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

Well, here we are—the last Full Moon of 2020. And some people may say good riddance to 2020—if we’re being honest, I may be one of them. However, there is so much to be gained from looking at how you underwent hardship, how the difficulties of this year have shaped you, and how you’ve responded to the struggles that you’ve gone through spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and absolutely, materially. 

This has been a rough time. I’m not trying to Pollyanna 2020 or give a really like love and light spin to it; there’s no need for that. But I will say that if you’re going to go through hardship, if you’re going to struggle, you might as well get something out of it—you might as well learn and grow from it. 

In this Hot Take episode, we’re going to talk about the Full Moon on December 29th and New Year’s Eve. And I want to give you a ritual that you can perform, and you can do this on the Full Moon on the 29th, you can do this on New Year's Eve, or anywhere in between. I just want to remind you—I want to encourage you to align with how far you’ve come. I say that knowing that some of you may hear me say this and be like, “Uh, uh. I’ve regressed,” or “I’ve been stalled,” and that’s okay, honestly. Seriously, it’s okay. 

What you want to be able to do is recognize how far you’ve come, even if you are frustrated with your progress or your situation. To be able to recognize where you are and where you’ve been is foundational to being able to leverage your lived experience and to create something better on it—on its foundations. 

So even though I’m about to break down some of the astrology of this Full Moon, I want to say firmly and clearly to you, this is a time to shed what you’ve outgrown. You do not need to labor. You do not need to labor. You only need to release. And so, if the ritual that I’m going to share, it feels like labor to you, don’t do it. If it doesn’t feel like a facilitator for releasing what you’ve outgrown and for stepping with intention into the new, then it’s not the best one for you. 

This is part of what I hope for you in 2021—that you cultivate discretion based on self-knowledge and to understand that when you do that you may say no to some things, you may turn away from some things or some people, and that’s not bad. We have this tendency as humans to resist change and loss and the unknown and for good reasons, but it’s not always the best choice. 

So I will remind you in this moment what I’ve said many times on the podcast, which is your strongest thoughts, your strongest feelings are not always your wisest thoughts and your wisest feelings. And so, my hope for you now and moving forward is that you know yourself well enough to know the difference between a strong feeling and a wise feeling, a strong thought, a compelling thought and a wise thought—a constructive and helpful thought. 

It’s hard to know, and I don’t think any one person knows all the time with great certainty. It’s okay to be uncertain. Be with your uncertainty, don’t abandon it. You know that’s the move, right. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a hot minute, you know that’s the move. It’s just hard to choose it in the moment. 

Okay. First, let’s break down this Full Moon chart. We are looking at December 29th of 2020—couldn’t resist—at 7:28 p.m., Pacific time. That’s when I’m casting it, so if you’re not in the West Coast of North America, then you just adjust it to your time zone. And depending on where you are in the world, it might actually be falling on a different day—them’s the breaks, kid. That’s just astrology for you. 

Okay, so we are looking at this Full Moon. And, as you know, Full Moons occur when the Sun and Moon are exactly opposite each other to the degree. So we have to be mathematical with this; it’s to the degree, and that’s how we get an exact minute. It’s like that minute where they’re at the same exact degree. And because of how fast the Moon moves, it’s important to note that it’s not exact for all that long. 

We tend to have one Full Moon per zodiac sign, per year, and this is our moment to have a Full Moon in Cancer. And, of course, the Moon is governed by Cancer, so when we have a Full Moon in Cancer, we can expect extra emo with a little emo on the side. And the polarity between Cancer and Capricorn, as I mentioned in the horoscope a couple of days ago, is in many ways the polarity between the summer solstice and the winter solstice. It is the broadening of days and the days getting shorter. 

When we look at the Full Moon in Cancer/Capricorn polarity, what we are being called to do is to emotionally grow—not just based on how we feel but based on maturity. In other words, to be able to weigh our lived experience in balance with our feelings in this moment. Being able to do this allows us to learn and grow based on who we are and where we’ve been, and it’s hard. 

And this is why Full Moons tend to bring up a lot of intense emotions because we can’t repress our feelings anymore; we can’t deny our past experiences. And so, we are meant instead to be with them, to integrate them into our moment and not to impulsively react to them, but with intention to respond to them. 

And in this particular Full Moon chart, that is a little complicated, maybe a little—we still have a bunch of planets in Capricorn. We’ve got the Sun and Mercury very close to each other in Capricorn, and that Pluto is at 24 degrees, so it’s further along. Saturn and Jupiter are still very close to each other in the sign of Aquarius, and they are forming a square to Uranus, which is not yet exact—that won’t happen until 2021, pretty early into the year, but we’ll get there, don’t worry. 

But this creates a sense of uncertainty and instability. It's putting everyone on edge. There’s a jumpiness to this Full Moon that I think is going to be kind of permeable just for all of us in the collective. This sense of like can I trust what’s happening now? Can we trust where we’re going? What comes next? Oh, shit. What’s coming next? So there’s this kind of collective feeling of jumpiness and the uncertainty of what of reality you can trust. 

And that paired with the Moon in Cancer, which is a little bit of a like attachment, love style kind of Moon. It wants security and stability, and it wants real assurances. This can be especially uncomfortable. And so, you may find that if you’re feeling big emotions about a relationship, about yourself, about the world, that it feels extra sticky, like you’re not sure where to kind of like lay your burden down. You know you want to. You know you want to, but it’s hard to know where to and whether or not it’s safe. And that is part of what is coming up for this Full Moon. 

So it’s not a symptom of something being wrong; it’s a symptom of what is happening in the collective. There is uncertainty. We do not know what comes next. Never. Never. We never know. I mean, come on. But especially now, we really don’t know. And so, how do you orient yourself? How do you create safety inside of yourself? When you secure yourself through other people or exclusively through external conditions, external resources, then life is very difficult, and in particular, this Full Moon is going to feel very difficult. 

So what I want to encourage you to do is look at how you are relating to safety and security inside of yourself, how you are resourcing yourself. Because Mercury and the Sun are very close to each other in the sign of Capricorn, if you do this with intention, this conjunction actually facilitates that because Mercury in Capricorn close to the Sun allows for intentional self-investigation, moving through the layers. 

So I want to encourage you to move intentionally through the layers of your own actions and your own attitudes so you can find your center and you can choose it, you can embrace it. Moon in Cancer loves a fucking embrace. Have you embraced yourself lately? This is both a metaphor and something literal. Have you ever hugged yourself? I mean, you’re cute, why not? Give yourself a loving hug, I implore you. 

Okay, now, there’s more. We have a very tight Venus square to Neptune—the Nodes are involved. So let me say this; I’m going to keep it really simple and remind you something that I’ve talked about, again, on the podcast before, which is the difference between ideals—Neptune—and Venus—values. 

I think of our ideals as stars. They light up the night sky, and they guide us. They are a source of inspiration and poetry and magic. But you don’t reach the stars. You can like, quote, reach for the stars, but no one’s reaching the fucking stars, right, even Elon Musk or whatever. We’re not reaching the damn stars; that’s not what it’s about. It’s about inspiration, idealism, guidance, spiritual connection. 

Then there’s Venus, and Venus is associated with values. And values I see as more like lampposts, you know, like in the city, on a city street there’s like a lamppost. And it also lights up the night’s sky. It also can guide you. But over the course of time the lightbulb will burn out, and then you can get a ladder—maybe it’s a big ladder, but you get a ladder, and you can climb up, and you can change the damn lightbulb. 

Values also guide us; however, they are more achievable. We can embody and live in accordance with our values. And that’s around how we conduct ourselves with others in relationship because Venus is also, of course, related to relationship. It’s how we conduct ourselves financially because Venus is associated with your personal finances, and Neptune is associated more broadly with your class—class in general. But it’s also related to how you engage with the world at large. What are you values, and how do your actions reflect those values? 

This Venus/Neptune square is an opportunity for you to really engage these questions. You may have your spiritual ideals and how are you embodying them in a material way—more Venus. The fact that the Nodes are involved, to me, only strengthens the spiritual content of this question and this point of enquiry, and it will guide some of the ritual that I’m about to give you in a moment here. 

And then there’s just one more thing that I want to acknowledge in this Full Moon chart, which is fucking Chiron, okay. So Chiron is forming a T-square—it’s not exact, but forming a T-square to the Sun/Moon opposition. It’s also forming a sextile to the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. To keep it simple—because I don’t want to encourage you to get so caught up in narratives that you lose point of the work in front of us, the ability to grow, to mature, to align with what is important, and to release what isn’t—what I want to encourage you to know about the Chiron implication here is that we are meant to be confronting the ways in which we have been harmed, but more importantly, I would say, the ways in which we use that to harm ourselves, the ways in which our attachment to our past and to our trauma and to the ways in which we’ve been harmed. In a way, it’s like holding the knife in your own back, keeping it in there. And so, this is a powerful opportunity to look at how and if you are perpetrating harm against yourself. 

Because Chiron is forming a sextile to that Saturn/Jupiter conjunction, there is real potential for that to clarify itself to you. So that doesn’t mean that it will be easy for you to be like, “Okay. Cool, then I’ll just change,” or “Oh, it’s an easy thing for me to see, and it’s an easy thing for me to accept, and it’s an easy thing for me to mobilize on.” That’s unlikely. This is a time for being able to acknowledge and name these things. And if you do that, if you do that, you’re laying foundations for wisdom, maturity, healing, and for these things to occur in a sustained way, which is fucking gorgeous, right. 

We also have—I think I just said one more thing, but I actually have one more thing, one more thing. Okay, we also have a Pluto/Mars square that is, again, not exact, but it is active in this Full Moon chart. And I want to really acknowledge that that means that within all of these things, we are dealing with our relationship to anger and frustration and ambition and passion. And that it is an urgent set of emotions. And depending on your nature and your relationship to those emotions, depending on your situation, and depending on the people around you, this may be something that’s really intense or just kind of like under the surface, just kind of driving you. 

And so, the last Full Moon of 2020, of course, packs some pretty meaningful punches. I want to urge you to stay present, to not abandon yourself, to not judge or deem certain emotions as unacceptable or not okay in any way. You’re allowed to have any feeling and any thought that you have; you’re perfectly entitled. It is healthy to stay present with your feelings and your thoughts. Then based on your maturity, on your discretion, on your values, on effort, it is incumbent upon you to find a way to choose your responses with intention to reaction. 

You’re not entitled to all actions. You’re not entitled to dump all your feelings, as justified as your feelings are, in the laps of others. Just because you’re entitled to your feelings and your thoughts does not mean that you’re entitled to all actions. But the more permission you give yourself to have wildly mixed feelings, the better equipped you are to determine which of those feelings you want to act from, you want to prioritize, which of those feelings come from your best wishes for yourself and which of them are echoes of trauma, are habits that need breaking, are points inside of yourself that need to grow and evolve. So let’s get to some damn ritual.

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.

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. Here are some organizations that you can donate to and volunteer with, and the links to them all will be show notes. 

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 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. They seek to empower the new American majority to vote through advocacy and engagement. You can go to their website at thenewgeorgiaproject.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. Get involved and donate at blackvotersmatterfund.org. Link to all three of these orgs will remain in show notes.

Okay, so here is my ritual for you, and it’s inspired actually by this game I’ve been playing since the mid-1990s—not to brag. But it’s called The Transformation Game. It is a remarkable game. Get out there and get it if you’re in the market. It’s basically like an interactive Tarot reading. This is not an ad or anything; it’s just a game I fucking love. It’s like an interactive Tarot reading. You can play it with two to four people at a time. It is just, I don’t know, it’s a fucking delight. 

But here we go. What I want to have you do for your New Moon ritual—and add all manner of woo to this at your discretion. Personally, me, I am a huge fan of doing candle work, which I’ve talked about on the podcast before, and there are many things to do in accompaniment with this. But here’s the Sun in Capricorn, conjunct to Mercury, opposite the Moon homework for you. 

What I want you to do is sit down, get yourself comfortable, and get yourself a pen and paper—just go old school with it. If you prefer a computer, do whatever you want. I encourage you to take some time to review 2020, to really pay attention to what has come up for you personally. Look at it through these four levels: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual and jot down some notes—or if you want to write a tiny novella, I respect you—about what you went through on each of these planes. 

From this place, what I want to encourage you to do is stay with the feels—the feelings that come up around what you went through physically, what you went through spiritually, emotionally, and mentally and to understand that these layers are all connected and yet they are unique. You may have really struggled mentally but thrived spiritually—that’s okay. Bring awareness to it. 

From this place, I want to encourage you to write out a new—whether it’s a list or you can storyboard it, whatever works for you aesthetically—to write out what it is that you intend to release, to release it with the Full Moon, to release it with the transition from 2020 to 2021. 

The only way to release something is to first hold it. Let’s do a quick little exercise here. Do you know where your phone is? Find your phone. Maybe you wear glasses. Do you know where your glasses are? Take your phone, take your glasses, take whatever physical thing you like, and put it on table in front of you—just look at it for a moment; look at that physical thing. Now try to let it go. Let go of the phone. Let go of the glasses. You can’t, can you? You can’t let go of something that you are not first holding. I know it’s really material, but that’s the rule. 

So what I want to encourage you to know is that this exercise is one of holding your lived experience so that you can release it. So in the second part of this ritual, what I want to encourage you to do is to name what you want to release and to understand that if you’re not connected to the feelings of the things that you are striving to release, then you’re not really going to be releasing them. If you can’t connect to the feelings, get more general—get more general or get more honest so that you can release it, so that you can first be in contact with the feelings, you can first be in contact with whatever it is that you’re saying you wish to release, and then release it. 

When you’re done with this writing exercise, I want to encourage you to get out a black Sharpie, black paint, whatever it is you like and just black it out. Just black it out. If you only have a pen, use a pen—do what you got to do. But black it out, and then rip it up or burn it. This is a process of releasing. 

Now, if you’re like, “Ooh, it just doesn’t feel right. I’m doing this exercise, I’m doing this ritual, and it doesn’t feel right for me to destroy these things,” then don’t do it. Wait until it feels right. And if that means you’re waiting for three months, wait until it feels right. This is not about denying your experiences. This is an exercise in releasing your attachment to them. 

And I should say, personally, me, I’m probably going to do this over the course of the next few days—the 29th, the 30th, the 31st, and the 1st. Nothing says you can’t spread it out. The only thing I would urge you to do is to make sure that as you sit down to do this or any other ritual, you bring intention and presence, and you turn off distractions—you turn off your phone, your computer is closed, that kind of good stuff. 

So the next stage is to set intentions for 2021 and set those intentions through the levels: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. What are your goals for yourself? What is it that you wish to achieve and how will you achieve those things through the levels? Now, I don’t want you to get attached to what it needs to look like. This is more of a spiritual exercise this stage of our ritual, a process of setting intention without attachment. And that means it doesn’t matter what it looks like. 

You don’t need to figure out how you’ll achieve x amount of dollars or a certain specific relationship. You want to set intentions based on how it will feel—how you intend, how you hope, how you wish for 2021 to feel. This is a more general part of the exercise. We are not trying to control the future, instead, what you want to do is align yourself through the layers of how you are going to participate, what you are going to prioritize, and what has the greatest value for you at this time, looking forward. 

My loves, I hope that you have a healthy and abundant Full Moon and transition into 2021. As always, I thank you for joining me here at Ghost of a Podcast and encourage you to hit subscribe wherever you’re listening to the show, write me a five-star review if you’re listening to it on a platform that allows for reviews. 

If you want more of my work, you can join me over on Patreon, follow me on social media, all that kind of good, common sense stuff that people do in the modern age as it is. And perhaps, most importantly, you can stay tuned for a bonus extra episode on January first, maybe I’ll drop it on December 31st, of the 2021 year ahead horoscope. Be on the look out for that shit. Bye.