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.

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Darlings, I promised you another episode devoted to the Lunar Eclipse on July 4th/5th, and you know I like to deliver, so we’re going to get into this Eclipse. But before we do, let me just speak to Eclipses in general, okay. And this is something that I’ve talked about on the podcast before, but it really does bear repeating. 

There’s a couple of things. The first thing is a Lunar Eclipse happens during a Full Moon, and a Full Moon happens once a month. A Lunar Eclipse does not—a couple few times a year, right. And when we have a Lunar Eclipse or a Full Moon, we are looking at the Sun and Moon opposite each other to the degree, to the minute. And it represents a time of closure, of endings, in some meaningful ways, an emotional confrontation with what is. It’s emo. It’s a lot. And when we’re dealing with an Eclipse—different than a regular Full Moon. 

A regular Full Moon is really going to kick up things that have been developing over the course of a past month. When we’re dealing with an Eclipse, we’re looking at much larger cycles, up to a couple yearlong cycle. And the implications of it or the ramifications of it will unfold over the course of closer to six months. So it’s a lot. These are big momentous shifts. And when we are dealing with big momentous shifts, a lot of things happen. 

One of the things that tends to happen is that the energy gets wonky. Your energy’s wonky. My energy’s wonky, but everybody’s energy is wonky. And, so, the way that that works on a societal level is everyone feels tender and sensitive. And that makes some people aggressive and some people feel victimy, and other people feel like they have to be a helper or a savior of the world. It kicks off our compulsions is what I’m getting at. 

And in addition to that, it makes sleep complicated. Some people sleep a lot during Eclipse season. I think even more people have a really hard time with sleep. Sleep gets hard to come by because the energy is in many ways electric. This is a time where if you’re feeling exhausted, if you’re feeling like your sleep is interrupted, like your body is just off, like you’re lacking in resiliency, hey, go for it—blame it on the Eclipse. I won’t tell you you’re wrong. No, I won’t. I wouldn’t. I shan’t. 

But that’s not all. That’s not all. Something that I talk about with Eclipses quite a bit is that this is a bad time for ritual work. It's a bad time for manifestation work. And a lot of times what people do who are not astrologers or not very advanced astrologers is they see an Eclipse, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s a Full Moon but with the volume turned up. Okay, that means we’ll do energy work with the volume turned up.” But it’s a misunderstanding of the astrological implications of an Eclipse. 

An Eclipse is its own Goddamned vortex. It is its own energy, and it is way too big to harness. We are not meant to harness or direct the energies of an Eclipse. It’s very important that if you’re working with energy, that you’re doing it responsibly because you don’t want to screw yourself up in a way that is hard to even understand how you did it or how to undo it, right. And, so, don’t harness this energy. Be present with the energy. Let the energy impact you, and then decide how you want to respond to that energy. Now I’m not saying being passive in a way that is like a negative thing; I’m saying this is not the, I don’t know, 48 hours, 72-hour period in which to make major moves on the energetics plane. 

Now a lot of you send me questions about like, “I want to quit my job. I want to break up with someone. I want to move in with someone. I want to make these big life changes. Should I not do it during the Eclipse?” So here’s the thing. If you’re going to break up with someone around the Eclipse, if you’re going to give notice at your job, if you’re going to, I don’t know, decide to unload on someone on social media because they said something you found offensive, you are making yourself a part of their Eclipse. That’s right—think that through for just one moment. You are taking your feelings, your needs, your goals, whatever it is, and you’re making it a part of someone else’s Eclipse, which means wherever their emotional maturity is at, wherever their shit lives and lies, you are implicating yourself in their experience of the Eclipse. So you are inviting into your life a kind of difficult to predict and intense amount of energy. If it can be avoided, I’d recommend that. 

It can’t always be avoided, just like you can’t avoid signing contracts during a Mercury Retrograde necessarily. What you want to be able to do, ideally speaking, is put it off if your life permits and sit in the feelings. And if you don’t want to do that, well, that’s all the more reason to damn do it. You do not need to create momentum during the Eclipse. The Eclipse has its own momentum, which I encourage you to be interested in, to avail yourself to. If you are uncomfortable—which most of the time we are during Eclipses and certainly during this really, deeply transformational time we are all living through—that’s actually not a bad thing. 

If you’re feeling arrogant and like you don’t need to be uncomfortable, or you’re not uncomfortable because x, y, z, I encourage you to challenge that. Because an Eclipse is a spiritual event, and we are all engaged in, as spiritual beings, in our own evolution. And if you are the greatest genius that ever lived, and you are the smartest smarty pants that ever wore pants, you still have evolution to be engaged in. You are not too good for an Eclipse. Do you know what I’m saying? And the reason why I’m pointing this out is because Mars is featured in this chart, and Mars manages the ego. And, so, everyone’s ego is a little tweaked up right now. I’ll get into that more in a moment. But before I do, I want to say one more word generally about Eclipses. 

If you are a spiritual person, and you’re already doing spiritual work—ancestral work, you work with the Tarot, you’re meditating, you’re doing breath work, I don’t know, there’s hell a things you do, spiritual baths, whatevs, right. You’re doing your damn thing. I am not suggesting that because it’s an Eclipse you have to become a muggle, and pretend you’re not doing spiritual work, or stop your spiritual work. I am simply saying that if you are stepping into an unpredictable weather front, that is not the time to be writing a thoughtful text to someone you really care about. That is the time to actually put your hands in your pockets, keep your eyes up, and pay attention to, I don’t know, is it going to be hailing? Is it going to be snowing? Is it going to be hot? I don’t know what’s going to happen. Look alive. Pay attention. Be present. Don’t be so fixated on whatever it is that you want to say or do or put out. This is a moment to actually just be here. 

It’s not about stopping or ceasing your spiritual work. It’s about not adding anything new to the plate, not trying to call anything in or control or contain or even direct anything new around this date. This Eclipse is exact at 9:44 p.m., Pacific time on July 4th. So just within, if you can, 72 hours of that date on either side—that’s conservative, but as much as you can, do what you can. Let me get a little bit more into this Eclipse. 

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Okay, let’s talk about this Eclipse. As I said, it is occurring on July 4th at 9:44 p.m., Pacific time. This is a Lunar Eclipse between the Sun in Cancer and the Moon in Capricorn. It’s happening at 13 degrees and 37 minutes of Capricorn—that’s where the Moon is. 13 degrees and 37 minutes of Cancer is where the Sun is. And what I want to say about this particular Eclipse is it really is kicking up the need to have healthy boundaries. 

Because of the Cancer/Capricorn polarity, we’re not just looking at boundaries with other people; it’s boundaries within ourselves around how we feel and what we do in response to those feelings. How we organize our needs and take care of ourselves or how we get defensive and act out, either against ourselves or towards others, which, either way, ultimately, is acting out against ourselves of course, but whether we want to drag other people into the mix of the situation is individual. 

This particular Full Moon is uncomfortable because the Moon is not comfortable in the sign of Capricorn. The Moon doesn’t want to be in the sign of Capricorn. Think of the Moon as like big, oceanic waves, ebbing and flowing, crashing into the shore and receding. And Capricorn likes to calcify things. It likes to solidify things, so it’s like ice. It's like that water turns to ice. And so this can be a time where you feel really uncomfortable with your own feelings, like you don’t want to feel what you’re feeling, and so you try to explain it away or defend it or fix it. Watch out for that shit this week. Watch out for that shit around the 4th of July, the 5th of July. 

And because of the times we are living in, and because of the particular date that we are looking at—the 4th of July, and all of the social unrest within the United States, this may play out on a lot of different levels. And we want to look out for men with power acting wrong. Not just men—all the damn genders can act wrong—but I am a little concerned about men with power. 

What we want to note is Eclipses have us acting out of our feels. So when people act out, if they act shitty towards you, if they act shitty towards others, if they do any number of things, notice how they feel. Notice what they are and are not expressing of how they feel because that is actually useful information for you to have. It is valuable to be able to recognize that everyone is an emotional being, and people without emotional tools tend to be the most poorly adjusted. And I don’t mean have the least amount of money or the least amount of power in the world—no, Sir, I don’t—but the least poorly adjusted, the most poorly adjusted amongst us. Because in order to age gracefully, to have any amount of peace in your own skin, you have to be able to tolerate your emotions and not just act out in reaction to them. 

This Lunar Eclipse is going to be very evidential of that concept—trust me. Because at the same time, within this Eclipse chart, part of what I am looking at is a Mercury/Mars square. So everybody knows, everybody knows that Mercury is Retrograde. Goddamn Mercury Retrograde, just giving me email problems and all kinds of other technical issues. How about you? How about you? But Mercury forming a square to Mars is something that actually is really going to follow us around all of July. It is a total fucking boner, and not a fun boner—a sad boner. 

Mercury square to Mars kicks up defensiveness. It kicks up fights. So Mercury is kind of like—it’s your attitudes. It’s your ideas. It’s your thoughts. It’s your neighbors. It’s your friends. It’s your siblings. And Mars is fighting. It’s defensiveness. It’s pride and ego. It’s aggression. And, so, when we look at this Mercury square to Mars in the context of the chart, and Mercury is in the sign of Cancer just like the Sun is, so they are not conjunct, but they are in the same sign. When we look at these two planets forming a square to each other, what we can know is that everyone’s ego is on high alert. Everyone’s going to be feeling defensive. 

And like I said earlier, if you feel defensive, you might feel like a huge victim. If you feel defensive, you might be really aggressive towards other people. You might get really anxious. We all experience defensiveness, and we all experience it in different ways. And some of it’s circumstantial and some of it’s personality, right. And, so, what you want to do as much as possible is notice when and if you feel defensive and when and if you are dealing with someone else who is behaving defensively. Try to simply notice what comes up, to be mindful of your thoughts, to be mindful of your feelings, and to be mindful of where they’re located in your body. Because Mars is very visceral in its expression and experience. Mars is like your musculature. It's your red blood cells. It’s related to your visceral body. And, so, when we experience anger and passion and defensiveness, it tends to be really a body-based feeling, and not just an emotional or a mental thing. 

And, so, what you want to be able to do as much as possible is notice where that stuff is in your body and what it’s triggering—what it’s triggering that was already there inside of you before this one thing happened. Because if you can use this period as a way to develop more tools and resources for tolerating your own anger, your own entitlement, your own defensiveness, your own ego—and none of these things are inherently, necessarily bad; they are appropriate for some situations. They are necessary in some situations. But what we want to have is self-awareness so that we can make choices and choose actions that are self-appropriate to our ends, that are healthy. The only way to do that is to stay present when those feelings come up and to be somewhat interested in them. I mean, I would love you to be super fucking interested in them, like interested in what’s coming up for you and what it means about you instead of rushing to be in the situation and to react to the person in the situation. 

So if you can be interested, you’re going to get a lot of value out of this. You’re going to get a lot of value out of this. And Mars is, as I mentioned last week, in the sign of Aries. And Mercury is in Cancer, so you can look to where Aries falls in your birth chart to get a sense of what Mars might be kind of triggering for you. 

Now here’s the fun fact. Here’s a fun fact. This transit, no matter what we do, is going to bring up a lot of feelings, and it’s also going to bring up a lot of defenses. It will be easy for you to externalize your feelings by focusing on what other people are or are not doing. That will be easy for just about every single person on this planet to do. But I want to just acknowledge that from a spiritual perspective, it is selling yourself short. And we all sell ourselves short. We don’t all take our shitty opportunities to be better and more whole people—no judgement to me, you, or anyone else, slash, also, you have a heads up. You have a heads up. 

So if your relationship to anger is not healthy and well adjusted—and very few of us have a really great relationship to anger—then this is a great opportunity for you to really be emotionally present and to have healthy boundaries without the need to defend yourself. You don’t need to prove yourself. You don’t need to prove yourself. Correct action is the way to correct poor action. So we want to think in terms of, instead of wallowing in guilt if you find that you’ve done something wrong, what amends can you commit to making? That’s long game. Capricorn Moon shit, right. How can you think in terms of the big picture of your ambitions, your needs, whether they’re to move your life forward or protect yourself from something dangerous? How can you show up in a way that allows you not only to make your life better, but to give you more tools? This is not a small thing. 

So there’s something else that I want to name about this Eclipse chart before we close up. Jupiter and Pluto are still very damn close to each other. Jupiter is at 23 degrees of Capricorn and 30 minutes, and Pluto is at 23 degrees of Capricorn and 59 minutes. Very damn close. Just a couple minutes apart. And that transit is absolutely bringing up major shit around social justice. And I use the word shit because Pluto governs— literally, it governs shit. It does. It’s toxins that we need to clear out of our system. More and more things are coming to light so that we can see them and heal them. And it is painful. It is exhausting. And it is absolutely necessary, and it is absolutely time. 

Additionally, Saturn is officially in Capricorn, so it is at 29 degrees of Capricorn and 46 minutes. So it’s several degrees away from that Pluto and that Jupiter, but it is quite close. It is what the astrologers call a conjunction. And, so, I want to say to you, things just got heavy. Things got really heavy. I know they seem like they were heavy before—okay, astrologically, they just got a lot more heavy. 

And, so, if you have been feeling in the past couple of weeks and increasingly so you are still feeling this sense of weight, this sense of urgency, you’re not alone. It’s in the morphic field. If you are committed to your own evolution, and you are committed to social justice, to being a part of the world’s solutions, then I want to point you away from looking for quick fixes. Because there are no quick fixes. These are long developing systemic problems in the world, and whatever’s coming up inside of you, whatever’s demanding your attention within you is an old pattern. So be patient. Stay present, so you can find systemic solutions for systemic problems, both personally, socially, and politically. You know? I know you know. 

Now, my loves, you’re not going to do any rituals. You’re not going to do any manifestation. You’re going to just be really present and uncomfortable. You’re going to embrace it. I feel like you are. I feel pretty confident in you. Unfortunately, part of being a person means experiencing insecurity and uncertainty and pain. Those feelings are not evidence that you’re doing it wrong. Those feelings aren’t evidence that you’re doomed to feel that way forever. Those feelings are simply part of the human condition, and you are a messy, weird, meat-suited human. We’re all in this together; let’s commit to acting like it.