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.

My darlings, this week’s question comes from Sensi [sp] and Stubborn, and it says, “First of all, thank you for the continuous work you do. The energy you put into the world is felt and so, so, so appreciated.” Hey, man, you’re welcome. Okay, it goes like this, “I am a sensitive person. I have always been hypersensitive to what others are feeling. I’ll even feel the pain or stress others are going through immediately in my own body. This often means that when I’m angry, I dilute myself, or when I need to be firm about something I hesitate and wring my hands about my delivery. I care very much about how someone else will feel about me being angry at them, even when I’m very, very angry at them. 

The more I study astrology, the more I understand my chart will continue to unfold and reveal strengths and gifts as I gain life experience. Right now, this sensitivity is a burden. Do you have any suggestions for managing hypersensitivity to others whilst still molding it into a useful tool? And I have a lot of fixed energy in my chart, and I struggle to know if I’m being stubborn or finally learning to set boundaries. Thank you, Sensi and Stubborn.”

Okay. Such an important question, and whether or not you have a lot of fixed energy in your chart, I bet a lot of people can identify with this. And I will say straight out the gate, my friend, that you definitely have some fixed energy in your chart, but, I mean, you’ve got a lot of fixed energy, but you have a pretty balanced chart. You have a lot of mutable energy too; I see cardinal in there. So that’s just like maybe a little aside. Oh, and I should say, Sensi was born February 17th, 1994, 3:46 p.m. in Arlington, Virginia. 

Okay, before I unpack the birth chart itself, let me do what you know I like to do, which is unpack the damn question. You said some really important things in your question. One of them is that you’re so empathetic, you’re so much of an empath that you feel other people’s feelings in your body. That is very real. And what I’ve noticed on social media in recent years is that more and more people are sharing that that’s their experience. 

So I don’t know if because of social media people are able to share it more and that’s why it’s in the collective or if there’s some sort of shift happening, and people are experiencing more empathy. And I mean empathy as a spiritual condition, not as an emotional condition, right, because they are different things. Emotional empathy is I choose to have empathy in this situation, and more of an energetic empathy is more of what you’re describing, which is feeling other people’s feelings in your own body. 

Now, personally, me, I am psychic, and I am an empath, which means that I feel other people’s feelings, and I know hella shit that I shouldn’t know. Okay, cute, bun. Okay, fine, but what you have equated between being an empath or being a highly sensitive person and how you respond to your own emotions is a false equivalency. 

When a person is highly sensitive, hypersensitive, and you feel other people’s feelings, it’s great information. It’s—some people would say it’s a gift. Some people would say it’s a burden. I say it’s both because it is hard to be sensitive. It’s hard to be sensitive, and it’s even harder to be responsible around your sensitivities. So when you feel other people’s feelings, first and foremost, it is incumbent upon you, my dear, to recognize that they are not your feelings and to not treat them like they’re your feelings. So let’s start with that. 

It’s really important, and I will get into the birth chart in a moment to explain how you can do this personally, but I want to keep it a little on the broad side first. You have said that because you feel other people’s feelings, that you dilute your difficult emotions. So you dilute your anger, you dilute your frustration, you dilute your boundaries. That has nothing to do with you being an empath. That has nothing to do with you being kind to others or sensitive to others. That has to do with you not being comfortable with how other people may feel in response to your boundary because of what that means about you. 

Let me unpack that one step further. Highly sensitive people, we will often tell ourselves that we don’t want other people to feel bad and that’s why we’re not being honest and forthcoming with them. But the truth is we don’t want them to feel bad about us. There’s a difference. There’s a difference. 

The truth is the truth, and if you want relationships with people that are real, you are not doing them a kindness by shielding them from the truth. What you are doing is preserving your own ego. What you are doing is preserving your own comfort. Listen, you’re a person, I’m a person, we’re all people—that’s a thing. That’s a thing. However, don’t tell yourself that this is a response to sensitivity. It’s a response to your ego. And there’s a meaningful difference between those two things. 

And this is where highly sensitive people and psychic people get into trouble a lot, is confusing your spiritual integrity with your personality, right. So more on that in a moment. The only way to manage hypersensitivity or being an empath or a psychic ability is with boundaries. It’s to make a decision whether or not you’re willing to be a Peeping Tom. And if you’re not—obviously, I don’t think you should be because I called it a Peeping Tom—but if you’re not willing to be a Peeping Tom, then you need an approach. And that I shall share with now. 

Personally, me, I have a rule in my personal life, I do not peep on people psychically. Now, inevitably, I know things. Inevitably, I pick up on shit, and it’s not my fucking business, and so I ignore it. It’s not my business. And if a friend asks me for something—they ask me to know something, they ask me whatever, they try to tap in on my little gift bucket, I take care to take responsibility for the consequences it may have. And I recognize that it’s messy and sticky and complicated. 

This is where—let me put it this way. You may have excellent hearing; you know what I mean? Like really good hearing. You can just hear everything, and that doesn’t mean you were given a gift so you can peep on your neighbors and listen to their conversations. It doesn’t mean that you’re not hearing loud noises at night when you’re trying to sleep and relax. In other words, you got to work with your sensitivities. So if you’ve amazing hearing and your neighbors are really loud and you’re trying to not peep on them, play some damn music, get a white noise machine, right. 

And if you are really sensitive, and you want to deal with your hypersensitivity in a way that makes it useful, have boundaries. Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t have those sensitivities; it means you are managing with intention and integrity how you respond to your sensitivities—you see? 

And then this brings us to the part of you that’s like I don’t know if I’m being stubborn. I don’t know. What’s wrong with you being stubborn? I mean, maybe being stubborn is exactly what you need to do. The only way we grow and the only way that we learn is if we fuck up, is if we make some mistakes. So the key is not to figure out that you’re a hypersensitive person and then to be perfect around it. The key is not to decide you want to be an entrepreneur and then start making tons of money and doing good in the world. The key is to be humble and consistent and passionate and present in the journey towards these things, whatever the thing may be—it calls for different stuff. 

So let me now go to your birth chart because there’s a lot in here. You have a Saturn/Mercury/Venus conjunction in Pieces, and it kind of moves from the seventh and into the eighth house, so it kind of like hangs out in both of these houses. And this definitely makes you very sensitive. This sensitivity is in the family of clairvoyance but kind of slips into body-based stuff because of that eighth house presence. 

So this planetary configuration can make you really sensitive. However, it can also make you really critical of yourself and give you the inclination to control the way you express yourself. And because of that, you may be over thinking, and you kind of speak to that in your question. This kind of like wringing of the hands about what to do is really not about being psychic or being sensitive; it's about your relationship to perfectionism. 

If you’re pissed off with me, and you say it in a weird way, “Jessica, I’m pissed at you,” then I can be mad at you, then I know you’ve done something wrong. And that’s what freaks you out—not that it hurts my feelings. I’m not saying you don’t care about my feelings in that scenario, but I’m saying what’s motivating you, the deep, underlying thing that’s motivating you is that you’re scared of being imperfect or of failing. And I want to say there’s no way forward without stumbling on the path—there’s just no way. 

And so, my advice to you, my dear, is to sit with that so you can start to determine the difference between your own fear of being perceived as imperfect or making a mistake and your desire to show up with kindness towards others and consideration of their feelings. If someone’s pissed at me and they don’t tell me, I don’t think they’re being nice to me. I think they’re being a withholding jerk to me, personally. Everyone’s different, you know. 

Now, that’s not all. You also have Moon in Taurus, and it’s opposite Jupiter and forms a T-square to Mars. That is the fixed energy you were talking about, right. That’s that part of you that just wants things to be done quickly, over quickly. When things aren’t quick, you get really uncomfortable. You don’t have an easy time sitting in discomfort or hard feelings, and so the thing is you are stubborn and also impatient and also sensitive. It’s okay to be all of those things. What you simply need to do is to decide for yourself how to take care of it. 

You know, because of Mars and Jupiter’s involvement, I wonder if you’re a bit of a Sporty Spice, if you’re like somebody who likes to exercise or use your body as a way to release energy. Generally speaking, this T-square does really well with physical exertion as a way to kind of manage sensitivities and your emotional health. So I strongly encourage you to play with that and to make the decision that you’re doing that as a form of psychic selfcare, so that you can clear out kind of the messiness of your feelings to determine what boundary you need to have and what risks you’re willing to take in a given situation. 

There’s no way to learn to set boundaries without fucking up, without making too harsh of a boundary, without making too weak of a boundary, without making a weird boundary adjacent to the thing you really should have made the boundary about. That’s just the learning process of being a human person with boundaries. It’s okay if you make mistakes—it really is, just don’t defend them without humility and without learning from them. The key is not perfection, my dear. 

The trouble that we get into as highly sensitive people is imagining that we can deal with everything on the spiritual level. If you are here in a physical body, if you are here as a human person being, then you have come here to learn the lessons of the material condition of humanness. And part of being a human is being sensitive. It’s a little bit more for some people, a little bit less for others, but part of being a human is being interconnected energetically. 

It’s also about communication and listening and trial and error and time and making mistakes and learning from mistakes or fucking up and moving on, right. It’s action and consequence—that’s the human condition. That’s the material condition of being a human. There’s no way around it. So allowing yourself to use your sensitivities as an excuse for not being honest or forthcoming with others, it won’t age well. It won’t strengthen your sensitivities, and it won’t improve your relationships. 

Taking responsibility for what you can and can’t do—that will. Taking responsibility for how you build the muscle of your sensitivities so that it is stronger and more flexible—that will improve your life. And I want to say as somebody who has been a professional psychic for many years now, the more you use your skill with intention, just like any other muscle, the more flexibility and adaptability you have with that muscle, and therefore, the more effectively you can use it. 

But in order to build a muscle, you have to tear the muscle. It’s a whole pain in the ass. That’s why I don’t like lifting weights—you just tear muscle. But on the psychic level, same thing, same thing, same thing. In order to build the muscle, you need to like kind of go through some pains. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the path, and it’s kind of the only way forward. So be open to learning through trial and error and for taking responsibility for how you feel when you feel it. 

And then, when and if you are stubborn, and you find that you have just been a bit of a bull or a bully, take the time to slow down, feel your feelings about it, even if they’re shitty, and then show up for others and be like, “Hey, I was stubborn. I was trying to assert a boundary and I overdid it in this way,” or, “My boundary got ridged, and I’m sorry. I’m learning how to have boundaries. I apologize.” And if somebody is an asshole, well, that’s great information for you to have. And if somebody’s not an asshole, but they have a hard time forgiving you, they try, okay, that’s fair too. Whatever it is, it’s all action and consequence—embrace it, my love.

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. Visit navajohopisolidarity.org to learn more about the grassroots, indigenous led, nonprofit 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.

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.

My loves, my loves, my loves, this is episode 175, and it’s the first weekly horoscope of 2021—what do you think? Kind of exciting. I mean, maybe it’s super unexciting to you that it’s episode 175, but really exciting to me to have created 175 episodes of this very nerdy and heartfelt podcast. So thank you for joining me, whether you’re on episode number one or if you have been here with me since the get—thank you. Thank you very much. 

I will also just really briefly say before we get into this week’s horoscope, if you are interested in getting a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast every single month, then you should become a patron over on Patreon. At the Kitten’s level, I drop a month ahead horoscope where I really kind of get into some shit. So if you want to get into some shit with me, go do that. We also study Tarot and do a bunch of other shit. So if you’re interested, please do join me other there. 

Also, I want to invite you to listen to the last two episodes I dropped. I dropped so many episodes last week. Episode 174 is the 2021 year ahead horoscope, and then also in episode 173, I dropped a New Year’s Eve and Full Moon ritual, which if you haven’t heard it or if you haven’t done such a ritual, I think it’s some good advice and a good strategy to do whenever the mood and time and energy permits. Because its great to just bring in greater intention about what you’re leaving behind and what you want to cultivate, and is the New Year kind of arbitrary time to do it? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. 

Now, we are looking at the week of January 3rd through the 9th of 2021. Here we are. Before I get into the transits, I want to acknowledge that in these dates it includes the Georgia state runoff here in these United States of America, and it is a really important political event here in the US, where we’re trying to get rid of Mitch McConnell and make some really strong moves. And we’re kind of leaning on Georgia to make that happen. 

If you are interested in learning more about the Georgia state runoff, I want to refer you over to Zodiac The Vote’s Instagram, where I dropped a little break down of the Georgia state runoff chart and explain it and unpack it. You can go check that out. And hopefully you have participated to the best of your ability. Maybe you’ve donated to Fair Fight Action or the Black Voter’s Matter or the New Georgia Project—these are great organizations on the ground, making shit happen. If you are in Georgia, of course, I encourage you to vote. I encourage you to vote blue. There it is. That’s what’s happening. 

Okay, now let’s get into the astrology. On the 4th of January, we have a Mercury conjunction to Pluto. We’re going to be feeling this transit before it actually gets exact, and it’s going to kind of impact us throughout the week. Mercury conjunction to Pluto is intense. Pluto is intense. 

Mercury is your mind, so Mercury governs your friendships, your platonic relationships. It’s communication and listening and DMing and emailing and ideas. And Pluto is intense and compulsive and driving. So this is where I urge you to remember your strongest thoughts, your strongest feelings are not necessarily your wisest thoughts and feelings—Pluto is proof. 

In this transit, Pluto will incline us to want to kind of pick at scabs, really. And that’s no bueno. The potential, the positive potential of this transit is that you can look deeply into something, whether it’s your own attitudes and beliefs, your friendship issues, some sort of project or issue that you’ve been working on and have such a penetrating capacity for concentration and investigation that you come up with a new deeper and more transformative answer. The potential here is that we transform our understanding and our relationship to our own attitude or some sort of relationship. The potential for healing and for transformation is meaningful under this transit. 

What’s equally if not more present is the potential for drama and allowing yourself to get swept up in petty distractions that cause more harm than healing. So if you catch yourself wrapped up in some bullshit, I want to encourage you to remember my words and be like, “Oh, I am harming myself with this bullshit. I need to distract myself with something neutral or something positive.” 

And a lot of times when you’re caught up in some bullshit gossip, when you’re caught up in obsessing on something that happened in the past or looking at somebody else’s social media and comparing yourself for being like, “Why do they have this, and I don’t have that?” whenever you’re caught up in that kind of shit, you’re really just causing harm to yourself and no one else. So it is hard to then switch gears from that to being like, “I just let it all go, and everything’s fine.” Maybe you have the capacity to do that. 

What’s easier to do is to try to find something neutral. Find a neutral mantra. Find a neutral thing to scroll through. Maybe you’re scrolling through other people’s feeds and being like, “Okay. I’m comparing myself to them.” Maybe you just need to scroll through some like cute animal situation or like beaches—not the movie—beaches, like actual beaches, just pictures of beaches. The key here is to go from something negative and destructive to something neutral so that you can then move into something positive, constructive, and to transform your compulsions from a deep place. 

But here’s the thing—this is the thing that Pluto always teaches us, and I’ve dropped episodes about Pluto and plan on dropping more, don’t you worry. But what Pluto always teaches us is that when we struggle actively against the compulsions that it governs, it wins. Pluto is like the undertow of the ocean; when you fight it, it pulls you under. You must let go. 

In the context of a Mercury conjunction to Pluto, letting go looks like being able to identify or recognize when your train of thought, when your tone of voice, or what you’re saying is essentially toxic—when it’s causing more harm than healing and being able to transform that self-awareness into a pause, to transform that self-awareness into a cessation of the harmful attitude, action, tone, whatever. And then from that place of stillness, that place of pause, then to be able to try to turn it into something positive, to learn from it. 

So Mercury conjunction to Pluto is intense. The fact that it overlaps with the Georgia state runoff, the fact that it overlaps with a lot of things happening across the globe means that we may see people with power, especially those who feel like they’re losing power, act a damn fool—just make a mess of things, just be aggressive and defensive and angry and say shit they do not mean. 

You may say shit you do not mean. And let me tell you what, whatever you say around this date is going to have influence in your life, it just is. It’s going to influence others, and it’s going to influence your life, so choose your words with intention. And if you don’t have something constructive to say, you don’t need to say anything at all, you know. I mean, hey, maybe you do need to say something that is destructive, maybe what’s called for is destruction, but make sure you believe that before you do that. 

This is a time where the reactions that we have will feel justified and entitled because of Pluto’s involvement, right. This is still Capricorn shit. But when the entitlement and the defensiveness and the compulsiveness clears, are you still going to be happy with what you did? That’s on you. 

So on the 8th, we have a couple more transits to speak of. The first is a Sun sextile Neptune. Lovely transit, very subtle, very subtle. It just makes us empathetic and feel a little bit more open to kind of the interconnectedness of things. This is a lovely transit. However, because it is sandwiched between some other heavier transits, it’s kind of a very light and consistent breeze on a hot, hot day. Or if you’re in a wintery climate, it’s kind of like walking by a heating vent on a freezing cold day but not being able to stop for very long. It’s not enough to massively change things, IMO. 

On the same day, on the 8th, we have an exact Mercury square to Mars. So here we have Mercury forming a conjunction to Pluto and then it overlapping with Mercury square to Mars. And this is difficult. This is what we get for all this fucking Capricorn shit still. So Mercury square to Mars is irritating, so irritating. Mercury square to Mars makes us feel defensive, and it can find us impatient and restless with an urgency to what we want to say or how we want to be heard. 

Again, the entitlement and defensiveness of this transit is to be seriously considered—seriously considered. What you say, if you can’t take pains to be empathetic and compassionate, then you’re likely to come off a little harsh, or you may find that you’re dealing with people who are just being harsh. Everybody’s going to feel these transits and, of course, there’s another one I’m going to give you in a minute, but everyone’s going to feel these transits—the urgency, the irritability, the restlessness, the defensiveness. It’s just frustrating, honestly. It’s a frustrating set of transits. And it’s all happening to Mercury. 

So it’s impacting your co-workers, your neighbors, your friends, anyone you have a platonic, communications based relationship with. So will we see this shit show up on social media? Yes, yes, we will. Yes, yes, we will because it’s typey, typey, typey—you know what I mean? Typing is Mercury, if that wasn’t clear. 

Okay. So Mercury square to Mars fights. I mean, it’s just like—it’s just fights. It’s not punch, punch, bang, bang—Mars governs those things, but it’s more like—it’s using your words as weapons. And so, if you’ve been thinking, ha, 2021, maybe I’m going to take a little pause off of social media, great time to do it is this week. Yeah, it wouldn’t be a bad time because people are just going to be on fire a little bit here. A lot of defensiveness. 

Now, the potential, the positive potential is if there’s something you need to say, you are likely to have the courage to say it. But don’t confuse courage and defensiveness and entitlement; they’re not the same thing. And the energy with which we do a thing is very fucking important. It really is consequential. So I want to encourage you to be conscientious and self-aware around this shit. Especially because on the 9th, we have an exact Mercury conjunction to Saturn—damn. 

Okay. So Mercury conjunction to Saturn is a transit that governs depressive thinking. So here we go. There’s a driving, entitled, urgent sense of your opinions and your attitudes and your narrative, and it’s kind of like influencing our whole week. And then Mercury sits on top of Saturn, and it just makes you feel like fuck, well, there’s just never going to be enough. There’s like a scarcity-based thinking that comes with Saturn—that’s the negative. 

The positive is this transit can coincide with you really learning something and being mature enough to be humble about what you’ve learned, to integrate it into your lived experience bucket—that lived experienced bucked versus your theoretical ideas bucket. Those are two different buckets that I just called buckets—whatever. That is a really big deal in life because we can understand things, we can figure things out, but lived experience is required for maturity because we can’t really have maturity without emotions and the emotions, they take trial and error, not just theory. 

And so, the good thing about this Mercury conjunction to Saturn is there is the potential to cultivate maturity and to kind of transform that self-awareness into something we integrate into the lived experience. That’s great. We want that. The problem is it doesn’t feel good. The problem is is that so many of us are so sick of feeling shitty that we defensively, urgently, and with great entitlement bounce out of our shitty feelings and thoughts and distract. It’s hard. It’s hard to be a person. It’s hard to remember to do simple things for self-care. 

Center them this week. Center your willingness to breathe, so Mercury does govern breathing. Center your willingness to count down. You read an annoying email, you see something that really pisses you off, count down. Pick a number—10, 30, whatever you like, just pick a damn number, and before you allow your reaction to be mobilized into a response, just count down and see how you feel afterwards. You do not need to impulsively react to people and things—not even to yourself. Try to create a little bit more space. And the good thing about the Saturn in this particular week is that it is going to support us in doing that. 

Also, on the 9th, we have a Venus trine to Mars. And not dissimilar to the Sun sextile to Neptune, in the context of these heavy ass Mercury transits, you might not feel too much, you know what I mean. The Venus trine to Mars, it does suggest, similar to the Sun sextile to Neptune, that the energy is there to support us in being a little bit more relationally considerate. So more considerate about how we impact others, how our energy, our words are influencing others or impacting others. It can also coincide with just feeling a greater sense of balance than these other transits would suggest around kind of making things happen and going with the flow, right. Mars is making things happen, and Venus is more going with the flow. 

Here’s the overall upshot of this week. Mercury conjunction to Pluto on the 4th, Mercury square to Mars on the 8th, and Mercury conjunction to Saturn in Aquarius on the 9th. These transits are going to agitate the mind. Agitation on its own is not bad, okay. Agitation can be like irritability and restlessness and upset. But agitation is also what is needed in order for us to be effectively motivated to create change, especially change that takes bravery and courage. 

So be interested in your relationship to irritability, to anger. Be interested in how you compare yourself to others, so potentially to your relationship, to jealousy, envy, comparison. If you take this opportunity to cultivate greater self-awareness, it will serve you for the fucking long haul. And if that means you don’t call someone out when they’re doing some bullshit, is that a problem? That’s something for you to answer based on your nature and your situation. 

I want to encourage you to center your own healing at this time instead of proving a point and instead of trying to like fix or force others. It’s about motive. It’s not just about the action. This week is going to bring up some definite mental stuff. So if you’re somebody who struggles with your mental wellness or your mental health, I just want to give you this little like heads up to create supports. This isn’t the week to cancel your therapy. Make sure that you are giving yourself as much space as you can to center self-acre. This doesn’t have to cost money. It doesn’t have to be in therapy. It doesn’t have to be like at a gym or whatever. This is simply about creating space inside your mind and even in your reactions, if you can. 

Final word I’ll say about this, because COVID-19 is an airborne disease, and because there is a new strain just in time for the New Year, don’t be a covidiot—yeah, I didn’t make up that word, but I am I love with it because of the covidiocy that I see all over this land and beyond. Don’t be a covidiot; mask it up, you nerds. Mask it up. Be very careful. It’s not just about you. It doesn’t just matter if you’ve already gotten it or whatever. You can spread it. Don’t be selfish; be considerate. Think community minded if you can, and if you can’t, do it anyways. Okay. Okay. Okay. 

That’s all for this week’s horoscope, but that’s not all for us. You know. There’s so much more astrology for us to talk about. And as always, I want to encourage you, if you have questions for me to answer either about le woo, astrology, or your life, pop me a question over at ghostofapodcast.com. If you get value out of this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button wherever it is you listen to podcasts. All right. That’s it. That’s all. Happy New Year. Bye.