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.

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Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week’s question goes like this, “Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve felt a sense of impending doom, like something would happen to my immediate family. I know this is anxiety, however, upon looking at my transits, I see I’m going through a Pluto square to Sun transit. I read that during this transit people can lose immediate family members or go through something drastically life altering. I have lost so much during the pandemic, and I cannot fathom losing another family member. 

I have one parent with health issues who refuses to get help despite constant begging from me and my sister. I feel powerless. The anxiety of this transit’s potential is deeply scaring me. How do I cope with this, and can you elaborate on the Pluto square Sun transit? Thank you.” 

And she was born on April 18th, 1996 at 2:12 p.m. in Santa Monica, California. So there is so much for me to say in response to this question. But first, just for your own edification, my dear, I want to say you are absolutely not going through a Pluto square to the Sun, unless you’ve given me the wrong birth information. 

Astrology is math. Now, granted, some people use a different orb than I do, and some people, theoretically, may say to you that a transit begins at a different time than I might say to you. But because, my dear, your Sun in your birth chart is at 29 degrees of Aries, well, Pluto just crossed into 26 degrees of Capricorn. So it’s not going to be a transit to your Sun until it hits the 28th degree, which won't happen for more than a year. And even then, it’s just going to be like a little taste test beginning before it properly begins. 

So straight out the gate, you’re not going through this, and this is where we come back to a topic that comes up a lot on the podcast, which is anxiety and, in particular, pandemic anxiety and anxiety around loss. So we’ll unpack that in a moment. 

But first let me take this opportunity to say that when you are learning astrology, it’s very tempting to want to jump straight into the predictive stuff—transit astrology, that’s the predictive stuff. The trouble is if you don’t understand the basics, you are very likely to freak yourself out with misinformation or false information. 

Astrology is really unique in that there’s no central governing source, so it’s very hard to know who to trust. There’s not like a only one way of doing it, and that is complicated; it leaves room for a lot of problems. It’s also part of why I like it because it gives me a lot of freedom and a lot of autonomy. Je suis into freedom and autonomy as an astrologer. 

That said, some astrologer may have told you that you’re going through this transit, or you may have just misinterpreted the information—either way, it’s freaking you out. It’s fucking up your days and nights, and all for what? For nothing, I say unto you. But also, there is a reason why you are freaking yourself out. There is an astrological reason why you are freaking yourself out that is unique and personal to you, and I will unpack it in a moment. 

First, let me say also this: I get countless questions from you, my loves, about, “I am going through my Saturn Return and there’s a pandemic. What does it mean that the Pluto Return is happening and it’s hitting my natal… ?” fill in the blank. You know, I get all these questions—this astrological thing is happening, and this personal thing is happening, or this social thing is happening, or this collective thing is happening, and that makes my brain explode. 

So this is where spiritual people have something meaningful to be inspired by or to learn from religious people. In my experience and in my view, religious people generally have a really kind of like—it’s integrated into the culture of religiosity to understand that there is no separation between God and driving from home to pick up dinner. Everything that you do is in relationship to God. 

Now, with spiritual people I think a lot of times what we do is we say, “Well, you know, yes, the Full Moon is happening, but also this thing happened.” So we see these things as separate. It’s not separate at all. So if you are going through, let’s say, your Saturn Return during a pandemic, if you are 25 years old, or 35 years old, or 55 years old during a pandemic, it’s not that you lost a year of your life, even if it feels that way. It’s not that you didn’t get the opportunity to live out your transit in the way you were meant to. This is the year of your life. This is your transit. 

If you’re going through, let’s say, a Saturn Return, or a Pluto square to the Sun, or whatever it is during COVID-19, if you’re going through it during, I don’t know, a drought, if you’re going through it during an economic upturn or downturn, that’s your transit. That’s your transit. It’s not happening in addition to. 

Astrology is simply a unique lens to look at your individual experience through and to understand it in context of the collective, to understand that you are a part of the collective—you are a part of the world, and this is your lived experience within the world. Astrology, maybe it creates your experience, maybe it simply describes your experience. Chicken, egg—I don’t know the value of obsessing on which came first, chicken or egg. 

This is like a struggle that I have been seeing so many of you go through for a really long time now. From my astrological perspective, we’re going to be dealing with the pandemic for the rest of the year, certainly. It’s not going to magically go away because of the vaccine. It’s not going to go away because we’re sick of the pandemic. I mean, that’s unfortunately unrealistic. Now, not saying things won't improve. 

And so, all of the transits you’ve gone through in 2020, all of the transits you’re going through in 2021 and potentially into next year will be touched by the pandemic—they will be happening in the backdrop of the pandemic, and it is unrealistic to experience zero anxiety about that. And I think that anxiety is actually not an unhealthy response. It’s not a productive response, but it’s also not—it’s not bananas to be anxious about something that you don’t understand and you can't predict and that is threatening. That seems like a pretty appropriate and healthy moment to experience anxiety, right? 

And so, while you are not, my dear, going through a Pluto square to the Sun, I will give a couple of words about that particular transit, okay, because it is coming for you in a couple of years. Whenever transiting Pluto forms a 90-degree angle, aka a square, to a planet in your birth chart, in particular, a personal planet—so that’s the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, or Mars—what Pluto is doing is it is creating conditions around that part of your personality that test you. And they test you to accept or reject parts of yourself and to let go of what isn’t serving you, to let go of what isn’t authentic to you. And so, while, yes, sometimes death is a part of it, it’s usually not physical death that people are dealing with, but it is usually grief. 

When a person is going through a hard Pluto transit, and, honestly, it’s not just the squares—it’s the squares, the oppositions, and the conjunctions—we are often dealing with grief. But we experience grief in breakups and in friendships getting fucked up and in the loss of a job and the loss of freedom of movement, from something like oh, I don’t know, a pandemic. We experience grief around social and political conditions—many of us. Unfortunately, not all of us. But we can experience grief over things that happen to us when we were little. And we experience that grief because we’re finally able to confront and engage with that trauma. 

There are a multitude of reasons why humans experience grief. Pluto squares, Pluto conjunctions and oppositions will often provoke conditions and situations that incline you to experience grief. It doesn’t mean death though. If you convince yourself that it’s going to mean death, if you convince yourself that you alone can be the savior of your parent who could die from their health issues, then you are experiencing Pluto—you are experiencing grief. Now, you’re also experiencing compulsiveness. And compulsiveness and obsession is Pluto, and Pluto, in particular, likes to focus on intense feelings. 

So the positive potential is that Pluto can inspire reform, transformation, healing. But the negative is that it can get you obsessing on the most powerful feelings you have and not the most wise or productive ones. It can find you creating self-harm or harming others and doing so in a way that is so compulsive and repetitive that you lose track of what’s important and why you’re doing it. 

So if truly—and I don’t think this is the case—but if truly you had a parent who is a grown ass adult who has full control of their faculties and they are capable of making decisions for themselves, and they are doing stupid shit to not prioritize their wellness, you as their child have a right to say, “Hey, mom, dad, weirdo, parent, guardian, whatever, I need this from you—I want this from you.” And they have the right to say no. 

It’s important to recognize that we all have the right to self-determine. And when someone is doing something that seems so obviously wrong and dangerous to you, and you keep on telling them what they should be doing, and they’re not doing it, now at a certain point it becomes important for you to be able to say unto them, “I need to understand where you’re coming from. Can you talk to me about where you’re coming from?” Take a different approach. Be interested. Don’t assume that your way is the only way. You can shove people’s faces in your version of the truth, but it doesn’t usually actually help. 

Okay, so why? What is the astrological reason why you have decided that you are going through a transit that you are not going through and are freaking yourself out about it? Well, there’s a reason. That reason is Pluto is conjunct your Neptune. You have Neptune at 27 degrees of Capricorn and 43 minutes, and that means that just at the end of February, when Pluto entered the 26th degree of Capricorn, it just started to hit on top of your Neptune. And so, I would imagine for basically all of 2021, you’ve been experiencing greater visceral, aka body-based anxiety. 

Now, why body based? Because in your birth chart you have Neptune in the sixth house—that’s the placement of your body. And Pluto entered into your sixth house a couple of years ago, but this is the first time it’s making contact with a planet. And as it does so what is happening is it is deepening, intensifying, and creating more of a compulsive condition to your natural Neptunian vibes. 

Pluto creates such compulsive, intense feelings of fear and, honestly, defensiveness and reactiveness. And when you pair that with Neptune’s anxiety, what happens is you’re likely to miss out on details, and you’re likely to jump to conclusions that feel incredibly justified. 

And so, what’s the remediation? What’s the answer? The answer is to start getting present with your physical and visceral experience of anxiety and intensity. In doing that, what you start to do is to cultivate the ability to stay with yourself instead of abandoning yourself when things get intense. 

Now, when we talk about abandonment in astrology, we’re looking at Pluto first and foremost, but Neptune is close second. And Neptune is less about proper abandonment but more about disassociation. So when Pluto meets Neptune, it triggers disassociating compulsively, and that leads to self-destructive behaviors and kind of shoots and ladders of ideas and actions that actually don’t bring about healing, even though that’s the storyline you’re working with. 

Now, all that said, I want to just acknowledge that in December of 2019, a two-year long period ended. So from 2017 through, basically, 2020, you were going through a Pluto square to Mars. So you named in your question that you had a lot of loss, and I imagine that in that period it was pretty fucking rough, and then that transit ended and guess what happened? Oh, I don’t know, a global fucking pandemic. 

And so, it’s easy to be like, “Oh, I had bad luck. I had this hard transit, and then everyone was on lockdown, and now I have another intense transit happening.” But, from my perspective as an astrologer, what I’m doing is I’m not just looking at the pieces of what you’re going through or of your nature; I’m looking at the big picture—the tapestry of it. And from a tapestry vibe perspective, what 2020 was meant to do was give you a time out, give you a damn break so that you could actually be in your feelings and reflect. Whether or not you took that gift is only you and your people know, but that’s kind of the big picture of what it was about. 

So this feeling of powerlessness, this feeling of anxiety that you’re naming in your question, I want to acknowledge is very real for you, and also it is somewhat universal at this time. This doesn’t minimize what you’re experiencing. It does contextualize what you’re experiencing because we’re dealing with these two outer planets—Pluto sitting on top of Neptune—we’re dealing with collective energies, and whenever we’re dealing with collective energies, we need to acknowledge what’s happening in the morphic field. And so, what’s happening now in the collective is a lot of things. 

A lot of people are really scared. There is absolutely a fourth wave happening of COVID in many places. At the exact same time, masses of people who were concerned about COVID are like, “Well, I’m vaccinated. Moving along. Everything’s fine. It’s going to be hot girl summer.” So there’s this level of disassociation or what I would characterize as disassociation from the material conditions and the vast unknowns that we’re still in. And because of this what you’re experiencing is reflected in the collective, and the collective is reflecting in you, so it’s amplifying those feelings and making them harder to sort through. 

This is not an impossible scenario, but it is a scenario that requires more empathy from you towards yourself and others, even your parent who’s driving you bonkers. It’s also an opportunity for you to practice being alone with yourself, sitting with your feelings, not abandoning your feelings. 

And, finally, I’m going to give you some really practical advice, which is after sitting with your feelings, not before, after sitting with your feelings, if you’re feeling really riled up, make two lists. Make a list of everything you feel anxious about, like literally every fucking thing you feel anxious about—just write it all down; get it out of your noggin. And then from there, turn it into two lists—a list of things that are out of your control and a list of things that you can do something about. 

And with the second list, the list you can do something about, break it into two sections. Each point gets two sections: what can I do short term? What can I do long term? And then strive to do something, something. Because not always, but certainly in this situation action can be the antidote to anxiety. 

And there’s not a lot of action you can take for a lot of the things that are giving you anxiety, but there are some. And one of the actions may actually be accepting that your parent is a grown ass adult and gets to make their choices, accepting that the way you’ve been trying to get your parent to change isn’t working, and you need to find a new way, or you need to let it go. These are actions. They may seem like passive actions, but they are actions—letting go, acceptance, being present, those are Neptunian actions, and they are just as valid as climbing a tree, or making money, or getting a promotion. They are just as important over the course of your life. 

When we go big picture, when we go tapestry view, without the capacity to be present with our fucked up, complicated fears and feelings life gets rough, really rough and confusing. So, my dear, I hope you are able to find some peace and know that you are not alone in this difficult period.

Compassion In Oakland was formed in response to the surge of anti-Asian attacks in California’s Bay Area. It started with a simple social media post offering to chaperone anyone within Oakland’s China Town neighborhood to help them feel safer. Since then, over 400 volunteers of all different backgrounds have come forward from across the Bay Area to stand against AAPI hate, thus was born the movement for the community to come together to support and protect our Asian elders. Compassion In Oakland is now looking for volunteers to serve in several different roles. Check out their website to donate, learn more about volunteering, or start a compassion project in your own area. Go to compassioninoakland.org. Link in show notes.

Astrology For Days is my forthcoming astrology app. There are no interpretations; I’m not here to tell you what to think. This is a resource for students and pros alike, regardless of what system you use. Astrology For Days helps you track the transits and keep comprehensive notes on what you learn or predict. Coming soon to an internet near you.

Darlings, darlings, darlings, this isn’t just any episode of Ghost of a Podcast—this is the 200th episode of Ghost, and I am so fucking excited about it. And because of that, I am offering one listener a Tarot reading with yours truly—that’s me. Okay, to enter to win is really simple; you do it in three steps. The first step is follow me on Twitter or Instagram—you can follow me on both, that’s cute, but you don’t have to. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram, and then the second step is respond to the giveaway post that is on that social media platform. So on Twitter it will be my pinned tweet, and on Instagram I am posting it on April 11th—the New Moon and the 200th episode, kind of exciting—and it will say, “give away” in big letters, so you can't miss it. 

All you got to do is respond to that tweet or that Instagram post saying, “me,” and then on the 17th of April, check your DMs to see if you won. That’s it. It’s pretty simple. I’ll contact you through DM. And if you’re not following me, you don’t win. I’ll find someone else. But if you are following me, and you did respond, then you’re going to get a reading. There’s only one caveat, before you get over excited. The reading will be recorded as a video, and it will be used as a teaching tool on Patreon, okay. Okay. Okay. 

Okay, this week we have a lot going on astrologically. It’s a fair amount. We’re looking at the week of April 11th through the 17th of 2021. We’re in Spring of 2021. It’s happening. It’s real. I guess it’s just a giddy up time. Okay, so let’s just dive right in. 

I mentioned last week that this week on Sunday the 11th, we have a New Moon in Aries and a Venus square to Pluto. So let’s get into the details. As you probably know, New Moons occur when the Sun and Moon are at the exact same degree of the same sign. And, very generally speaking, we have one New Moon per sign, per year. This particular one is exact at 7:31 p.m. on April 11th of 2021, and that’s Pacific Time. 

Now, this particular New Moon is an explosion of Aries energy. We’ve got Chiron, Mercury, Sun, Moon, and Venus all in the fiery sign of Aries. This means a lot of things, but let’s start very broadly with New Moons are always about a beginning or an opening, right. And, in particular, a New Moon in Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, you know, a sign that occurs during springtime in much of the world, this is a time for planting seeds, for innovating, for starting something new. It’s an energetic New Moon. And whenever we’re dealing with New Moons, we want to be considering the beginnings of something, right—the beginnings of an idea, of an action, of a vibe. 

And with this much Aries energy, there is great potential for impulsiveness, a feeling of rashness or brashness. Aries energy is pretty impulsive, obvi, and also really strong. It is a strong bucket of energy. And to have all of these planets come together, it’s really relational. Whenever we’re looking at zodiac signs, to get more information about any given sign, if you’re really going deep, you want to consider the opposite sign. So when it comes to something like Aries energy, that’s me; that’s mine. And when we think about its opposing energy, that’s Libra. That’s ours; that’s us. 

And so, while all of us are going through all this Aries energy and this beautiful New Moon in Aries, there’s all of this concern with what I need, what I want, what I’m experiencing, what is happening for me? Where am I going? How am I going to deal with this? There’s a lot of me, me, me. Which is not bad inherently, but it’s also—it can get pretty tricky and pretty sticky, pretty quickly. 

When we’re dealing with Aries energy, it can devolve into selfishness, or it can help to evolve our relationship to the self and to cultivate a healthy dynamic with our ego or our ego energy. But because in this chart we also have an exact square between Pluto and Venus and a much wider and not exact square between Pluto and the Sun and Moon, what we can expect is some intense feelings. 

Those intense feelings are around the responsibility—Capricorn—we feel to others and whether or not we resent it or the responsibility that we feel others should be holding towards us and whether or not we feel they’re failing at it. And so, this transit is likely to kick up a lot of old resentments or obsessions. It can kick up guilt—all kinds of heavy, difficult to process emotions. 

Pluto is kind of—is related to paranoia and feeling like, “I deserve this. I know I deserve this, so fuck you for not giving it to me,” or, “I am less than everyone else. I am the bottom of the barrel. I don’t deserve anything, and I feel awful about what I have or haven’t done.” It can govern either extreme set of feelings or thoughts. And for a lot of people, it’s both. 

So what you want to do this New Moon in Aries is really consider your relationship to your ego, your relationship to your selfhood, to really, deeply consider which thoughts and feelings you’re centering in your process. Are you justifying yourself? Are you defending yourself? If you are justifying and defending yourself, are you doing that because you absolutely have to or are you doing that because you haven’t full located your self and you don’t fully know what you feel or deserve? It’s too sticky and hard, and so instead you’re focusing on the external part of the dynamic instead of the internal part. 

These are questions to ask yourself. These are questions to ask yourself about yourself. I think these are really important things to consider during this Aries stellium New Moon. What are you doing? What are you not doing? What are the effects it’s having? Do your actions, do your energies, does your focus reflect what you value, right? And it’s what you value because of Venus’ involvement. 

Life is full of distractions. Life is full of competitions—petty competitions, and it’s important if you want to live a life that feels good to age into, that you bring yourself back now and again to what is actually important to you so that you don’t lose time and energy in bullshit you actually don’t truly care about—you only care about in the most surface and competitive of ways. This is a great way of engaging with all this Aries energy. 

Now, if you have been feeling really low, if you haven’t been having energy lately, all of this Aries energy may be the exact giddy up that you need to start to mobilize. And mobilizing might mean starting to write in your journal again. It might mean practicing affirmations. It doesn’t have to be something physical, although Aries energy is quite physical or visceral. 

I want to encourage you to look for openings, openings of new ways of engaging. And within all of this, it’s important for me to note that the Neptune square to Mars that I talked about in last week’s horoscope is still active, so we’re still under the influence of the Neptune square to Mars during this New Moon. And what this means is simply more of a continuation of the themes around identifying your ego, identifying your will, and making sure that you’re not centering yourself as worse than or better than—not putting others on a pedestal and not being idealistic around what you demand of yourself. 

This is a sticky and tricky New Moon, IMO. And from a healing perspective, if that’s the kind of things you’re into, that’s great. If you can create space and time in your life to really be present with whatever it is you’re going through and be interested in it, if you’re able to do that kind of work with yourself, this can be a time that is really pivotal. 

And I’ll just remind you that pivotal experiences from a spiritual standpoint are not always dramatic. They’re not necessarily where something materially changes. It’s when you access something new inside of yourself. It can be related to the most subtle of movements, but those pivotal changes that we make spiritually become foundational to things that in this moment we can’t fully imagine because we haven’t fully changed yet—we haven’t turned that corner yet. 

And this kind of brings me back to squares—square energy and conjunction energy. So let me just pull back to say when planets are conjunct, much like the Sun and Moon are always conjunct during a New Moon, we don’t have perspective on those planets. Those two planets are seeing things from the same position. 

So if you imagine that all these planets are climbing up a hill—yeah, I’m a Capricorn, so I’m going to give you this metaphor—all the planets are climbing up a hill. Well, the Sun and Moon, they’re holding hands. They’re playing a three-legged race—their legs are tied together so they have to walk together; their perspective is identical. They can see the exact amount of path ahead. They can look to the left, they can look to the right, and they see the same amount of landscape, that’s a conjunction. 

Now, a square transit—not a birth chart aspect but a transit—a square transit brings us to a point on our path where we’re going to turn. We’re going to turn on the road, and we can't see what’s on the other side of that turn. We can’t see it because it hasn’t happened yet. This is a time where we have a choice to make—how are we going to take that turn? And if we’re dealing with two planets forming a square to each other, they are coming from really different experiences. And what’s happening in that square transit is that they are challenging each other from their very different perspectives. 

And because we’re dealing with, within this New Moon chart, a Neptune/Mars square and a Venus/Pluto square, these are really important things to consider. There’s so much we don’t yet know about ourselves, about others, about the world. And how we orient ourselves in response to what that kicks up within us, that becomes more defining than the things that happen to us, the things that we don’t have control over. So I hope that is a helpful kind of jumpstart for your New Moon schtick, whatever it may be. 

On the 13th—the 13th of April, we have a Sun sextile to Mars. And this is an energizing transit. This is a lovely transit. It can kind of create this energy of motivation. It can help you to get out of a rut, to get a project going, or to move a project along. It can support your ego energies so that you can feel a little bit more entitled or a little bit more excited or confident. 

Now, I suppose, if you are too entitled and too excited and too confident, it can also, you know, push that along, but let’s expect the most and the best, how about that? So the Sun sextile to Mars is an opportunity to leverage, and we can leverage it in any part of our nature or our lives that is helpful. 

That said, because the Sun is in Aries and Mars is in Gemini, you in particular might want to look at those sectors of your birth chart, with whatever house system you use, to get a little bit more information about where that’s hitting your birth chart and where you’re going to have the easiest time leveraging this energy. The Sun sextile to Mars can be a sexy kind of energy, so if you can get in there and get some, have at it, my friends—have at it. 

On the 15th, we have another sextile transit. It’s a Sun sextile to Jupiter. This transit is lovely, honestly. Sun forming a sextile to Jupiter is expansive. It can really just feel like a smooth breeze on a hot day. It is an energizing transit. It’s not especially spectacular on its own, but this transit can help you to recover if you need to. It can inspire you, and it can help you to learn. It’s expansive and growth oriented. And, in the context of everything that’s happening right now, it may help you to integrate lessons you may have learned, even if you learnt them in a difficult way, in recent days or weeks. 

This transit is absolutely lovely for any kind of growth or learning that you want to get into. If you’ve been struggling with wanderlust, and you’ve just been like, “I can't deal with the pandemic anymore, and I need to travel; I need to go out,” that’s the only downside I can think of with this transit, as it may find you really just wanting to get out of the house and meet new people and have adventures or do new things. 

And so, I would invite you to consider the many ways that we can connect with each other, that you can have adventures and the many ways of putting yourself out there. If you can get yourself into nature, especially if you can get yourself into a situation where you’re expansively looking out at something, like getting literal perspective by looking out at literal expanse, that’s amazing. Jupiter would thank you very much for it. So if you can, get on that. And if you can’t, you know, there’s lots of other ways of being expansive. 

Now, on the 16th, we have a couple of transits that are important to name. The first one is a Mars trine to Jupiter. This should surprise you zero percent because the Sun just sextiled Mars and then Jupiter back to back, and so now Mars and Jupiter are forming their own transit to each other. 

So we have them both in air signs—Jupiter is in Aquarius, and Mars is in Gemini. And this is a wonderful transit, again. It is energizing. It is inspiring. It is fortifying. This is especially good for improving on and working on your health—your physical health, in particular. It’s also really good for your relationship to sex. And I don’t mean sex with other people. I mean how you experience your own sexuality, how you feel in your body as a sexual being, whatever that looks like, wherever you are on the spectrum of human sexuality. 

Mars trine to Jupiter is just really strengthening. It’s fortifying. And so, as with all the trines and sextiles, they’re not especially spectacular, unless you make use of them—unless you activate and energize. So giddy up on that. 

But another thing about this particular transit, it can coincide with the spread of anger or indignation or entitlement. On its own, Mars trine to Jupiter is unlikely to do that. It’s not what I would typically think of when I look at this transit, but in the context of the fact that there is an exact Sun square to Pluto that day, we can get into some drama. 

So as you already noticed, on the 11th, there’s a Venus square to Pluto. So you already have a solid sense of what that Plutonian energy in the square is likely to provoke. Now, the Sun square to Pluto is compulsive and intense and driving. Are you resentful? Are you enraged? Are you defensive? Pluto’s going to come and fuck that up. Pluto’s going to come and rattle your cage. 

Sun square to Pluto is a really intense transit, and it tends to be pretty unpleasant. Now, you may not experience this as unpleasant. You yourself may be pretty much fine, or idealistically, and this will absolutely happen for some you, you may experience this as a moment when you really, deeply transform something, where you come to a greater sense of understanding about yourself. So it's about yourself because of the Sun, and the Sun is you; it’s you at your center and your core. 

So this can facilitate healing. It can facilitate self-understanding. It can confront you with what you need to acknowledge and accept. So this can be a really healing and transformative moment—yay, slash, also, it very often feels like you’re being confronted with something that you don’t want to accept about yourself or about your life and is unpleasant. And when Pluto’s involved, we often try to resist—we fight it. You do not want to fight Pluto. When Plutonian energies are activated, they are generally stronger than us as individuals. 

And so, that’s when we want to be able to recognize oh, I am in the throes of compulsion. I am in the throes of self-destructive or unduly negative thoughts and feelings, and this isn’t the time for me to figure things out. This is the time for me to let go of my attachment to these things. Whenever we’re dealing with Pluto and in a very different way Neptune, and we’re talking about releasing attachment, what we’re really talking about—it’s not not having negative feelings, it’s not avoiding negative thoughts—it’s not investing in them. It’s letting them be as they are without making them stronger by feeding them, returning to them, and coming back to them again. And that’s what Pluto will inspire us to do, but it is not in our best interest. 

So when we have these two transits exact, at the same moment—Mars trine to Jupiter, Sun square to Pluto—the combination could go in one of a couple directions. Mars trine Jupiter may have us going down a very wrong road, very quicky and without a lot of interruption. Mars trine Jupiter may clear the way for some self-destructive or destructive to others behavior from the Sun/Pluto square. That’s the negative. 

The positive is this can be a time where we are brave enough to really show up for ourselves, to confront something that’s scary or difficult, to bring healing to something that is hard to heal—that’s not easy to heal. Whether you have worst-case scenario or best-case scenario, whether you’re dealing with someone else who is worse-case scenario or best-case scenario, I will say, a: don’t place a value judgment on that—we are where we are; life is what it is. Do your best in the face of what it is. And the other thing I’ll say is if you don’t like the game, don’t play. 

You do not need to engage if something is destructive. If there is a dynamic occurring that is clearly not about an open dialogue—it’s not a creative or constructive dynamic, you have the right to say, “Huh, I’m not going to engage in this. This is not worthy of my energy and my time,” or “I can’t do this in a healthy way, so I’m just not going to do it.” And if it is appropriate, I think it’s very healthy and wise to say to a person, you know, if you’re in a one-on-one dynamic, “Hey, I can’t interact with this right now, but I will get back to you.” 

In a lot of situations in life you don’t have to say shit; you can just have a boundary. Embodying a boundary is hard when all things are easy, but when we’re in Pluto transits, things are generally not easy, and so it’s a lot. It’s tricky, and it’s a lot. But because of all this Jupiter, Mars, and I’m about to tell you about Mercury energy, there is potential for us to make relationship headway. It’s a bumpy ride but real headway, nonetheless. 

And that brings us to the last day of this week’s horoscope, and that’s the 17th of April. Now, on the 17th of April, Mercury forms a sextile to Jupiter and to Mars, who are still conjunct, and it forms a square to Pluto—oh, shit. Yeah, that’s right, another square to Pluto. For those of you keeping track, yes, that is the third square to Pluto this week, making this week intense and compulsive and really ripe for healing. 

So Mercury sextile to Jupiter and to Mars—these transits are wonderful for figuring things out. Mercury is your mind. It’s your attitudes. It’s how you listen. It’s how you communicate. We’re talking emails, texts, DMs. It’s also conversations, letters, pigeons—if those pigeons are in fact carrying letters. 

Okay, so here we go. Mercury sextile to Jupiter is lovely for hearing what’s being said, learning things, speaking your truth pretty gracefully, making your way through your inbox that’s overflowing—all that kind of good stuff. Mercury sextile to Jupiter, it’s just friendly—hello, thank you for listening. 

Mercury sextile to Mars can be a little agro. You can come across a little blunt or a little much, but that’s only if you are already kind of a forceful and assertive communicator. If you’re kind of a shy or retiring person, if you’re a bit of an introvert, this can help you to speak what needs to be said, to send that email, to put some of your accomplishments on some online presence that you have, you know, to just kind of own who you are and where you’re at. That’s a beautiful thing. 

Now, in the context of the Mercury square to Pluto and the Sun square to Pluto that is still active, it’s a little bit of a different story, or rather I should say it’s a little bit more of a complicated story. Because here’s the thing—and it’s something I talk about in lots of ways, in lots of episodes—each natal aspect, each transit of your horoscope on its own means something, and it has a strong integrity. But then when we look at it in the context of everything else, we must synthesize that data. And when we synthesize that data, it changes the meaning, right. 

Because I can wear, oh, I don’t know, red glasses and red lipstick—looks great until you put me in an all-green outfit, and now I look like a Christmas tree, which is not the look I was going for. So each thing on its own means something, or it has an effect or an impact. But in context of all other things, the effect or impact is different. And forgive me if you are a big fan of green and red together, aesthetically, outside of Christmas time. 

Mercury Square Pluto—this transit is a tough one, okay. And I got to tell you, all week long we’ve got all these fucking transits going on. It’s a lot going on. Venus square to Pluto’s hard. Sun square to Pluto’s hard. My concern about this third one is a couple of things. The first one is that it’s the third, so it’s just been a heavy week. There’s a lot of intense energy, and most people can hold it together in really stressful conditions, you know, 24 hours, 5 hours, I don’t know, maybe 48. But going through all these Pluto transits back-to-back it can bring out the worst in us because it has a buildup effect, right.

And so, it’s really important this week, all week long, that you find healthy outlets for your feelings. Yeah, I said it slow—healthy outlets for your feelings. Because it might be that you’re really, really mad at someone you’re a huge fan of, or it might be that you’re really, really mad at your best friend, and it’s not appropriate, or it’s not possible to express those feelings to that specific person. Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine. 

So let’s say you decide you’re not going to express those feelings to that specific person. If you don’t find a healthy and appropriate outlet for those feelings, what happens is they build and they build and they build, and then when fucking Mercury starts to square Pluto, shit falls out of your mouth. I said it. I mean, shit falls out of your mouth. And once you say a thing, once you press send, you can’t take it back. You just can't. 

So it’s really important that you cope with what you’re feeling. And that might look like listening to angry music. That might look like talking to a therapist. That might look like going for a run. That might look like writing in your journal a tiny novella. But it doesn’t look like repressing your feelings, and it doesn’t look like dropping them in someone else’s lap because we’re all going through these transits. 

And, in general, with these kinds of transits—Venus square to Pluto, Sun square to Pluto, Mercury square to Mercury—what I like to recommend is wait 72 hours. Based on what you’re feeling, wait 72 hours if you can. Because that allows enough space for the transit to cycle through. So the most demanding of your feelings and thoughts has time to play themselves out so you have a little bit more perspective before you try to cope with things with others, right. But because these transits are all stacked up against each other that won't really work this week. That’s why you need outlets. 

So back to Mercury square Pluto specifically. Mercury is communication. It’s how you hear things. It’s how you read things. It's how you speak things. It is a big risk that people will get very fucking defensive and very angry, and you may say things in a way that is really hurtful and unkind. Other people may say things that are very hurtful and unkind. And, again, where you have a choice to make is do you need to stand up for yourself? Do you need to engage? And you might, but you really might not. 

It is healthy and wise to investigate the space between your reactions and your responses—make sure there is enough space between your reactions and your responses so that you can be intentional with your responses. This is not easy. It’s very simple, but it’s difficult as fucking hell, especially because Pluto always brings to surface feelings, thoughts, and conditions we don’t want to deal with because we have decided that they are bad or shitty or shameful. 

Oh, yeah, Pluto governs shame. And so, whenever we’re dealing with Pluto transits we are dealing with shame—shame we feel about ourselves, about our past, about someone else, about our desires, or what we don’t want. So, again, this is a great time for healing and for inner work, and it’s a difficult time for interpersonal relationships. And whatever you put out there, whatever you put out there, you can't take it back. So make sure that you are participating in a way that reflects the contribution you want to make to the world, what actually needs to be said to someone else, the energy with which you believe a situation truly deserves your energy. 

As I say week after week—and I’m going to fucking keep on doing it—Saturn square Uranus, the backdrop of all these transits, is psychologically very straining. So to have all these squares to Pluto happening in the backdrop of Saturn/Uranus, it’s really testing. So if you’re feeling frayed, if you’re feeling like some of your worst parts are just on parade, making noise, keeping you up at night, you are not alone, and there’s a bigger reason for why that’s happening. And that bigger reason, IMO, is so that you are inspired to change and grow. 

And what that looks like is super individual to you, you know. It might mean that you need to make different choices around how you behave, and it might mean you need to make different choices around how you relate to yourself, how you talk to yourself, who you’re listening to. It could be any number of things, but the discomfort that we are feeling inside of our own skin is information. 

Part of being an adult is parenting yourself; it’s providing structure and form and care for yourself. This is not something we can outsource to others. I mean, ideally, we have loved ones who are also doing those things for and with us, and we are doing those things for and with others, but really, this is an essential part of being a grown up. It’s taking care of yourself, taking responsibility for yourself. And that doesn’t just require follow through and identifying what’s right and wrong. It also requires adaptability and flexibility. It requires knowing when it’s not the right moment to do a fucking thing. It’s difficult stuff. This is difficult stuff, but it is really valuable. 

When we talk about finding value in hardship, for me, I am a big believer that meaning transforms suffering. And it doesn’t transform suffering from something that’s painful into something that’s pleasant, for the most part, but what it does is it transforms it from something that feels like a punishment to something that feels like an assignment. And they’re both burdensome; they’re both difficult, but one is a lot easier to bear, in my view and in my experience. 

So, my loves, I know that this was a lot. I’m going to repeat all of the transits of the week here. On the 11th of April, we have a New Moon in Aries. The Sun and Moon are conjunct in Aries at 22 degrees, and it is exact at 7:31 p.m., Pacific Time. We also on that same day have an exact Venus square to Pluto. On the 13th, the Sun forms an exact sextile to Mars. On the 15th, the Sun forms an exact sextile to Jupiter. On the 16th, Mars forms an exact trine to Jupiter, and we have another square to Pluto—this one is from the Sun. On the 17th, Mercury forms a sextile to Jupiter and a sextile to Mars. It also forms a square to Pluto. 

My loves, that is your damn horoscope. It’s a lot. Buckle up. Don’t forget that you have tools. You have inner resources. You don’t always have to find new ones. A lot of times it’s about remembering to use the tools you’ve already cultivated. You have people you can reach out to. You have resources you can make use of, so don’t forget to do that. This isn’t a time for you to isolate yourself unduly. If it’s supportive to you to hide out from the world, go for it, but you don’t have to go this alone—you just don’t. 

My loves, I thank you, as always, for showing up, for tuning into Ghost of a Podcast, for being on a journey with your own healing and self-care, and for learning astrology. The conversation continues over on Patreon, so go and join me there if you haven’t already. You can also subscribe to my weekly horoscope and get it in your inbox. And subscribe to the damn podcast because you don’t want to miss an episode, do you? I mean, do you? Okay, bye.