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 loves, welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week I want to go a little bit deeper into astrology kind of in general, mental health, and, importantly, Saturn square to Uranus. So let’s get into it.

The first thing I want to name is that in life, just like in astrology, it’s really important to be able to see the big picture of what’s happening, right. It’s really important. The truth is that the journey is the damn point. Now listen, capitalism and really traditional structures and infrastructures will tell you otherwise. But I really, earnestly believe that the journey is the whole story. The journey is the point. And it’s so easy to be focused on the details of what’s happening in your life right now, the kind of like point of achievement—I made this money, I broke up with this person, you know, whatever it is—but it is actually the totality of it all that makes up a life. 

Your inner world, your innermost psychology, your emotions, your feelings, what you do when no one’s looking, how you talk to yourself, your motives, the things that actually drive you to do and say the things you do and say over the course of time, these things are not incidental to your life. They are not, “Oh well, I guess this is kind of a thing that has been happening for the last x amount of years that I’ve been alive.” These things are your life. They are defining and central to your lived experience here on earth, in this body, this time around. If you vibe with reincarnation in any way.

So I want to just start with that. How you feel, what you think, how you think it, the motivations that actually drive you. These things are essential and foundational to your lived experience. And it’s important for me to name that because on February 17th we have the first exact hit of the square between Saturn and Uranus. So Saturn is at seven degrees of Aquarius, and Uranus is at seven degrees of Taurus. This is a transit I have talked a bunch about already in 2020, and it’s only mid-February. And I’m going to keep on talking about it because it’s the big astro news of 2021. 

There is a lot of ways that we can think about this transit. There’s a lot of ways we can look at this transit. But what my interpretation of it has been, from when I started thinking about it last year until now, is that the primary thing that we need to be concerned about, or one of the most primary things to be concerned about in the context of this transit is the psychological toll that it takes. 

This is why I wanted to start off today talking to you about the theme of understanding that astrology is simply a tool, right. It’s simply a system. My view, it’s not a belief system. I personally do not believe in astrology. It’s simply a tool for understanding patterns and cycles. And whether you study astrology, or you study history, or you’re into politics, whatever it is, it’s important to recognize that whatever system you’re using to understand patterns, the reason why it’s effective is because we pay respect to the details, but we don’t actually get too fixated on any one detail because we understand that each event, each act, each thing, whatever it is, is part of a larger whole, and there’s this larger concert happening. 

So when you’re coding something from scratch, no one thing that you’re doing exists in total isolation of everything else; it has to work in concert. I don’t know if that’s a very universal metaphor, but, okay, I used it. I’m in the Bay Area, what can you do?

So listen, many of you are messaging me that you are struggling with terrible depression, that you are feeling lost or frustrated or just like you don’t know what to do. A lot of you are messaging me asking me questions about the financial troubles you’re having, the uncertainty you have about your career or your finances or your sense of where am I going to be, how’s it going to work? And then, of course, a lot of you are messaging me about various themes related to loneliness and whether or not you feel connected or what comes next in your interpersonal life. And I want to acknowledge and hold space for how it is completely personal to you. It is absolutely personal to you in a way that is unique to your own lived experience. It’s unique to your birth chart, and it’s very private. It’s also public. It’s also systemic and pandemic. 

These things, feeling depressed and overwhelmed by all the things happening in the world, including, but in no way limited to this pandemic that has taken so many lives, and also created all kinds of other problems and highlighted pre-existing problems. The economic uncertainty that we’re living under and the economic struggles that we’re living under, and the social isolation that COVID-19 has provoked, it’s not exclusive to you, and you are not experiencing these things in a bubble. 

And, for me, looking at that, talking about that, is very much motivated by understanding that it is not a personal failing of yours to be feeling fucked up these days. I want to hold space for, I don’t know, maybe you fucked up, maybe you’ve totally failed. I don’t mean to be an idealist, but there is a larger context to what you’re going through. 

It is really generous and smart to understand your personal lived experience—even if it feels really isolated—in the context of the collective. And when we talk about the collective, are we talking about Saturn and Aquarius and Uranus? You better fucking bet you bottom dollar we are. We are talking about that. Saturn and Uranus, both in their own unique ways, as I talked about in the most recent episode of the podcast, govern the collective and society. Jupiter gets in the mix too. Aquarius also ditto, ditto, ditto. 

So there’s an important struggle that I think is happening psychologically within masses of people where we are struggling around our place in community and in society. We may be feeling really isolated and alienated. We may be feeling a sense of pressure socially. And what this Saturn square to Uranus is doing is a lot of things. It is a transit that represents a breakdown of infrastructure and, yes, to all my loves in Texas, that includes electric grids. We are going to continue to see throughout 2021—I would imagine—breakdowns of infrastructure. And those breakdowns are a reflection of, maybe, tons of people living on a grid that was never built for so many people using it. 

We have not seen over the course of time our governments investing in the most basic needs of society, right? Like our infrastructure within our towns and cities and states and provinces and countries, right? And so now there is going to be this pressure that is placed, and as things break down, the veil is lifted, and we can see the problems that exist within infrastructure, which is the only way it gets fixed, unfortunately. But Saturn square Uranus really does highlight these breakdowns.

But the infrastructure I’m referring to, it’s not exclusive to city grids or city streets or whatever. It’s structures Saturn breaking down. It’s our relationship to linear time. I don’t know about you, but this fucking pandemic has me feeling like it’s Monday every day. I don’t know, is it two o’clock in the afternoon? Is it 10 a.m.? I don’t know. It’s really hard when life becomes so out of the ordinary—parenthesis Uranus—to track and maintain mundane consistencies—parenthesis Saturn. 

And so, the tension between these things is psychologically uprooting and upsetting. And what this does is it creates great psychological pressure. So your relationship to time, your relationship to normal, your relationship to real is being tested. So is mine. So is everyone’s. And because we are all going through this, everywhere you look there are different reflections of change and instability and questioning everything. And that is psychologically hard to bear. 

And it would be hard to bear—it was hard to bear every other time that Saturn and Uranus have formed a square. But here’s a big difference, la intranet, constant noise, constant feedback, constantly being fed strangers’ and loved ones’ thoughts and feelings and what they are doing and what they are not. It’s a lot of fucking noise. And if you have a tendency do to what most humans do, which is compare yourself to others or get mad at others or feel like others are better than you or anything, anything, then it’s a relentless, noisy, messy time.

What we must understand is that we are being challenged to really interact with our relationship to reality—Saturn right. And that kind of challenge for interacting with reality is Uranus. It’s through upsets. It’s through sudden unexpected any kind of curve ball. It can be an action. It can be an insight. It can be a feeling.

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It is hard when you have organized your personality, your coping mechanisms, your time, your behaviors, when you’ve organized these things—no matter how consciously or unconsciously you’ve done it—to cope in a certain way, and then it stops working. And it stops working either because it maybe never worked, it stops working because your external circumstances changed. It’s really hard to pivot. But, my loves, pivot we must do. We must pivot as individuals. 

We must be willing to be wrong, to realize that we didn’t have all the information and now we do, and, okay, changed my mind, keep on moving. Changed my approach, keep on moving. And when I say keep on moving, I want to acknowledge that my hippy ass means keep on progressing. And part of progressing is sitting down. Part of progressing is knowing when it’s time for inaction, for rest, for repose. So when I refer to, quote, keep on moving, I just want to be really clear, I don’t mean that in the most conventional sense. I mean it in allow yourself to not get attached to any individual one thing, no matter how wonderful it is or how difficult it is. Instead, allow for there to be a continued flow of lived experience, right. Which is really difficult in a time like this where there is so much fixed energy. 

The concern that I’ve had about 2021—now, let’s get into big picture astrology for a minute here—the concern I’ve had about 2021, unfortunately, has so far, a month and a half into the year, come to bear. Which is that it is psychologically very fucking trying this transit of Saturn square to Uranus because of how destabilizing it is.

So, let’s pull back a moment, shall we? As an astrologer in 2019, something that really kept on coming up and coming up and coming up for me was this need to prepare people for things to meaningfully change in 2020 and to support people in having emotional intelligence. And the reason why emotional intelligence is the most important thing, I believe, across the board—and just FYI for all you Sun sign stereotypers, I am Sun, Moon, and rising all in Capricorn, and I am obsessed with emotional intelligence, so suck on that, stereotypes. But the reason why emotional intelligence is so important is because you can study all the things, you can make all the best laid plans, but at the end of the day, life just happens. Shit happens. And when we have emotional intelligence, we can be flexible and adaptable. We can pivot. We can honor what is most true and aligned for us in the moment. 

And emotional intelligence is what we need in the face of inequity and injustice on a systemic level. It’s what we need in order to be spiritually right with ourselves because—in my view—if there is your intellect and then there is your spirit, the bridge between the two is the heart. And in order to be whole at the end of your days, whenever that comes, you want to be able to be in alignment, know that you’ve lived in honor of your spirit, which requires not just having theories and ideas and fancy words, but to have embodied them emotionally so that you can honor your spirit and your mind. 

Okay, that’s a slight digression. Let’s pull back. 2019, obsessed—this guy over here—obsessed with cultivating emotional intelligence and kind of bracing for impact. And then 2020 came, and sure enough, everything went into survival mode, right. We saw the beginnings of a social uprising in response to anti-Black racism and white supremacy. And so many people became activated. The rise of authoritarianism globally and certainly, domestically here in the US was headline news every damn day. Every damn day. A lot of us were dealing with life and death issues in the context of COVID. Maybe all of us on some level were really dealing with it to some extent or another. 

The astrology of 2020 was very Saturn/Pluto, very Capricorn, Capricorn, Capricorn, so it was very much like you cannot escape from reality. Reality is pressing down on you. You must cope. Your very survival depends upon it. It’s very Saturn/Pluto. Very heavy shit. 

As a lot of astrologers looked to 2021 and saw and that it is no longer this heavy, driving survival stuff. They were like, “Woo we are going to have a break.” But, unfortunately, for me, what I have come to find is that human psychology doesn’t work like that. We’re not math. We are tender, tender parts. We are so sensitive. And so, what has happened is that, yes, for many people, not all—no, not all—but for many people there is less of a driving, survival-based pressure, but there’s not more stability. In fact, there’s arguably less stability and, in some ways I would say, less stability systemically across governments and countries and less stability in the economy, less stability in our psyches. 

And so, how do humans respond to years on end of stress and fear and then some of that stress and fear eases or recedes just a little bit, just a little bit? I mean, here in the US we had a president that seemed to really fucking love the Proud Boys, which are basically just rebranded Nazis. So we had a president who was outwardly in support of them, and now we don’t. That’s great. Whether or not that translates immediately to your life as a positive thing, whether or not that immediately has changed any systems that are corrupt is another conversation. But it is objectively a better thing that he is no longer in office. 

That said, the psychological pressure, the psychological pressure of having endured so much stress and still being in so much instability and no answer being in sight… Now, we have a vaccine for the pandemic. Will people take the vaccine? Will the vaccine work? Will there be side effects? Is the pandemic morphing? I mean, these questions are enough to make anyone feel so overwhelmed, so distressed. 

And so, this brings me back to the topic of today, which is this Saturn square to Uranus. Whatever it is that is happening in your birth chart, whatever it is that is happening in your life, it would be very tempting to focus on the details—very tempting. I mean, who doesn’t want to focus on the details of your own fucking life? And I’m not saying ignore the details, that would not make a whole lot of sense, but I want to encourage you to pull back today, this month, and maybe, ritualistically, throughout the year and look at the patterns that are playing out in your life, the themes. 

Because the patterns that are playing out in your life are not exclusive to 2021; they are not even exclusive to you. Can you look at the patterns that are playing out in your life, instead of focusing on what other people are saying or doing or not saying or not doing? Can you focus instead of on what it is that your situation is creating, but instead what your patterns are, what your emotional patterns are, what your psychological patterns are, and what are the patterns of behavior and how are you choosing to engage. Because if you work on that shit, if you bring consciousness and awareness to that shit, what happens is you have more control. Now, not magic control, not instant control, not even satisfying control, but more control. 

It’s about understanding that this is your life, and astrology is not going to fix it for you—nothing’s going to fix it for you. There is no God that’s going to fix anything for you. There is no system, there is no belief that’s going to fix it for you. You fix it for you. And your relationship to astrology or to God or to any other belief system will hopefully empower you and give you tools and support, and those things will fill you up so that you can be the best person you know how to be in your situation. 

But it is really important to take personal accountability for what you do and don’t do—for you to own your own patterns. This is not about blame. It’s not at all about blame. It’s about simply recognizing that this is your life, this is your body, these are your lived experiences, these are your feelings, these are your thoughts, and what are the choices you’re making in response to those things? 

Because when you start to take stock of that, your life gets better—not instantly, not even necessarily in the short term, but over the course of time your life gets better. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s about using this tool of astrology, these tools as spiritual people or people who are interested in psychology or politics or whatever it is, understanding systems to understand ourself, to validate our experience, but not to then say because Saturn is square to Uranus, fuck it, life’s stupid, and I’m just going to like smoke weed until I pass out every single damn day. You can do that. That’s your choice. That’s a choice. But look at what that choice means. Own what that choice means. 

Own all the parts of your own patterns around, let’s say, disassociating or checking out. And, to be clear, disassociating and checking out are not inherently, necessarily, a problem. It’s about the pattern. Are you doing it for months or years at a time? Maybe then we have a problem. Are you doing it because it actually is a harm reduction choice? Okay, cool, that’s interesting. Are you doing it as a form of self-harm and self-sabotage? That’s important information. 

Again, I don’t want to encourage you to judge yourself. I don’t want to encourage you to ignore the details of your life. I want to encourage you to work with the energy that is at play to the best of your ability because we’re at the start of this transit, and this transit’s trying. And the more we are willing and able to see our own patterns and to stay present with the psychological distress that most of us are feeling, the more we’re able to do that, the more gracefully we can—and this is a quote—"ease on down the road.” You know what I mean? 

So, my loves, this little Hot Take on the Saturn/Uranus, slash, 2021, slash, astrology why for, what is she has not been conclusive. It has not given you a specific answer, but I hope it has empowered you with more information and greater context so that you can engage with your life more consciously and effectively. Because that is what it’s all about. You capiche? I feel like you capiche. 

Now, if you haven’t already, join me over on Patreon. I invite you to do so because we have fun, we connect—what can I say? Also, in case you don’t know, and I bet you do, but I do write a weekly horoscope in addition to the podcast, so you can read that on my website at lovelanyadoo.com—always linked in show notes. While you’re there, you can sign up for my mailing list so that you can be amongst the first to know about my forth coming astrology app, which is a transit tracker called Astrology For Days. Yeah, it’s a really good name. 

Okay, I’m going to let you get to your day. But just know that you are part of something much bigger than you—within that wholeness, the interconnection of all of us, you have a place. Treat yourself kindly, be generous with yourself and with others. Talk to you in a few days.