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.

Darlings, darlings, let’s talk about Pluto. So I touched on Pluto in last week’s astrology Hot Take by talking about Boomers and Millennials—that was episode 161 about Boomers and Millennials and how they are kind of both a part of different Pluto generations. Now, this week I want to pull back and talk about what Pluto really is about. So let’s begin at the beginning.

Not all astrologers love working with the outer planets as much as I do. I am obsessed with the outer planets. And I think that anyone who does any kind of astrology associated with trauma and healing and early development issues and addiction and abuse and inherited conditions etc., etc.—anyone who is really focused in their astrology practice around any of those issues or related issues is going to want to fuck with Pluto because Pluto governs all of those things. 

When we look at Pluto, which is the slowest moving planet in the whole of the zodiac that astrologers work with—it moves very, very slowly. In fact, Pluto takes almost 250 years to move all the way around the zodiacal degrees. So while the Sun takes a year—your birthday is when the Sun returns to the exact place you were born every year—Pluto will take 248 years approximately to do the same damn thing. Yeah, slow moving. 

And whenever we’re talking about slow moving planets, when you’re first studying astrology, it’s really tempting to think, “Well, that can’t really be that personal to me because it’s like it moves so slowly. Anyone born within a year or two of me is going to have the same planet in the same sign”—not in the same house, but it’s the same for a generation, so it’s easy to think, “Okay, it’s not personal.” Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Pluto drags with it the dregs of inherited conditions, and I mean inherited in the context of your family. And that could be the people who are raising you, and also it can be your family of origin, so the people who have to do with your genes—which for many of us, it’s not the same people, right. It can also be inherited issues in the context of what you’ve inherited alongside your generation, so the conditions of the world, the conditions of any number of things. 

Pluto in the birth chart governs everything intense. Pluto governs the very classy shitting and cumming. It’s the big letting go. Pluto is related to death and grief, but it isn’t actually about your death, necessarily. I have most commonly seen and read about Jupiter being related to your dying, but that’s an aside. Pluto itself is your fear of death, your relationship to death, your relationship to grief. So that’s your experience of other people’s death or the death of an era or a relationship. 

Pluto governs our abandonment issues, our feelings of being out of control—both in a delicious way, like with cumming or in a heart wrenching way, like with death. And unsurprisingly, Pluto is related to power struggles. The power struggles that we have with ourself around our desires or our needs, but also the power struggles we have within society, the power struggles we have around our body, with our parents, with our exes, with our partners, with our friends, whatever—it can happen anywhere. 

The way that Pluto functions for you personally is related to the house you find that planet in and also any kind of natal aspects to Pluto. Now, I’ll say even if you have a, quote, easy aspect in your birth chart from Pluto to another Planet, like a trine or a sextile, it’s still intense. Pluto has no chill—like none. No chill whatsoever. 

When it comes to Pluto, what we’re dealing with is your survival mechanisms, your impulse to flight or fight. It’s that animal bit brain, or it’s sometimes called the lizard brain—that part of you that feels like I need to do whatever I’m doing or not doing to survive. It doesn’t matter what I want; it matters what I need, and what I need is to just survive. It is not necessarily our wisest impulses. And the reason why Pluto is not necessarily our wisest impulses is because it is related to the survival mechanisms. 

Let’s say you’re in an actual crisis where your survival is meaningfully being challenged—that’s where we want your Pluto to kick in. Unfortunately, because it’s a fight or flight mechanism, it doesn’t have the nuance—left to its own devices, Pluto does not have the nuance to be able to determine this is an actual threat to my wellness and welfare versus this feels like a threat to my wellness and welfare. 

Once you’ve been chased by a bear just one time, it kind of gives you some feelings about bears and running for your life, right. So you were chased by a bear one time when you were seven years old. It was fucking terrible; you hated it, and now you’ve got a Pluto issue. So what happens is every time you’re walking down the street and you hear footsteps behind you, the feelings of being chased by a bear may reoccur. But that doesn’t mean there’s a bear behind you, or it doesn’t mean that there’s a big bear behind you. 

So in other words, what happens with our Pluto issues is they get stuck inside of us, and we start to feel justified. But we don’t always do the really basic simple steps of getting present and grounded and checking in with what’s actually happening. And that’s what we need to learn to do wherever Pluto is in the birth chart. 

Pluto isn’t all bad. Where we find Pluto, we also find our capacity to heal. There are many ways to talk about psychic—intuition and psychic gifts, but I can say that clairvoyance, clairaudience, anything in the clairsentience, any of that kind of stuff falls into Neptune. Pluto is mediumship and more raw psychic intuition or psychic knowledge. 

Pluto in the birth chart describes where we have the capacity to generate and create meaningful transformation and transmutation, the capacity for change. But not just on a surface level, on a deep and heartfelt level—that’s Pluto for you. 

Pluto also governs not just power struggles but power in general. So when we are looking at the capacity to be successful and influence a large amount of people or create something that has meaningful impact, we want to look to Pluto. Because Pluto is one of the main planets that will describe for us our relationship to power and our relationship to creating transformation in a way that actually creates something that is generative in this world or in our lives or whatever is it. 

Do you ever lie awake at night obsessing about the moment when everything went wrong? Maybe you wish you could reach out to the brother you stopped talking to 40 years ago, or maybe you want to ask your high school sweetheart why did you dump me? On the podcast Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein helps guests journey back to the past to answer the questions that still haunt them in the hope of setting things right. That’s Heavyweight from Gimlet. Follow and listen for free on Spotify.

Excited that Trump lost in Arizona and that the state finally flipped blue? You have the native vote to thank for that, as voters in the Navajo and Hopi Reservations cast almost 60,000 ballots, and Biden won by only just over 10,000. 

The Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservation are extreme food deserts with only 13 grocery stores on Navajo to serve some 180,000 people and only 3 small grocery marts on Hopi to serve some 3,000 people. These communities also have high numbers of elderly, diabetic, asthmatic, and cancer afflicted individuals, which makes them all high risk for COVID-19. 

You can make a difference by giving back this day of national mourning—more conventionally referred to as Thanksgiving. Visit Navajohopisolidarity.org to learn more about the grassroots, indigenous-led, non-profit organization that is raising money for families struggling with COVID-19. Find the link to both the organization and the GoFundMe page in show notes.

Okay, here’s some real talk. In order for any democratic president to get much done, they need a blue senate. It doesn’t really have to be that way, but that’s the way the GOP’s stall and block tactics work, and so therefore, it is so. And right now, it all comes down to Georgia. 

So we’ve dealt with the election of the president, but we are not done with the larger fight. On January 5th, of 2021, Georgia has the opportunity to flip the US senate blue. And whether or not you’re in Georgia, you can get involved and be a part of turning that damn senate blue. Let’s get on it. 

Okay, so here are some organizations that you may or may not know of that you can donate to and volunteer with, and the links to them all will be in show notes. Now, a huge part of why the Biden/Harris ticket won the presidency is because of the vision and dedication of Black women across this nation. And one super star on the political scene is Stacey Abrams. I know you’ve heard of her, but let me just tell you about her organization Fair Fight, whose mission it is to advocate for free and fair elections by fighting voter suppression and promoting fair elections in Georgia, as well as around the country. You can donate to this organization and find out more about how to get involved over at fairfight.com. 

Now, there’s another organization I want to share with you, which is called The New Georgia Project. And it’s another Georgia based org that is making a huge impact. They seek to empower the new American majority, which they describe on their website as people of color, those 18 to 29 years old, and unmarried women. And they are empowering this new American majority to vote through advocacy and engagement. You can go to their website at The newgeorgiaproject.org to donate and get involved. 

And, finally, you need to know about Black Voters Matter. Their goal is to increase power in marginalized, predominately Black communities. Effective voting allows a community to determine its own destiny. On their site, they amplify the words of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, who said, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Get involved and donate at blackvotersmatterfund.org. Again, link to all three of these orgs will remain in show notes.

Pluto by transit is a little bit of a different thing. Because while Pluto in the birth chart describes your early developmental conditions—it actually can be used in determining pre-natal conditions, in other words, conditions that occurred before you were born or even conceived—Pluto transits, they tell us what’s coming at us. When something’s coming at us by transit it presents itself either by a sense of fate, like this is how I feel, and I can’t help it or a situation or person or persons wrecking some damn havoc in our lives. 

And you know what? Thank God for that. We need havoc. We need things to be shaken up so that we learn and grow, so that we move beyond wherever we’re at. And not to over reference a classic called The Matrix, but there’s a reason why humans rejected the damn matrix when it was all unicorns and lollipops. Human nature is not well suited to everything being lovely all the time. Conflict and crisis and contrast, they illuminate where our yes lives. They illuminate where our joy lives. They make it clear why we should care about caring. So don’t completely fear the Pluto transit. 

Now, that said, because of how slowly the planet Pluto moves, whenever a person goes through a transit from Pluto to either a planet in your birth chart or one of the major points in your birth chart, it lasts for two years—give or take but two years. So it’s always life altering, even if Pluto wasn’t fucking Pluto and so intense and transformational, just the fact that it lasts for two years on its own means that it’s this meaningful thing. 

Now, some Pluto transits happen to everyone at around the same age, and some Pluto transits do not happen to everyone. In either case, these transits are always transformational. The way I most commonly describe a Pluto transit is it’s kind of like your house. You’ve got your foundation, you’ve got your plumbing, you’ve got everything—cool. Cool, cool. And then what happens is Pluto comes, and Pluto is that big, yellow truck with the ball, you know, the chain and the ball, and it knocks down your house. And then it’s the next big yellow truck that comes, and it digs. It’s a like a digger truck. I obviously don’t know anything about trucks or construction, but it’s like a digger truck, and it digs up all that plumbing, all that electricity. It just destroys the foundation and brings you to a big old gaping hole of dirt where you once had a house—that’s a Pluto transit. 

Now, maybe that doesn’t sound super optimistic, but the opportunity here is to rebuild your house or sell the land, move on. I know it was a weird metaphor, just bear with me. Sell your land, move on. Get a new house. Maybe decide to just travel the damn countryside and not even get a house. You have choices. But, generally speaking, what Pluto does is it demands that you let go of something that you don’t want to let go of, that you feel feelings that you’ve gone really far out of your way to not feel. 

There’s no such thing as a Pluto transit that brings you what you want without any consequences or any costs. That’s just not how Pluto works. The emotions that Pluto triggers are transformative and scary and intense. Pluto governs resentments and pettiness and all kinds of other intense things that people really struggle with. And when we go through Pluto transits, it can actually inspire us to acts of cruelty, either to ourselves or to others, but most commonly, both. 

And if you are not dealing with you being cruel, you maybe instead in a Pluto transit coping with somebody else who is being cruel towards you. And in response to that you have to deal with are you being mean to yourself? Are you abandoning yourself? Are you punishing yourself? Are you martyring yourself in your thinking and your attitudes towards the situation? And also, are you allowing somebody else’s bad behavior to entitle you to your own bad behavior? Because here’s the thing. Pluto is vindictive and punishing, and so, it inclines us to be forced to deal with those parts of our personalities that are also competitive and vindictive and punishing. 

But Pluto comes with it the potential to get at the root of things, to heal. But that healing comes through confrontation. And the confrontation that we need to have whenever we’re going through a Pluto transit, even a really easy—quote, unquote, easy one or a positive one, is we have to be willing to confront the feelings and the compulsions that underly a thing. The feelings and the compulsions are the thing to really deal with. Everything else is a symptom of the underlying issue. 

Pluto transits have a funny way—and also big Pluto aspects in the birth chart have a funny way of making us feel like we don’t have a choice. Pluto functions are a lot like all the lights in the house are on, all the lights in the house are off, and you don’t have your hand on the switch. It feels really out of your control. And it makes us feel desperate, and it makes us really reactive being that out of control and things being so on and so off in our experience. 

The opportunity of a Pluto transit is to sit in the damn dark when you need to sit in the dark and to not make things more complicated than they need to be, than they already are and instead to be with that—that unknowing, the resistance, that struggle, the negative narratives you have running through your head, the difficult feelings that you’re trying to distance yourself from, the compulsions that you’re indulging or that you have habits around in the face of those intense feelings. If we can do that, if we can be with our feelings, then we have more options. 

Pluto’s trick is to make you feel like there’s only two choices: all the lights are on, all the lights are off. Yes or no. And whenever you find yourself in this kind of all or nothing feeling, all or nothing thinking, you know you’re in Pluto’s snare. There’s always more than two options. Now, maybe none of them are good. Maybe you have 17 options, and they’re all fucking terrible—sure, that’s possible, but there’s always more than two options. 

I’ll tell you, whenever I do podcast episodes and I’m doing the question and answer segment, and somebody has big Pluto issues, and those big Pluto issues show up in the reading, I get the strongest response to it. Because Pluto governs where we have shame, where we’re ashamed of ourselves, where we feel vulnerable and we feel convinced that we are the worst or we are the only one, that we are alone—essentially alone in how we feel and in what we are experiencing. 

And Pluto is very, very bright. Now, I don’t mean the planet itself; I mean it’s energies in the birth chart. And, so, we can substantiate any fucking thing we want to when it comes to Pluto. You will look around your life or look at yourself and say I have proof. And you will find that proof if you want to because Pluto’s energies are tenacious. They’re determined. 

And, so, when you catch yourself either dealing with this as a personality trait or in a period of your life where this theme is really up, a feeling like you are utterly alone, that your pain is insurmountable, that you only have two options, and that you’re too much or not enough, start to know that that is the languaging of Pluto, and there’s investigation to be done around either the natal issue, so your chronic issue in your relationship to Pluto or your situational dynamic, where you’re going through a Pluto transit that will last for at least two years. 

In being willing to investigate what can happen is you can start to find more options, and that’s really important for Pluto. You know, drug addiction—there’s a lot of planets that go into addiction, but the kind of act of addiction, of self-annihilation and compulsive behavior and self-destruction, it’s very Pluto. Pluto is kind of a trash can addict. Pluto will do all the drugs, eat all the foods, watch all the TV, just shop—buy all the things. Pluto just wants everything— more, more, more, more, more. So Pluto either stuffs or starves—that’s Pluto’s move. 

The reason why I’m a huge fan of A.A.—personally, me, I am not sober. I’m not an addict—not in that particular way, anyways. But the reason why I’m such a fan of A.A.—not without criticism, not without—not in an unqualified way is because it is pure Plutonian wisdom. What the healthiest way to deal with and the surest way to deal with our Plutonian issues is to not sit alone in our shame and with our narrative. 

The thing that A.A. does so successfully and other programs that are kind of peer-based sharing of vulnerable stories with a confidentiality clause, what that does is exactly what Pluto needs, is to not sit alone in your shame, to be vulnerable and share with others, to know that your story is unique to you, but it’s not exclusive to you. There are many people who share the exact same experience as you, no matter how random and weird your experience is. And I’m saying this as a damn medium, animal communicator, astrologer weirdo, I am. We’re all unique, but we’re also not that unique. You know what I’m saying? 

There’s something really powerful about hearing other people speak your truth for themselves, and that is one of the more healing things we can do with our Pluto issues—it’s to share. And not to just share in a way that is a self-fulfilling prophecy but to share with people who are also willing and able to share, to share back. That’s what Pluto wants us to do. 

Now, I could go on, honestly, for hours and hours and never have said enough about Pluto, but this is a Hot Take. I want to acknowledge there’s a lot of things that are really deep topics of Pluto that I haven’t actually gone into in this particular episode, and a big one, of course, is abuse. Another big one is sex and sexuality. Pluto governs both of these things. If you have interest, I’d be happy to drop another episode about Pluto. 

We’re going to be talking about Pluto a lot more as we move towards the Pluto Return of the United States. So you’re going to hear a lot more astrologers, me included, talking about Pluto more frequently. A lot of times when you hear people talk about Pluto, it’s scary—whether you’re hearing about something that’s happening globally or something that’s happening to you in your personal birth chart or something that is in your birth chart that’s in your nativity. 

But let me just remind you of this. The fear that you feel when you think about any of the themes that are governed by Pluto, that fear that you feel is an opportunity to not abandon yourself, to breathe into those feelings, or if breathing into feelings isn’t resonant for you, finding your way that is resonant and safe and healthy for you, to be present and to not perpetrate harm against yourself, to take pains to recognize, “Oh, wow. Okay, so I’ve come up against a limitation that I have with myself. I can’t do this. I can’t tolerate these feelings. I can’t tolerate this fear.” Okay, cool. That’s where you want to start. If you can cultivate self-awareness about where your limit is, then you can show yourself the epic fucking kindness of respecting that limit. 

And I’m not saying indulging a limit that is unhealthy. I’m saying recognizing your own limits is essential so you can respect them. And in respecting your limits, you can start to expand beyond those limits. But only if you’re doing it in a respectful, kind, and present way. This very process that I’m describing is Pluto. It’s the function and energy of Pluto, whether it’s by transit or in the birth chart. 

As always, I thank you so much for joining me for another little astrology Hot Take on Ghost of a Podcast. If you get value from this podcast, please do give me five stars on whatever platform you are listening to the show or write a review. I mean a nice review—write a nice review. I mean, I know it’s Pluto time; I’m talking about Pluto, so maybe you want to write something vengeful—don’t do that. Write something generous. 

If you want to know more about Pluto and what it looks like in your birth chart, you know I have a book, an astrology book. It’s called Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along, and it’s broken into a bunch of sections: friends, hookups, and long-term relationships. And I delineate Pluto in the signs and the houses—it’s the houses that’s really interesting, IMO—in the context of all three of those kinds of relationships. Who doesn’t want that? I mean, seriously, who doesn’t want it? 

And if you’re going to buy a book, if you’re going to buy my book, why not support a small, local bookstore. You can do that without leaving your house. You can buy books from a bookstore that has a bookshop or Indie Bound books or one of these kinds of platforms. Go check it out—fuck Amazon. Yay books. Yay astrology books. 

Mixed feelings about Pluto, but I love you, and I hope you love you too.