Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

You know, I wish I could tell you that I planned the podcast very effectively and very detailed—in a very detailed way, but it would be a damn lie. It would be a damn lie, and that’s not what I’m here to do. What I’m here to do is talk to you about Neptune. And the reason why I’m choosing to talk to you about Neptune is because during this week we happen to have a bunch of transits to the planet Neptune. So this is a great opportunity to not only learn about this planet and what it means and what it means in your birth chart and by transit and all kind of good stuff, but because the exact transits that are happening this week are to the planet Neptune, what that allows us to do is watch the energies and function of this planet in your life in real time, in the world in real time. That’s kind of cool, right. I think it’s pretty damn cool. 

But the thing that I realized as I was sitting down to talk to you about the planet Neptune is that in episode 114, Ancestral Messages, the very topic that I spoke about of connecting to Spirit, managing fear and anxiety, receiving guidance from the spiritual world or ancestors, that’s all very Neptunian. Now, we could look it from a Saturnian perspective as well, but, really, it is very Neptunian—to resource Spirit is Neptunian. And, so, again, I can’t take credit; I didn’t plan it or anything, but it’s all going to kind of come together. 

And I want to say thank you to Spirit for bringing me here. And I want to say thank you to you for doing the work, wherever you’re at with it, of staying associated and empathic and humble because these are days that are calling for all of those things from us. Maybe not 100 percent of the time, but in a meaningful way. 

So let’s talk about Neptune. The planet Neptune is a slow-moving planet. One thing that Neptune governs in the birth chart is your experience, expression, and presentation of anxiety, nervousness, unrest. Now, as I’ve said on the podcast before, Uranus is your nervous system, and so the kind of ADD or ADHD style of nervous system where you can’t quite focus, and you’re very nervy or your brain is speedy—that’s Uranian. 

Neptune’s anxiety is feeling helpless or hopeless, feeling demoralized, feeling like you don’t belong; there’s no place for you, feeling overwhelmed or burdened by not knowing what to do, not knowing who or what you are, not knowing where you belong—that’s all very Neptunian. And I start with this because I feel that it’s really useful to know that we all have Neptune in the birth chart, which means we all grapple with these feelings to various extents in our natures and over the course of time. 

If Neptune is strongly placed in your chart either through house placement or by natal aspect, then you’re going to be really resonating with what I’m going to share about Neptune. And if Neptune is beneficially aspected, which means it doesn’t have anything too stressful or upsetting happening to or from it, then a little bit less so; you’re not going to be as touched by this. 

But with Neptune in the birth chart, we see our capacity for empathy as opposed to sympathy. So the ability to empathize is to not just have concern for others but to feel that concern for others, to feel others’ pain alongside with them. Connected to that, Neptune also governs projection. Where we have Neptune in the chart, we are most likely to project onto others idealistically or to have others project onto us idealistically. When we look at the function of Neptune, we see theories related to impersonal love. So this is a kind of truly spiritual planet because what it does is it refers to our capacity to love all the people of the world, all the cats of the world, the environment, to forgo our individual, egotistical needs in favor of what we believe is the right thing to do. Very Neptunian. 

Neptune is also related to high romance and high arts. So when I say high romance and high arts, I mean you walked into the room, you saw that person, you made eye contact, and you knew that you were meant to be—you could just tell. You’ve only known someone for three weeks, but you’ve had such amazing conversations, and the hooking up is so good, and that means you know that they’re a good person. That’s all Neptune shit right there—that’s Neptune. 

And if you have a nature that is Neptunian, then what happens for you when you start to catch feels for someone is you have a tendency to fall what they call ass over tea kettle for a person. That’s an expression; I didn’t make it up. But, yes, where we find Neptune in the birth chart is where we idealize others—we place them on a pedestal. In some ways that can seem kind because where we have Neptune is where we tend to be devotional. However, it’s not really kind to project fantasies onto other people because then you’re not really getting to know them; you’re not letting them be messy, problematic, full humans. And when other people project onto us they don’t really get to know us, and they often like us for things that are not the real things about us, right. 

So when we look at Neptune’s influence you can see that it’s confusing, and it’s overwhelming, and it is also the source of your capacity to connect with love and abundance to the universe, to the Earth, to other people, to yourself, and to God or plant medicines or spiritual guides or ancestors.

Neptune is not of this world—I mean, what planet is of this world, obvi, but Neptune is the least materialistic planet of the zodiac. It is an ether. It is what cannot be touched, what cannot be defined. When we talk about people who live outside of binaries, who live outside of constructs, who don’t identify with binaries in general—whether we’re talking about gender or any other thing—we’re talking about Neptunian people or Neptunian issues because Neptune is not dense or solid matter. So it’s not water in a cup. It’s fog or mist in the air. It’s beautiful, and it’s also overwhelming. 

Voter suppression wouldn’t exist if your vote wasn’t important. We are the majority, and it’s essential that we all get to the ballots this November. Go to vote.org to double check if you’re registered to vote or to request your ballot to vote by mail this November. That’s vote.org, and the link is in my show notes.

Okay. Now let’s talk about Neptune by transit, so Neptune’s influence in your life when it’s doing its thing in the sky. So there’s two ways that you’re going to experience transits to Neptune in your life. There’s one way which is like, okay, there’s transits happening right now. For instance, on the 13th of June, Mars is forming an exact square to the planet Neptune. So that’s just like a transit that is happening in the world, and that is essentially like the astrological weather report, right. So that’s one way you’ll experience Neptune. 

Another way you’ll experience Neptune is when you’re going through transits from the planet Neptune to any major point or planet in your birth chart. Now, I guess there’s a third way, which is you’re dealing with a Neptunian person or a person that you’re close to is dealing with Neptune transits themselves, and so it’s kind of like walking through a waterfall—you’re going to get wet. You don’t have to be the waterfall to get wet. That was a weird metaphor, but I’m going with it. 

Okay. So in the context of the kind of like transits that are happening, much like what’s happening on the 13th of June 2020, you’re going to notice its effects. It’s going to impact you and your life from wherever you’re standing, and in your weekly or daily horoscopes, whatever you consume, you will learn about the influence of Neptune, and you’ll be able to note your experience of Neptune. And it’s a really useful thing to do because the planet tends to trigger anxiety. And, so, it’s nice to know that if you’re feeling just really off or anxious or easily upset, hyper-sensitive, you’re having like martyry feelings to victimy feelings—Neptune, Neptune, Neptune, Neptune, Neptune. Okay. Cool, then you can start to work with it more consciously, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

But when you’re going through transits from Neptune in the sky IRL to planets in your birth chart, that’s called the Neptune transit. And Neptune transits last approximately two years; they tend to be really big deals. They tend to be something that marks your identity, your sense of self, and your life in a major way. Whenever we go through transits by the planet Neptune or Pluto, which I’ll talk about in another Astrology Hot Take, they last approximately two years. So they’re really big deals. 

When we are going through Neptune transits, also when we’re talking about Neptune issues in the birth chart, one of the things we are meant to learn is boundaries. Now, I don’t mean boundaries like restrictions; I mean boundaries in this way. Transiting Neptune has the tendency to strip us of our energy and our resiliency on a material level, so that we really mainly have energy for what is authentic to our Spirit and to us. And that sucks because most of us live lives filled with compromise. You need to have a job so that you can earn money so you can pay off debts so you can take care of your kids or pay your rent or whatever the fuck it is. There’s a million things we do all the time that are a reflection of sometimes really considered compromise and other times just necessity. Sometimes we just make compromises because we’re not brave. 

Whatever it may be, when we’re dealing with transits from the planet Neptune, what we’re dealing with is the consequences on a spiritual level of that. So you become exhausted by everything you’re doing and everyone you’re hanging out with that isn’t authentic to you. And the reason why this occurs on a spiritual level is to teach you to have boundaries, to center what is important to you, and not just what is materially important, but what is spiritually important. 

Neptune reminds us in the value of a Soul based and Soul infused authenticity. Neptune transits often kind of throw us on our ass, and they do so so that we don’t say, well, shit; I got to pick myself up, but instead so that we say, do I have support? Am I connected? Where are my guides? Am I receiving my guides? And when I say guides, you know, there’s a lot of contexts you can apply that term. It could be God. It could be Spirit. It could be nature. It could be your ancestors. I think that there are so many pathways to divinity, to connection, and I don’t want to—I don’t think that one is better or worse than another, and I want to hold space for whatever language or vantage point you come from. Just want to name that because Neptune really—what it wants us to do more than anything—like if Neptune was the ruler of the world, we would all be living on like ashrams or some sort of beautiful piece of land, and we would be free of interruptions and distractions, things that are inauthentic, and we would be doing spiritual work. We would be doing actions that were in service to spiritual work. 

And for some people, the actions that are in service to spiritual work are meditation. It’s sitting. For other people, it’s caring for children. For other people, it’s coding. I think that there are, again, many ways of showing up in this incarnation to the best embodiment possible of our connection to the divine, embodiment of the divine, and I want to just like pull away from any kind of hierarchical thinking about that. 

This is a tricky thing to do because when we go through Neptune periods it brings up questions. Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it the right way? Am I going in the right direction? There’s all these other things I should be doing. All that kind of thinking. It can be quite exhausting. When we are going through Neptune transits, we are meant to fortify the body, nourish the body, fortify the spirit and nourish the spirit. And, unfortunately, we often feel like doing quite the opposite; we deny ourselves or we feel that we are being denied. 

This is just a Hot Take. I mean, this is just a Hot Take, as you know. There’s so much more that I could say about Neptune, and I will again, and I will again. But I will say this, Neptune governs illusion and disillusionment. It governs over all things subtle. And when we are dealing with that fine line between illusion and disillusionment, we have the risk that we will say, “Oh, look at that garden of roses; they all smell lovely, and none of them have thorns,” without actually stepping into the garden. We see what we want to see. 

The key with Neptune is understanding that in order to have authentic compassion, in order to have sustainable kindness and to be of service to yourself, to the planet, to others, you need to be able to be present with the wholeness of the truth. The spiritual concept of non-attachment, of being present without holding onto, without seizing onto the value judgements of a thing—that that’s Neptune. That’s the best of Neptune, and we all have Neptune in our chart; it is achievable. The key is to not be so attached to finding the answer, to doing it right, to getting it right, to showing people how you did it right and got it right, but instead to be in the process and the journey. That is what Neptune wants of us. It’s hard because we live in a really material world, and Neptune is not a material girl.

My Loves, I want to thank you again for joining me for another Astrology Hot Take. If you would like to continue the conversation, I invite you to join me over on Patreon where I have a month ahead horoscope that’s quite detailed; it’s a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast. And I’m teaching the Tarot—teaching how to read the Rider Waite deck. And I will be moving onto the Thoth Deck—really into it. You maybe into it too, so join me there. 

If you want to understand a little bit more about Neptune and how it functions in your birth chart, go ahead and look at your birth chart and look at the sign that Neptune’s in, but, honestly, because it moves so slowly, the sign is really useful, but it’s not as useful as knowing the house that the planet Neptune falls in. You can pick up my book, Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along. There’s an audio book version, and there’s a written book version. There’s also a digital version of the book; you can get any damn thing you like. You don’t have to get it at all. I’m not trying to bully you is what I’m saying, but it’s a pretty good tool, if I may say so myself. So, yeah, learn more about how Neptune functions in your chart and how to best work with that planet. Okay. That’s it. Bye.