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.

As you shop for masks in this new normal that we’re all living in, consider others who rely on lip reading and facial expression for communication. Look into getting a clear mask, sometimes called a smile mask. Just look them up and consider buying them when you buy masks for yourself and your family.

Darlings, I really love it that you send me so many questions. And if you’ve never sent me a question, or if you’ve sent me a question and it didn’t get chosen yet, don’t hesitate to email me. I’m over at ghostofapodcast.com. There’s a contact form, fill it out. Send me as many questions as you like. Don’t be shy. You know I want to help. And this week, what I’m going to do is I’m going to answer a bunch of questions. 

So let me start with the first one, and it comes from Dump My Trump Boyfriend, and she says, “I feel at a crossroads with my partner. We’ve been together on and off for the past 12 years, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some tumultuous periods, but there’s definitely love between us and maybe a dash of codependency. He’s been apolitical our whole time together, and while we have had philosophical differences on many issues, none have come close to the one we are experiencing now. 

I work for a progressive, grassroots community action group, and I lean left in my world view. My boyfriend has more conservative ideals and has decided to vote for the first time in his adult life for Trump. I’ve been wondering where this relationship is going for a while now and if our differences are too stark to continue to be with each other without one of us having to compromise essential parts of who we are. I’m hoping you can tell me if you see anything in our charts that might be helpful in navigating steps forward in this relationship. Thank you so much.”

So I won’t look up the boyfriend’s chart because he hasn’t given permission, and I just don’t do that. However, my Trump Dump Boyfriend—I don’t know; that’s what I’m going to call you now—was born January 18th of ’89 at 5:07 p.m. in L.A. And, you know what? There’s a couple things I’ll say. The first thing is this is a time of reckoning. You have got some really important transits, including you’ve got Mars and Aries at 29 degrees, and you’ve got your Sun at 29 degrees of Capricorn as well. And, so, Saturn is really crossing over both of those planets. And, so, for the rest of 2020 you’re going to be dealing with frustrations. And what you’re going to need to do is to decide where to take a stand and how to take a stand. 

That said, My Dear, here’s my thought. There is having differences in opinion, and there’s having differences in outlook, and then there’s having differences that are actually about disrespect. So what you need to determine—because listen, if you’re asking me—me, Jessica, your old friend Jessica, should I dump my Trump boyfriend? My personal answer is yeah, absofuckinglutely you should. 

But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re asking me, Jessica, your friend astrologer, right. And I’ll say this. From my astrological viewpoint, the way to determine—kind of if we’re going to try to come up with a metric of determining whether or not a difference in opinion with a significant other or a close friend is grounds for ending the relationship—it’s really about respect. Are the reasons why you don’t like Trump and the reasons why he does like Trump fundamentally about your values? 

The reason why I have a knee jerk reaction to somebody being a Trump supporter is because I assume that means they are either happy with his racist and xenophobic policies and actions—they’re either really okay with that, or they don’t think it’s a big deal. They think it’s like not their problem. I can’t imagine why somebody would be pro Trump, and you didn’t explain that in your question. But you need to really look at this as a values-based thing—really. Because when you’re committing ten plus years of your life to someone, if you find that you define your humanity fundamentally in really different ways, that can be really great, actually. But if you define your humanity in ways that are in cross purposes with each other, if the things that you believe are good and righteous are really incompatible with each other, that’s where you have a problem, and that’s where you’re on call to make a decision—not just about your theoretical politics or what you talk about when you’re having a conversation about values; it's about how you chose to live. Because, really, at the end of the day, what’s important is how we chose to live. And if he is choosing to live in a way that you think is an attack on what you believe to be correct, what you believe to be right and ethical, then staying committed to him doesn’t really make sense. 

Now, kind of on the same theme, I have another question. And this one goes, “My BFF of over 15 years recently chose to go forward with her wedding and did not prioritize or enforce social distancing or mask wearing. I wasn’t aware that there would be zero masks and zero social distancing. It was outdoors at her home, so I RSVP’d hoping I’d be able to keep my mask on and maintain my distance from everyone. But when I got there and saw what was happening, I didn’t even park. I drove away and texted what I was feeling and apologized. I haven’t heard back from her, and I’m feeling heartbroken on many levels. How can I move forward from this in a way that’s beneficial for both of us?” 

So here we have another question about a fundamental difference in viewpoint that, ultimately, for the questioner felt like a safety issue, a personal safety issue, and I’m guessing also a values issue, although you don’t clearly say that in your question, BFF. 

So here’s the answer to your question. I don’t think you can move forward in way that’s beneficial for both of you. Unfortunately, you don’t get to decide for your best friend what feels beneficial to her or what her values are. However, you do get to do that for yourself. And I know that what you did was complicated. I know that what you did was really hurtful to your best friend, but I also know that what she did was complicated and really hurtful to you and potentially put the lives of countless people at risk. 

Your best friend did something that was really dangerous and really disrespectful, in my view. Obviously in your view too, but not in hers, right. You have a right to have handled it the way you did, and she has a right to be hurt. She has every right in the world to be butthurt that her best friend didn’t come to her wedding. I wonder why the two of you didn’t talk about this, but it sounds like maybe in the past you’ve been able to make assumptions, and they were safe bets for you to make on your bestie. 

There’s no way forward that’s going to feel great here because we are talking about someone’s wedding, and most people are pretty emo and intense about their weddings. But we’re also talking about something really scary which is this disease, COVID-19. And I have seen over the course of these many months that a lot of people, the way they’re coping with it is by being increasingly blasé. It’s just like having unsafe sex—nothing bad happens, so you keep on doing it until one day maybe something bad happens, and then you’re like, fuck, that was stupid. Why did I do that? 

Listen. You didn’t do anything wrong, in my view. In my view, you did the right thing. What you can do, and what you must do at this point is accept that you cannot control how this shakes down—you just can’t. The difference between the two of you is so fundamental, how you’re dealing with not just your health, not just her health, but the welfare of your community. Because there’s plenty of cases of a small group of people, a family gathering happening, and then it makes a whole community sick and people die. Again, I think you did the right thing by not going to this wedding. Just the fact that I agree with you, doesn’t mean that we are right. I mean, it totally does; we are right. 

Basically, unfortunately, you need to stay in your discomfort. This is really uncomfortable. If you have the chance to talk again, which I hope you do, what I would encourage you to do is be able to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. What she did was wrong for you. It was outside of what you believe to be right, and it was outside of what feels safe to you for your own health and for your community, right. Irrefutably, what you did was also hurtful to her: you didn’t go to her wedding last minute. You just didn’t go to her wedding. And that’s going to hurt her feelings; there’s no way around that. 

We could easily point fingers; we could easily lay blame, but here’s the way to move forward. It’s to acknowledge the complexity. It’s to acknowledge that both of you did things that were hurtful to the other and the only way forward is if you chose to talk about it and acknowledge the differences in values and find a way to come together as a team. I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know if you’re even going to get the chance to do that. So where you’re left is being in your feelings and not getting any kind of resolution. 

And this is something that I see a lot in my private practice is people say, “Well, I need some sort of a conversation to rap things up. I need closure.” Closure is not given to you by someone else. Closure is when you come to acceptance of what is. And my guess is you’re not going to get great closure with this person. So my question for you is can you accept that these are unprecedented times; this is an unprecedented situation, and you did what you felt was right? She obviously did what she felt was right, and you’ve very different feelings about what you’ve each determined to be right. 

My next question is a real shift in tone, and it comes from Trine To Be Empowered. Did I choose this question in no small part because of the great sign off? Yeah, maybe I did. It goes like this, “I’ve been trying to book a reading with a local astrologer who is well known for being amazing and on point but notorious for avoiding sessions with those she senses have major challenges coming up in their lives. After trying to schedule a session with her maybe five times with no avail, I am terrified and consumed with the thought that maybe she sees something majorly challenging coming up via my birth chart or her intuition and doesn’t want to tell me. Should I be worried? How much power should we give to astrology and psychics with this shit? Help. Thanks. Trine To Be Empowered.” 

Okay. So, first, listen, if somebody is a practitioner, whether it’s a shrink or a Tarot reader or a psychic or an astrologer and they’re only really good at their job when their clients are thriving and doing well, they’re not very good at their job. Sorry. That’s just not real. If the only context that she wants to talk to people on is when they’re thriving then what she is is a cheerleader, not a reader. 

So, first of all, I’m glad that you have friends and you know people who have had great experiences with this person. I’m not trying to shit on this person, but I want you to be critical in your thinking here. If they’re only going to give consultations or good consultations to people that are thriving, that’s about her and her shit and not about you, first of all. 

Second of all, I pulled up your chart. You were born January 12th, 1993 at 4:20 p.m. in Tel Aviv, Israel. And while you maybe in a really difficult time in many ways, I don’t see a particularly difficult time coming for you. In fact, you have some lovely transits actually emerging in the next year. 

You do have a Pluto square to Pluto occurring next year, and it is not the chillest of all transits, but this is not a reason to be scared for your future at all. You’ve been kind of in some heaviness for the past couple few years, and it’s totally fair that you are obsessing and freaking out about this because one of the transits you’re going through—which is going to be over before the end of 2020—it actually increases your obsessiveness and your compulsions. 

But let me say this, it is totally possible that this astrologer person is just not good at responding to emails or that somehow your email got lost in her spam folder. I don’t know. I mean, you don’t know is the point. And, so, what I want to really encourage you to do is slow it down—just slow it the damn down and have faith that if somebody is only able to give a fair weather reading, they’re not the reader for you. You’re a damn Capricorn; you want to hear the hard truth—the whole truth and nothing but the hard truth, and that’s clearly not who this particular astrologer is. So move on. 

And then, finally, I have my last question from Big Feels. And they ask, “Sometimes I feel the weight of my, quote, bad placements, and I’m wondering how I can turn these self-perceived weaknesses into personal power. Upon listening to your podcast, I re-evaluated my birth chart using Campanus houses instead of Placidus and discovered that I have a twelfth house—not eleventh house like I thought—Scorpio Moon, and I feel like it makes a lot more sense about why I feel a lot of deep emotions.  I’m wondering, between a twelfth house Scorpio Moon and an eighth house Stellium, how can I lean in and make these, quote, bad placements into a source of strength? Thanks. Big Feels.”

So the kind of astrology that I’ve primarily used over the course of my practice I’ve thought of always as like humanistic astrology, which is probably closest to psychological astrology. Now, I don’t really believe in bad placements. I just don’t. Certain planets are happier or less happy in different houses or different signs for sure, but bad placements? Nah, I don’t buy that; I really don’t. And I speak as a person with many, quote, bad placements. I just don’t think of it that way because where’s the value in it? How does it help you grow? So let’s get the concept of good and bad placements out of your head—let’s just first of all remove the value judgments from your birth chart. 

The second thing I want to say is having a Moon in Scorpio in the twelfth house—it’s a superpower, but it’s a superpower that requires a lot of care. The reason why I call it a super power is because it makes you incredibly sensitive, just incredibly sensitive and intuitive, and you only have useful access to those sensitivities when you are managing your life in a way that protects your mental and spiritual health, period. 

And, so, that means other people can party and you can’t—not if you want to feel good. Not if you want to be able to resource your intuition and your emotional knowledge. Other people maybe can function off of no sleep—not you. You’ve got to sleep. You got to sleep. Maybe you have weird hours, but you need to sleep a certain amount. Other people can not drink water or eat crap all the time and be okay, not you—no, no, no. 

Our birth chart placements don’t tell us what’s good or bad. They tell us our nature and what our nature needs to thrive. That’s it, see. That’s it. So if you are a emo, sensy person, as you are, and anyone with twelfth house placements is—especially twelfth house water placements and the Moon really in any sign in the twelfth—it means that your choices need to be made in deference to your sensitivities, and then when you do that, you can thrive. 

So it’s not what’s wrong with me and how do I cope with it. It’s who am I? What do I need? What choices do I need to make in order to thrive? It’s a very different tone. You see it? You hear it? Very different tone. 

So the eighth house and the twelfth house are two houses that I get a lot of questions about, and I will have to do an Astrology Hot Take on them specifically on their own. They’re the two houses in astrology that are associated with mental and spiritual health, psychic health, psychic and clairvoyant abilities, that kind of stuff. And because we live in the world we live in, there’s all this pressure for us to just kind of be efficient and productive and fall in line. And these two places in the birth chart are not where we do those things. 

When we have planets in these two house, the twelfth and the eighth houses, what happens is we are sensitive, and we need to honor our emotional bodies and our energetic bodies in such a way that we can actually use and leverage our creativity and our sensitivities—that’s it. 

So I keep on using that word sensitivities. I mean it in so many contexts. There’s our psychic sensitivities, our emotional, our feeling sensitivities, you may be sensitive in a way that allows you to be a really effective scientist, or you might be an artist, or you might be someone like me who’s psychic and woo woo. There’s so many ways that these houses can kind of function. But what’s important is they’re not for public consumption. The eighth and the twelfth houses are the two most private places in the zodiac. And, so, again, this concept of bad placements is based on some fucking metric—I don’t know—it’s not my metric, but it’s somebody’s metric. There’s nothing bad about having a rich inner life. 

Now, when it comes at the expense of your external affairs or treating others fairly or taking care of yourself, that’s where we get into problems. That’s out of balance, right. What you want to be able to do is honor your need for being in your feelings and not doing anything about it, so that it’s essentially like—the way I used to always describe the twelfth house to clients is when you have planets in the twelfth house, or if you’ve got a lot going on in the eighth house, a good thing to do every single day is stare at a blank wall and do nothing. Think of yourself as a rechargeable battery—you just have to plug yourself back in by not being externally active, not fixing, not seeking, not taking something in, just being. Just give yourself, if you can, 20 minutes. If you can do more, great. If you can do 90 seconds once a day, and you’re not already doing that, that will be a huge fucking improvement. 

It’s about creating spaciousness inside of yourself so that you can practice taking up more space inside of yourself. When you take up more space inside of yourself, you have the potential and capacity to better belong to yourself, and when you belong to yourself, these placements allow you to thrive. 

We are going through transformational times, and whenever you are engaged in your own evolution, inevitably, you need a little help. And that is why I’m really happy to share with you Better Help. They’re committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches, and it’s easy and free to change counselors if you don’t like the person you’re matched with. This service is available for people worldwide. 

It’s just really valuable to be able to talk to someone about whatever it is you’re going through, whether it’s queer issues or depression or just anxiety from all the shit going on in the world—Better Help is there for you. In fact, so many people have been using Better Help that they are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states of the US. 

I want you to start living a happier life today. As a listener of Ghost of a Podcast, you will get 10 percent off of your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/ghost. Join over one million people taking charge of their mental health. Again, that’s betterhelp, H-E-L-P .com/ghost.

Learn about colonialism past, present, and ongoing. Educate yourself about whose land you’re living on, and, if you can, make a monetary donation or pay a land tax to that tribe. Visit Our Native Land at native-land.ca. The link is in show notes.

In a recent court reversal, ex-felons in the state of Florida must now pay fines before voting in November. This could seriously impede the ability of hundreds of thousands of voters to cast a ballet. It comes as no surprise that five of the six judges who supported the decision were appointed by President Trump. Help pay the fines on behalf of the ex-felons through the Florida Rights Restoration Council. They’re a grass roots, membership organization run by returning citizens who are dedicated to ending the disenfranchisement and discrimination against people with convictions. Visit floridarrc.com to learn more or floridarrc.com/donate to give what you can.

There are a couple of things that I want to touch on before we drop into this week’s horoscope. And, as I had warned you about at the end of last week’s horoscope, this upcoming week and, of course, the end of last week is astrologically marked by some mental anguish and mental health challenges. And, again, I’ll get into that in a minute. 

But I want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is very easy to become demoralized—her loss is being felt by so many of us—but it is really important that we do not give up, that we do not stop fighting for what is right, that we allow her legacy to inspire action and activation instead of only despair. Now, I’m not saying not feel despair—feel all your damn feelings, but don’t lose yourself in them. 

This is a time to rise up, to do what is right, to activate, to talk to people, to educate yourself, to be engaged in the process. We are getting closer and closer to the 2020 election here in the United States, and the reality of the situation is that there’s now an empty seat on the Supreme Court that Ginsburg held, and she was, in particular in the context of the Supreme Court, a progressive voice. These Supreme Court positions are lifetime positions. 

I don’t have really inspiring words to say how to feel about her death or exactly what to do in response to her death. I don’t have the answer here. But I do know one thing. You can’t do nothing, right. You can’t feel nothing; you can’t do nothing. We all—this is a time to be activated. There’s a lot of ways that we can be activated, and it actually makes me want to mention something else that’s happened in the news very recently that is so deeply upsetting. 

There’s this nurse named Dawn Wooten, and she’s in Georgia. She worked at an ICE detention center. And if you haven’t already heard my episode about ICE, I do invite you to do so. I do not think there is a way to reform ICE. We need to dismantle ICE. There is no good application of ICE, in my view. And if you are interested in that, you can listen to episode 59, where I look at the astrological chart of ICE itself. 

But, this women, she alleges that they are performing at this detention facility mass hysterectomies on women who have no medical need for a hysterectomy. These women are not giving their consent. They are just having these hysterectomies performed on them. And she has said, “I became a whistle blower, and now I’m a target. But I’ll take a target any day to do what’s right than just sit there and be part of something inhumane.” 

And these two women, these two situations, in some ways are very disconnected, in other ways are very connected. What I’m trying to say, My Loves, is feel your feelings. It’s okay to feel cynical. It’s okay to feel depressed. It’s okay to feel scared. They’re your feelings, but don’t get stuck there. This is not the time to wallow or to allow our cynicism to empower us to do nothing, to just let shit happen to us and let shit happen to the most venerable amongst us. This is not the time to give up; we need to do something. And if each of us does something—something, then things change. And I think that’s really important. 

So to that end, I want to say talk to people about what’s happening in the world. Talk to people who know more than you. Talk to people you disagree with. Talk to people who have better ideas than you or agree with you and want to cheerlead you and you cheerlead them, and it helpful for mobilization. Don’t isolate yourself because when we feel despair and we isolate ourselves within that despair, it tends to make things worse. 

I also want to encourage you to do two other things. Organize, and that might mean finding somebody who is an organizer or an organization that you believe in and get to work. Do something that needs to be done, even if it's not glamorous, even if no one can see you doing it. Just do something. It’s time to get activated. It’s time to get to work in whatever way is right for you based on your circumstances, your values, your time management issues, whatever it is—based on what you care about, but do something. Because if all of us are doing one little thing, things start to change. 

Now, there’s another thing which is voting. Now, listen, I am not an idealist. I have a lot of problems with the American government, just all across the damn board. I don’t have a great deal of faith in the system; I’m not going to lie to you. Why am I going to lie to you? Am I going to start off lying to you now? No. I’m not. But I will say that I am a realist, and we do have the government we have, and we do have a two-party system. This is what we got. 

And if we accept that this is what we have, and if we look at what Trump and his regime have done over the last several years, and we believe them when they tell us what they want to do next, if we really pay attention to these things, then we know that this is not a Republican versus Democrat election; this is not an election like we’ve had before. This is really about authoritarianism versus democracy, no matter how flawed our democracy may be. It really is. 

And to misquote an important saying, I will say to you, My Loves, yes, it can get worse. It can get much fucking worse. And I don’t say this to scare you. I say this because Je suis a realist. And so I want to really empower you and inspire you to do the smallest and least thing you can do, which is vote. 

Personally, me, I double check to make sure that I’m registered to vote every other week because I trust no man. I trust no system, and I have been voting by mail, I don’t know, for 15 years or something like that. I really like voting by mail. If you’ve never done it before, I’m excited for you; it’s way easier, IMO. 

But I get ahead of myself. Here’s the thing. I feel so passionate about this that I’ve teamed up with my friend, Lindsay Scola, who’s a political strategist, and we’ve created something called Zodiac The Vote, where we teamed up with a bunch of astrologers, and we have created this site which is a resource for voting information. It’s got all the links you need to figure out how to vote, where to vote—all that kind of stuff. There are astrology articles about the system, about politics, about our shared system from the perspective of astrology, which is what I want to see more of in the world. 

We know that the political is personal and that personal is political. We know, as astrology nerds, that there are 12 signs, there are 10 planets, there are so many configurations of how these things can interact with each other, right. We are not going to all agree on all the things—of course not. We are not going to all take the same role in creating change in the world. We are not going to all have the same ideas and agree on whatever the fuck; we’re not going to agree on everything, and that’s okay. Our differences make us stronger—they do, as long as those differences are not in any way netted in cruelty and disrespect. That’s really, really important. 

And I think that within all of this—I just want to invite you, if you haven’t already checked, if you’re registered to vote. If you don’t really know what the fuck that means, go to zodiacthevote.com, and we have lots of information there for you, plus astrology stuff, plus, of course, of course, astrology swag—it’s astrology wear that you’re really going to want to wear, including, but not limited to a shirt that says, “Mercury might be retrograde, but my vote isn’t.” Because, yeah, Mercury’s going to be Retrograde for the 2020 election—that’s right. Go check that out. 

Forthcoming will be a Mercury Retrograde voters’ survival guide, so put that in your pipe and smoke it—or wait, put that in your pipe and get ready to smoke it; you can’t smoke it yet because we haven’t dropped that yet, but it’s coming. You can sign up for the mailing list on the site. But the point is get engaged—just get out there. Know that voting is not all the things that need to be done, but it is the foundation; it’s the baseline of what needs to be done. And you don’t have to leave your house to get it done.

Okay, to your horoscope, My Loves. Now, we are looking this week at the dates of September 20th through the 26th of 2020, and it starts off on the 20th, as I mentioned last week, with an exact Mercury square to Pluto. This transit is what some people named Jessica might characterize as no fucking joke. 

Mercury is your mind. It’s your attitudes. It’s what you think and what you say. It’s also how you say it—it’s your tone. And Pluto is transformation and destruction. It is shame and healing. It’s deep. Pluto’s energies are compulsive and driving and relentless. And so the square between Mercury and Pluto can really trigger negative obsessions. It can trigger this kind of compulsion to focus on thoughts that hurt you, that don’t help you. It can find you wanting to obsessively look back at communications where somebody hurt your feelings, and you want to reread it and reread it and reread it. 

This is a terrible time to process. If you can avoid processing, that would be best. And the reason why is because we are all going to be driven by compulsions. And when we are driven by compulsions, what is happening is we are being informed by trauma in our past. And, so, the trauma in our past in compelling our thoughts and feelings to defensively react one way or another. And when we are netted to the past, in any way really, we’re not present. And when we’re not present, we’re not engaging from our healthiest, wisest self. Instead, we’re kind of—it’s like we’re being run like a program. And that’s when we tend to feel totally entitled to say shitty things, to treat people or ourselves in shitty ways. 

And when I say shitty things, it could be to yourself, it could be to someone else. Taking out your shit thoughts and feelings on a stranger is shitty. Taking it out on yourself, taking it out on people close to you—shitty and shitty. Lots of shit—shit everywhere. 

So here’s the positive. Shit can be used in some contexts as compost, as can this transit. The potential for healing with the Mercury square to Pluto is absolutely present. The problem is where Pluto is involved it’s not easy. Best case scenario you have healing, but it just is like, oh, fuck. I have to deal with this. I have to confront this. Like I said, Pluto governs shame, and, so, we might feel ashamed of ourselves in some meaningful way. And however you know how to tolerate feelings of shame has a lot of do with what you’ll do or not do under this influence. 

If you react to shame by getting blamey or shutting down or turning to substances or harming yourself or others in some way, then this can be a really fucked up moment, right. But if you can, instead, find a way to not abandon yourself in the thoughts and in the feelings, if you can stay with yourself, stay with the feelings without feeding them too heavily, there’s great potential for transformation there. And if our, quote, better senses, if our analyzer is like, well, I’m going to engage with those feelings; I’m going to reason with those feelings; I’m going to make myself understand those feelings, all those feelings do is turn on your rational ideas, right. 

When we are in a state of being activated is not the time for figuring things out, finding solutions or reasoning with yourself —that’s just not what the moment’s for. The moment is to not engage those particular feelings. So validate them; let them be what they are without pairing them with thoughts. Let the feelings pass till they’re in a state of a little more calm, and then you can start finding solutions or trying to understand what’s happening. 

What most of us do is we try to talk ourselves into submission, or we abandon ourselves, and we just are really shitty to ourselves. We judge ourselves. Both of these strategies don’t work. They don’t work. Sometimes they work in the short term, but they don’t work in the long term—that’s for damn sure. 

This is really important because this transit is existing in the context of so many other things. And, so, whatever it is that you get activated around, I can assure you that it is directly related to a larger theme that you’ve been struggling with. So maybe not the specifics of the situation, but certainly the theme and the beliefs that you hold about yourself or others is going to be activated here. 

And, so, the potential for healing, the potential for finding a more compassionate and sustainable way for engaging with yourself—that is there. It doesn’t always feel like you have the choice to engage or not engage or receive yourself with kindness or not, but you do. And however you can, to whatever extent you can, try to do it. 

That’s not all. That’s not the only transit I have to tell you about. The Equinox on the 22nd is when the Sun moves into Libra. Many people say that this is a really powerful time of the year. There’s this kind of sense of integration that can occur when the Sun moves into Libra or on the day around the day that the Sun moves in Libra. 

What you may find on the Equinox is that the veils are thinner, that there’s a sense of being really permeable or really sensitive or just really meaningfully impacted by what’s happening around you, not just within you. And if that’s the case, I want to point your attention to the Sun being in Libra. 

It is a relational sign, and it is a relational season. Libra’s not just about achieving balance; it’s about understanding the interconnectedness or the interplay of energies. How you feel or what you’re going through doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it’s relational. And, so, this is a really meaningful time to be thinking relationally. How do you abandon yourself, how do check out of yourself when you connect to others? How do you show up in a whole way around others? When you make your choices, how relational are they? This is a really important thing to consider at any autumnal Equinox, but while we have Mars in Aries Retrograde, this kind of call to really look within at individualism, at our ego, and at how we act when we are driven by a sense of urgency or egoism—it’s a lot. It’s a lot going on, and we’re going to see an increased tension between these themes while Mars remains Retrograde in Aries, and we are in a Solar/Libra season. So buckle up kiddos. What can I say? I don’t write this shit; I just report it.

So on the 23rd, we have an exact Mercury square to Saturn. It will overlap with the Equinox. Mercury square to Saturn—this transit; it can be quite depressing. Saturn governs depression properly. I’ve probably said this on the podcast a couple of times before, but Saturn governs depression, and Neptune, anxiety. And a lot of times what I’ve experienced is that people have a hard time experientially telling the difference between the two. Some people are super fucking clear about the difference, but a lot of people experience them as kind of similar.

Now, Mercury square to Saturn inclines us to see the worst. It inclines us to see the glass as half empty. It inclines us to scan for scarcity, and it can trigger any kind of scarcity model thinking or attitudes that you have. This transit is likely to really trigger the very real differences between you and others, and, in particular, this transit impacts the plutonic side of your relationships. So this can impact your love life, but it’s going to be the foundational friendship part and not the sexy romantic part per se. 

This is a transit that on the positive can really clarify for you what isn’t working. It can really be a great time for editing or streamlining. On the negative, it can just be too fucking much because it makes us feel stuck. It makes us feel depressed, and, again, it inclines us to see the worst or the worst potential. 

And, so, you know, so much of what I’ve been talking about this week is it’s kind of tricky for the mental health. To have the week start off with this Mercury Pluto transit, which is likely to have us feeling really activated, and then to have it very quickly shift into the Mercury Saturn square—it’s just activated and then depressed. 

So let me just give you this little bit of advice about mental health. So this is not about the world; this is about mental health. If you have a negative obsession, it is like praying for what you don’t want. If you compulsively repeat your fears over and over and over to yourself or some negative belief you have about yourself, if you repeat it on loop to yourself, you are praying to it. So if you cannot be positive—which you may not be able to be this week, or in general, I don’t know, but certainly not this week—if you cannot be positive, if you’re caught up in a negative or self-harming loop, strive for neutrality. 

And this is something that I talked about in episode 143, my mid-week episode. I talked about manifestation, positive intention setting, and kind of some hit balls around it as well as some tools for it, so you may want to give that a listen. But if you cannot be positive, you don’t have to stay in negative; strive towards neutral. Because neutral can be a lot more sustainable than negative or positive for some of us some of the time. 

This particular transit is likely to make you feel a little exhausted. I don’t know, for some people—for me, personally, this transit tends to frequently make me feel really motivated, and I just get to work, and I respond to all the emails, and I clean out the closet and all that kind of shit. But a lot of people I have seen with this transit feel really just—it can just make you feel defeated or deflated and stuck, so work around it. 

If your energy feels the worst parts of this transit, it’s okay. It’s not going to last more than a couple few days. What I want to encourage you to do is just cut yourself a little bit of slack. It’s not going to last forever, and there’s a reason why it’s happening. And if you seek to cultivate greater self-awareness, greater self-control, if you cultivate greater responsibility and humility around what you say and how you say it, this transit’s very constructive. It’s not super fun, but it’s constructive. So you might not be the most productive on this day—just give yourself permission to be where you’re at and keep on doing your best, keep on trying. That’s all. That’s it—that’s the move, right. 

Did you think this was over? It’s not over. There’s one more transit for me to tell you about. Mercury opposite Mars is a tricky fucking transit. Just because this week was super chill, you know, why not? It’s exact on the 24th. You’ll be feeling it overlapping with the Mercury square to Saturn creating a greater sense of urgency to all that Saturnine stuff. And Mercury opposite Mars can be a time of fighting, unfortunately. 

So Mercury is what you say, how you say it. Mars is the ego, and it’s combat. Mars is passion. Mercury is communication. So on a social level, I would certainly say that this is a time where we are likely to see a lot of angry tweets from a lot of obnoxious people. This is a time where we may see more fights, more drama, people jumping to conclusions. 

Because Mars is Retrograde, you really want to make sure that you are taking responsibility for how you engage with others, and you might fuck up. You might say something wrong. You might say something too forcefully. And you just want to be able to hold space, for we all make mistakes. You got to keep on trying. You got to keep on trying, even in the face of your own errors and mistakes, even in the face of your own butthurt ego. You got to keep on trying. 

You are allowed to think and feel whatever you think and feel, but this is the time to track your actions and make sure that they’re in alignment with your convictions, not just your thoughts in the moment, but your convictions overall. Mercury opposite Mars can be a time of conflicts and combat and all that kind of shit. It’s not fabulous. You may say something or somebody else may say something that cannot be taken back, but, man, are you going to wish it could be. Pick your battles wisely, My Loves. But seriously, pick your battles wisely. 

I’m not saying don’t battle. Sometimes you just got to do what’s right, even if you don’t get what you want, even if it doesn’t go well. Sometimes you just have to choose to keep on doing what’s right, even if you’re frightened, even if you are not sure if you are doing it gracefully. And sometimes you need to rein your shit in and check yourself and make sure that your motivations are clean. Mercury opposite to Mars is going to challenge all of that.

And, of course, it’s coming on the heals of all these others transits I’m telling you about where we’re not coming at things super clean right now. And when I say we, I mean, literally, everyone—these are global transits, right. 

This transit can be associated with various forms of violence, and there’s so much of that that you really just can’t control. All you can really control is how you engage—that’s it. That’s all you can control is how you engage. So do your upmost to, throughout the week—really do the work of self-investigation and showing up with integrity to the best of your ability and with humility when that doesn’t work. And then when this transit occurs that is likely to really trigger things, be brave, be courageous, choose to stay centered in your integrity and what you believe in in your convictions. 

Now the positive side of this transit, if we do see a positive side of it, is going to be bravery. It’s going to be courage. It’s going to be being willing to step up and get things done. Mars is motivating, so you may find yourself very motivated. 

In terms of COVID stuff, which I’m not—haven’t really spoken to in the context of all of this, but, again, Mars Retrograde in Aries—I am concerned about the spread of COVID. You really want to make sure that you’re not allowing your frustration with COVID and all the restrictions it is imposing on your life to inspire you to pretend that something is not real just because you don’t want it to be real. In other words, wear a damn mask. Stand six feet apart from someone. It’s not just about you. It’s not just about your friends. It’s not just about your love life. It’s a highly contagious disease, and it is about all of us. And there’s a lot of very selfish energy running through the stars this week, and it’s triggering. Let’s not have it trigger a wave of infections, if we can avoid it, eh? Eh? 

Okay, now, really briefly, let me run through those transits again, in case you’re taking notes. On the 20th, we have an exact Mercury square to Pluto. On the 22nd, the Sun moves into Libra, and that is the fall Equinox. On the 23rd, Mars forms an exact square to Saturn. And on the 24th, Mercury forms an exact opposition to Mars. ’Tis not chill, My Friends, but there it is.

As always, I want to thank you for joining me for another week of Ghost of a Schmodcast, where we just try to do our best at being a human in concert with other humans. And the thing about astrology that’s so fucking cool is that it really does help us to track our own development as individuals, but it also helps us to track the development of societal trends, social trends. And, for me, that’s really helpful. It allows me to have a greater sense of meaning, and that sense of meaning helps when things are hard. And we all know that things get pretty hard sometimes. So I’m sending you love within it all. In the words of Sarah Kendzior, “If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave, and it’s often hard to be brave, be kind.”