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.

It's May, and I am doing so many virtual events this month. And I hope you will join me for at least a couple of them. On Friday, May 15th, I will be speaking at the assembly with the illustrious Avery Trufelman. We will be talking about my book, Astrology for Real Relationships. On the 22nd and 23rd of May, I will be speaking at this awesome astrology conference called NORWAC. I'll be speaking on inherited conditions in the birth chart and outer planets and love. I'll also speak on a panel called How to Become a Professional Astrologer. You need to be there for all of it, plus just check out NORWAC. It's super cool, and you can discover new and exciting astrologers there.

And then, finally, on May 30th, I am offering am AMA—that's an Ask Me Anything—Venus Retrograde themed, and all proceeds raised from that event will go to National Bail Out and Sovereign Bodies Institute. Check out those organizations. Donate money if you got it. And join me for the damn AMA so I can answer all your questions about relationships and all things Venus oriented.

In honor of Mother's Day, it felt really important to share this conversation that I had with Tia, who you may remember from Episode 52. She wrote in because she had a complicated relationship with her mother, who had a lung cancer diagnosis. Her mother has since passed, and this is the conversation that we had.

Tia: So I wrote in for Episode 52. My mom was diagnosed for the second time with cancer, and this time it was lung cancer. In my feelings and in my gut, I knew that it wasn't going to end well. And I was really struggling with the ability and the okay to show up because my mother and I had such a complicated relationship that stemmed from childhood, and then as we got into adulthood, a lot of power struggles and a lot of disrespecting of my boundaries. And I just wasn't sure of how I could show up or what I could do and to ensure that I was letting everything, in a way, go and let it just live and allow myself to be present in that situation.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. And so how did that go?

Tia: So, in the end, she was pretty sick for a few months. I think our episode was in June. And I spent a good portion of that time showing up and being there through phone calls or being present. In about August, I was on a trip in Australia, and I cut my trip short because I just had this feeling like I had to come home. I had to come home, and I don't know why I had to come home, but I had to get home. And I had a couple of weeks with my mom before she ended up going into a coma and being unresponsive.

I was her power of attorney, so I ended up being the health directive for her and having to make a lot of end-of-life decisions that weighed greatly on me. And it was very difficult because of all of the power struggles and disrespecting of my boundaries throughout my life with her, and then at the end of it, having to show up for my mother, who created me and put me here, but having to make decisions about the end of her life. It was tough. It was really tough.

Jessica: That sounds so hard.

Tia: I think that in the end, I'm actually very grateful for having shown up and having made a lot of those decisions and really helped her transition to the next phase. But I do have a lot of questions and a lot of guilt that I still hold on to that I want to kind of get some answers to.

Jessica: Great. Okay. So let me start by checking in with her. Hold on. Okay. And what would you like to know?

Tia: One of my questions is, because we had a very complicated relationship—and I take my part in that, and I think that I was awful a lot of times. And I do carry the guilt with that. But what I want to know is does she forgive me for my behavior, but does she also take responsibility for her part in things, too?

Jessica: Okay. I will say straight out the gate the very first question that you're asking is exactly what your relationship was. It's like, "I'll own my part, but do you own your part? Yeah, I did wrong, but did you do wrong?" That seems to me like it's emblematic, in a way, of the kind of power struggles you had always. Does that make sense to you?

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Your mom feels of herself—she thinks of herself as a very diplomatic person. Am I seeing that correctly?

Tia: Uh-huh.

Jessica: Yeah. She thinks of herself as a giver. She thinks of herself as, honestly, a victim. And since you were very little, she decided you were the strong one. That's really complicated because you were really little. I mean, you are a strong person. But unfortunately, your mom's identity is, "Well, I may have done wrong, but it was because"—

Tia: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: —instead of, "I did wrong, and I can hold and own that." Now, did she pass quite recently? How long ago was it that she passed?

Tia: She passed on October 14th.

Jessica: 2019. Is that correct?

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Okay. So let me just slow you down. Let me slow down the question and cut it into parts. Does your mom forgive you? That's a really important part of your question. Your mom is showing me that she never held a grudge against you, that she always wanted things to move on.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Okay.

Tia: She loved to sweep things under the rug, and then I'm the [indiscernible 00:06:14] who holds it all.

Jessica: Right. Yes. So here's the problem. Your mom passed recently. It's very, very recent for her. And she has not evolved yet, and I want to say "yet" because I do think she will. But she has not evolved yet on some very key issues, and I think that's frustrating for you. So the first one is, when you ask has she forgiven you, she shows me quite innocently that she's never held a grudge against you and she's never been mad at you, and if she was, it passed very quickly because she loves you. And I believe that that is true for her. I also see how that is the story she tells herself about herself—

Tia: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: —so that she can be okay, and how frustrating that is for you because you're like, "Okay. Sure. But let's actually get to the truth underneath the truth. Let's get to the root of all that." And she's unable/unwilling to do that, and I think, for you, that feels like an abandonment and it feels like a cruelty. But for her, it's just her being her.

Tia: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Does that make sense?

Tia: Yeah. Yeah. That's very much how she was in waking life. And I forgive her for those things because I think she just couldn't help the way she was, and it's okay. It's okay. That's just her personality—

Jessica: Yes.

Tia: —and that's just the way it jammed out. But—yeah.

Jessica: But also, not completely. But also, it's frustrating and it's upsetting, and it was an impediment to being close and to having resolution with her. Now, in regards to the other part of your question, will you ground me back into it? Will you repeat the other part of the question?

Tia: Yeah. Does she take responsibility for her part in things, too?

Jessica: Not exactly.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Not exactly. I'm so sorry. I mean, I'm laughing because it's a completely unchanged problem. You know? She—well, of course she made mistakes, but she tried her best. And she just thinks of you as somebody who's very moody and emotional and passionate. She feels very confident you did not get that from her side of the family or from her. And was she married to your dad?

Tia: No. They never got married, but they were together—

Jessica: They were partnered.

Tia: Yeah. From the time I was 1, so 34 years.

Jessica: Okay. Yeah. So she was. Okay. That's what I was really asking, not really about marriage, but about she was partnered with your dad. And is he really passionate as well, or is he really shut down? I can't tell.

Tia: Shut down.

Jessica: Okay.

Tia: He's more of a shut-down person.

Jessica: Because that's where the intensity comes from, is from his side of the family, according to your mom. With what your father's told you, has he shared anything kind of intense with you about his upbringing?

Tia: Yeah. Just recently. He told me about how my grandfather basically was never around.

Jessica: Yeah. Did your grandpa drink a lot?

Tia: Not that I'm aware of.

Jessica: Okay, because there's this intensity that I see there that could be any number of things. But your mom—I can't tell if what she's saying is true, that this comes out of your dad's side of the family, or if that's just part of her deflection of intensity. "Well, it's not like me, so it must be like him."

Tia: You know where we're getting this from? I should have clarified this. So, when I refer to my dad, I actually refer to my stepdad, who raised me. But I think what you're picking up is my real dad.

Jessica: Absolutely. She's talking 100 percent about your biological father.

Tia: Okay.

Jessica: 100 percent. Sorry. Yes. I assumed it was the same dude. She's definitely talking about your ancestry, not your family life.

Tia: Yeah. So I don't really have much of a relationship with him. He was an alcoholic.

Jessica: Okay. That's where I'm seeing the alcoholism. That's right. He was an alcoholic. He was angry a lot and very moody and passionate.

Tia: Yeah. That's where I get it from, then.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. That is where you get it from, and you get a lot from your dad. Have you never met him?

Tia: He disappeared out of my life when I was 3, but we barely had a relationship. And then, when I was 32, I had met my half-brother and posted it on Facebook, and he found me through that and has been trying to have a relationship with me. But he's a user. He's a user and abuser, and I know that in my gut. And I have no intentions of being friends with him, having a relationship with him. So there really is no relationship there. I know he exists, I exist, and that's it. My dad, when it comes down to it, is my stepdad.

Jessica: Great.

Tia: That's who raised me.

Jessica: Okay. Okay. Great. So this is where we get into a lot of complexity. And your mom is showing me her—I think some guilt and some shame around your father, around the choice she made. And what she feels is that she kind of saddled you with some of his qualities that are just very hard for her. I think unfortunately, now I'm seeing more clearly how her capacity to be around intensity is small. And on top of it, with your sperm-donor dad, with your biological father, his intensity isn't healthy. It isn't something that is high functioning in his life or in the world.

In a way, it's very hard for her. As I'm about to verbalize what she's showing me, it's like she pulls it back and doesn't want me to verbalize it. And this is exactly the problem that you have with your mom. It's that she actually does have a nuanced set of feelings, and she has really complicated thoughts and feelings, and she doesn't want to say them because she doesn't want to hurt you. She doesn't want to say it wrong. She doesn't want you to get mad at her. And so she pulls back and doesn't say what needs to be said even if it is messy, and that's exactly what you don't want. You don't mind going into the messiness to get to the truth, and for her, she would rather avoid the messiness because the truth is there either way, and she just doesn't want to have to be in the heart of it.

And we have an impasse here of your mom taking responsibility—I wouldn't exactly say she takes responsibility. She sees her responsibility.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: But it's around the choice she had with your dad more than with her actions because she thinks that life is easier if you do it her way than your way. I would say to that that it's easier for her; it's not easier for you. And this is not healed. It's not fixed. It's not different. And over the course of her own evolution in spirit, that is something that she may come to a different understanding with. But your mom is still—your parents—they own that house that your mom lived in?

Tia: Yeah. My dad owns it.

Jessica: Okay.

Tia: It's his house.

Jessica: I see. Well, she's spending a lot of time in that house at this time. She is still very close to her life. She knows she's passed. She's still very much in that house. She hasn't had time to make a lot of progress. And when we're no longer in body, time is not really a thing. So I'm using the word "time" even though it's not exactly the right word. Somebody else could have made leaps and bounds. Somebody else, it will take centuries. I mean, there's not really physical time when we're in spirit, so I don't want you to worry about what that does or doesn't mean. It's just the easiest way for me to verbalize it. She's just not there at this time.

But in terms of her holding on to upsets with you, she's not doing that. In terms of whether or not she knows what you've done for her, she absolutely knows what you did for her. And she really deeply appreciates it, and she's not surprised that you did it. Even though for you it was a real struggle to get to a place where you made the choice or to kind of step up, she always knew you would be there for her. She always knew that you loved her. She often questioned whether or not you liked her, but she never questioned whether or not you loved her. And she feels that you were the same, that you always knew she loved you whether or not the relationship worked.

Tia: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I see that more in her death than I did in waking life. I very much feel her around me all the time. And I guess that could lead into my next question.

Jessica: Yeah.

Tia: I do feel her around, and I see her in dreams, and I know her presence. But I feel very much like she's still trying to mom me. I think that she tries to control a lot of situations, and she's trying to get me to this next step in life. What I want to know is what message is she trying to give me? Because I know she's here.

Jessica: Okay. So I'm going to be silent for a moment while I listen, okay? But I'm not disappearing. There's no problem with the phone. Hold on for a moment. So she never tried to control you, and she's not trying to control you now, is absolutely her first response. I'm not positive whether or not that's completely true. It's kind of like we were just talking about is that she does feel that she is innocent, and she certainly doesn't resonate with being controlling. She never has, and she certainly doesn't. But I think what you're referring to is she has a vision of what is best for you, and she is pushing you towards that. Is that correct?

Tia: Uh-huh.

Jessica: Yeah. Okay. So we can soften the language, and then she can hear it better. Hold for just a moment. What it is that you're feeling is that your mother does not want you to linger in feelings, in grief, in sadness, in anger, in anything intense and unpleasant. And so what she is trying to do—it's almost like she's trying to fluff you up. It's like—this is such a weird way of putting it, but it's like in laundry commercials where there's a lady and she's bathed in sunlight, and she takes a white sheet and she fluffs it out and puts it on a hanging line. That's kind of the feeling I'm getting of it, like she just wants you to feel better and move on and be okay.

And this has always felt controlling to you. It's not felt like support or love to you. But for her, that's how she loves and supports. And so, in a way, her best effort at this moment is a continuation of your power struggle.

Tia: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica: I'm sorry. I wish it was simple. It may or may not change over the course of your life. But for whatever it's worth, motive is not equal to impact. That said, her motive is, "Don't linger over there. Be happy over here." And it is like she's consumed by her own perspective, which is, "I cannot linger over there, because I'm scared of lingering over there. I'm scared of what it means for you," but also, she's scared of what it means for her. She doesn't have the willingness to linger over there.

Meanwhile, you are a very intense person, and you can linger in intense, unpleasant, bad feels and then go to really lovely feels. And then you can go back and forth. She doesn't have that same capacity. So she's not trying to control you. She doesn't even have a value judgment on what you do. It's about how you feel. And I would say that I don't agree with her about what's in your best interest, and I don't think you do. So it's okay to continue to be in disagreement, and it will be in some ways easier to have a boundary with her now than it was when she was living because there's not words.

Even the way you framed the question of, "I feel like she's trying to control me," she had to reframe it before she was willing to answer it. And I think the same thing will be true in the reverse. I think the two of you just—you come from such a different place. You have such different values, ultimately—what kind of a person to be. You have different values on this. And she is scared of the parts of you that are like your dad, your birth father. I don't think you need to be scared of those parts of yourself at all. I don't think they're negative parts. I think they were negative for her with him.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: And I think they were a point of discord between the two of you. But she is the consistent factor in that. It's not something for you to feel bad about about yourself. And certainly, with grief and with supporting someone through the end of their life, I think it's very healthy and appropriate to be in the unpleasant feelings, in the difficult feelings. But she just has a very low tolerance of that. And again, that's about her.

Tia: Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting here is the fact that that is very much how she is and how she can just sweep things under the rug, but I am very much a person that—I feel the feels, and I want to feel the feels. But then I struggle on the other end of it because what I've learned from my mother is to don't feel the feels. Sweep them under the rug. And I don't know how to do that. So it's constantly a struggle within myself but, obviously, as you say, a power struggle in our own relationship that we've had both in waking life and in death.

Jessica: Yes. So let me just speak to your birth chart for a moment on this. Okay? And this is something I kind of touched on when I read your chart, whatever it was, back in the summer of 2019. But you are still going through a Pluto opposition to the Sun, and a Pluto opposition to Mars has since started. This has to do with confronting intense feelings and finding practical ways, like real-life ways, of coping with them behaviorally. And this period of your life is just wired to bring up intensity.

Now, what I don't think I did mention in the last reading that I will mention now is that in your birth chart, you have Venus and the Moon in Gemini with Chiron sitting in between those two planets. So they're all in a sandwich on top of each other. What this indicates is many things, and on the list, Venus/Moon conjunction means you like things to be pleasant. You like things to be nice. It's not just your mom. It's also you. But because of Chiron's presence, you have such a negative connotation with it. It's not really your truth to sweep things under the rug and make them nice. And so, when you do it, it feels bad. But then, when you don't do it, it feels bad because Chiron is like that. It's kind of like damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And so the work of this for you is finding healthy ways of being in both of them, being in the duality, without it being either/or is true. And so what this looks like is recognizing that there is a way that you absolutely need chill nothingness. You need your surface content that you consume. You need friends that you just talk about stuff with and that you don't get into the deepness and the realness with. You need people who aren't going to be tracking you for your intensity. But then you also need friends who are all about being aware of and present with this real stuff you're going through.

I think you just need a life that can contain all of it, which ironically is what you asked your mother to be able to provide for you and she didn't know how to. But it is your job moving forward in your life to provide that for yourself. And within all of this, I guess the best way to put it is 2020 is not the year that you're going to have this unlock easy and worked out. You know what I mean?

Tia: Oh, I know what you mean.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. It's not the time. This is the time where all of your shit is coming to the surface so that you develop new tools for dealing.

Tia: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: The way that people often frame their question to me when they're in as much struggle as you are is, "Why am I cursed?" Have you had that feeling?

Tia: I've had that feeling for the last two weeks. I feel like the world is coming down.

Jessica: Yeah. It's not that. It's absolutely not that. It's that you are feeling it in such a way that it is absolutely clear that you are meant to find new ways of coping because your old ways of coping aren't as effective as they need to be. Unfortunately, sometimes the way the Universe works—a.k.a. life works, a.k.a. astrology works, however you want to frame it—is that you get hammered with the same lesson until you do the damn thing. It's kind of like life is a batting cage, and you're just in there with a bat and the Universe keeps on throwing these pitches at you until you hit it out of the park. It's a stupid metaphor because I don't know anything about basketball or baseball or whatever that stupid metaphor was, but you get where I am with it, right?

Tia: I get it.

Jessica: And the irony—and I know I just said this, but I feel like I really need to repeat it—is what you have required of your mother your whole life, it's time for you to give it to yourself.

Tia: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica: Self-acceptance around your intensity, a willingness to be flexible around—yeah, sometimes you do want to act like everything's fine. Sometimes consuming bullshit media and just relaxing is the healthiest thing for you to do; it's the right thing for you to do. Sometimes you do want to run away. And sometimes running away is not the wrong choice. And then sometimes you need to fester and stew and be in the nuance and the roots and the intensity. And you don't have to choose between them. You just have to be honest. Have self-acceptance and some measure of flexibility both with yourself and with others around the complicatedness of it all. Does that make sense?

Tia: It does. It does. So, in short, keep doing the work.

Jessica: Keep fucking doing the work.

Tia: It's not in vain.

Jessica: Yes. That's exactly right. Now, I want to just check in. In regards to your mom, is there anything else that you want to ask her?

Tia: I don't necessarily want to ask her anything, but I want her to know that I do forgive her. And in death, I have been able to find that forgiveness. My hope is that at some point, she understands that. I know I made the best choices I could for her, and I hope that she does understand that fully.

Jessica: She does. Your mom—again, she feels she doesn't need to forgive you. And she wants you to hear that. She's saying, whether or not you and I don't believe that, she believes it. And she wants you to hear that. So that is the first thing she's saying. She really loves you. She wishes you could find peace, and she's not talking about with her. She's just talking about within herself. And I want to just tell you—me, Jessica, I want to tell you that I understand that some of this is really complicated because I feel like this is who she is, and this is triggering for you, this "I wish you could find peace. I wish you could let go." It kind of feels like a criticism to you.

She means it. She does mean it. She loves you, and she wants you to have peace. She doesn't want your life to be so hard. And the way she's showing it to me is just—it's so heartfelt for her. She wants you to be happy. She loves you. She wants you to know that she is with you and that she's going to continue to be with you, but she tries to give you more space because she understands that her being around you all the time is not great for you; it's difficult.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Again, she has a hard time owning things in a way that my personality and your personality—honestly, our personalities are like, "Let's get into the messiness of the truth." Her personality is not like that. And to be fair, that's okay. She's being true to who she is when she says those things to you, for whatever that's worth. And that's not to invalidate your experience of things and your take on things. It's just to say "and." "And this is her perspective and this is her take."

She feels that something was healed between the two of you, and she understands it's not all done, but—I mean, she has such a different way of framing things. She's showing me and saying in a very different way what you said, that something was really healed at the end of her life and how you were able to choose to take care of her and how it felt like the right thing to do to you. She understood the choice you were making. Was she not conscious the whole time?

Tia: She wasn't. She went into a coma, and she was in a coma for almost three weeks. There was one point that she did come out of it. It was very short, and she was able to tell me that—I said to her, "I love you, Mom," and she without skipping a beat said "I love you" back. But majority of it, she was unconscious. There was no reactions to her. [Crosstalk]—

Jessica: She was also on drugs, wasn't she, during the coma?

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Okay, because what she's showing me about the coma is that the drugs were really—I almost wonder if she was on morphine because she really was in this soup.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: And she was able to hear in the coma. It's not exactly that she knew what was happening, because she was on a lot of drugs.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: So it was very confusing. And then I guess—and this is not something I understand medically, but I guess you sleep and are awake in a coma. That's not what I ever have heard, but that's what she's showing me. So sometimes she was really offline, essentially, and then other times she was very able to hear, but it came through a drug haze. So I think probably when she heard the most was when she was at the final hours before she got more drugs or something, like when she had less in her system. I don't know. That's basically how she's showing it to me. So she knew you were there. She knew you were taking care of things.

She saw how stressful it was for you, but she saw that that same part of you that is not at peace and that is dogged and won't let things go is the part of you that allowed you to advocate for her and take care of her. She wouldn't have been able to do it the same way. And your father—she's referring to your stepfather—wasn't able to do it the same way. It was that same part of you, and she sees that. She saw it at the time, and she sees it now, and she's grateful and she's proud. And she does love you.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. And that's what she needed you to hear.

Tia: Okay. Well, I appreciate you.

Jessica: Oh, I appreciate you. And I'm really sorry about the loss of your mom, but I'm glad that it went as well as it could have.

Tia: Yeah.

Jessica: And it sounds like it really did.

Tia: Yeah. I think that there's a lot of peace around it. And when she passed, there was this sense of relief, of like, "Okay. She's going to the next part, and it's okay. She's free."

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah.

Tia: There's no pain where she is.

Jessica: Yeah. That's right. That's right. And you did what you needed to do as she was sick, which I think is a huge part of being able to experience that peace, is you stepped it up, whatever that meant day to day.

Tia: Right.

Jessica: Well, my dear, thank you so much for doing this with me, and I hope you take really good care.

Tia: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jessica: My pleasure.

My loves, we are going to talk about the week of May 10th, Mother's Day, through the 16th of 2020. But before that, I gotta talk to you about some stuff. In light of the now viral video of Ahmaud Arbery being murdered, which—I gotta say I have real conflicts with viral videos of real murder happening. It is just horrifying and traumatizing, and not just for people in general but for the relatives and loved ones of the victim. But that is probably a whole other conversation.

Racism in America—the very roots of this country are netted in many things, and one of those many things is racism. And as I've talked about quite a bit on the podcast is how we are at a time of reckoning. We are astrologically at a time of reckoning with our shadow. We are at a time of reckoning with our shadow as a collective, as a people, which has so much to do with violent racism. We are seeing an uptick in hate crimes. We are seeing an uptick in racists—violent racists—feeling empowered, feeling that they have a right. That is, of course, related to our racist president.

But I've been thinking about it a lot, and the metaphor that has really emerged for me this week has been how coronavirus in some ways is metaphorically a lot like racism and anti-Black racism. It is deeply infectious. You don't have to be obviously symptomatic in order to have it. There's this way that Americans have this idea that, "I'm not racist if I'm not violent. If I'm not calling people names out on the street, I'm not racist." But that's simply not the case. Those are terrible, violent presentations of racism, but the truth is we live in a racist society.

Because of that, we are all infected. We are all carriers of it, not just white people—non-Black people of color, and also, there is such a thing as internalized racism. It is a terrible disease, this racism. Now, disease is not—that's metaphorical. It's not a disease, right? It's not a disease. It is a learned condition. Racism is a learned condition. Your thoughts and your feelings, your assumptions, they all are yours to manage. And it is important—I would honestly say it is essential—for your spiritual health and for the health of our society, for the world, for you to really be willing to be humble about your own feelings and assumptions and thoughts, and then your actions, your words, and your inaction.

When you are in the presence of other people's racism and you don't say anything and you don't stand up, that is an act of racism to not take it on as your own battle. When you don't stand up and do what's right in a situation, but also, when you don't challenge your own racist or hateful or phobic feelings, thoughts, and assumptions, your own racist or phobic behaviors and attitudes—when you don't challenge those things, you're perpetrating the spread of racism. Racism and anti-Blackness are really a white sickness, but they impact all people.

The consequences of this inequality and this injustice—the consequences of them fall on Black and Brown shoulders. We have to take the responsibility for healing ourselves and being an agent of healing in our communities so that the burden of healing this doesn't fall on Black and Brown shoulders. And if you hear me say this stuff and you feel defensive, you feel agitated that I'm focusing on this or saying something about this—and listen. I don't know. I might not be saying this right. I am not an expert. I am a person in the world, and I am doing my best. And I want to hold space for I have made mistakes; I will continue to make mistakes. And also, saying nothing—that's the for-sure mistake. That's the for-sure injury.

We have to take the risk of doing it wrong and saying it wrong and being wrong because that's a risk, but it's an assurance that if you do nothing, if you say nothing, if you absolve yourself of having to care about this or be an agent of change within yourself and the world at-large, that's a for-sure injury. I actually have a lot of confidence in individuals to choose to heal and change. You just gotta start wherever you are. So, if you're being honest with yourself and you can acknowledge that you don't want to hear about anti-Black racism, that you don't want it to be your problem, start with that racist problem of yours. It is your problem. It's your problem for sure. It's all of our problem because what happens to one of us happens to all of us, and we all have a role to play to change that.

That means really taking responsibility for your thoughts, your assumptions, your feelings, and all the ways that you don't stand up and say something because you're scared of being wrong, you don't want to make waves, it doesn't seem that important in a particular situation. It's always important in every situation. It's okay to make waves when they need to be made. If we're going to heal a collective sickness, it takes an emergency response within all of us. And so I want to drop that in your lap, white friends and non-Black POC friends.

How are we going to be an active part of the healing of this disease? How are we going to take responsibility as individuals for our own feelings and thoughts, for our own laziness, our own apathy, our own self-indulgence, and the harm that it causes? It is our spiritual and moral imperative to heal racism and the harm that it causes. We must change. So many people ask me about the actual coronavirus, not my metaphor of the coronavirus—about, "When is it going to be over? When are we going to go back to normal?"

Why should we go back to normal? Who is that good for? My friends, who is that good for? This is a revolution. Be a part of it. If you feel that racism isn't your problem, that anti-Black racism isn't your problem, that you shouldn't have to care about it, then you, my friend, really, really need to care about it. And it is super, very much, completely your problem. There are none amongst us who are not touched by racism, internalized racism, racism pointed out. We give certain groups a pass and other groups not. And we must be willing to step into our shame and cope with it.

And yes, there is an astrology to that. But honestly, forget astrology. Forget astrology. There is a spiritual, moral, ethical integrity that we all must strive to embody, and we can't if we are not working on this, actively working on this. We all have a role to play. Wherever you're starting from, it's okay. Shaming yourself from this moment or being so defensive in this moment that you don't have the humility and strength of character to try to educate yourself, to change—that doesn't serve anyone. So do your best, whatever that means right now. But by fucking God, do something. Read a book. Follow activists. Listen to podcasts that inform you. Do what you can do, but start this week, I implore you, my loves. Start right now.

Okay. That's a lot, but there's so much more. Let's get on to the astro, shall we? So, like I said, we're looking at the week of May 10th through the 16th of 2020. We have a long-awaited Venus Retrograde this week, plus a bunch of other stuff. So let's start on the 10th. On the 10th of May, we have a Sun sextile to Neptune and a Mercury trine to Jupiter. Sextiles and trines are both lovely, "easy" transits. Neptune and Jupiter are both idealistic planets. The good part of these two transits is huge.

These two transits represent a time of greater empathy and the potential for understanding. So, honestly, this is a time for educating yourself about the conditions, feelings, needs, perspectives, whatever—the experiences of other people. This is a really great time to do it because Neptune increases our empathy and Jupiter our willingness to learn, our excitement about exploring what we don't already understand. And Neptune gives us the compassion and the gentleness of spirit that we need to go into places that are a bit difficult to stay in.

Sun sextile to Neptune can be a time where you are more willing and able to put your needs aside and be there for someone else. This can be a time where you simply have a break around this date where you feel a sense of relief from some of the heaviness of things. This can be a time where you simply have a nice time watching a movie that really inspires you, or it can be something a lot more deep, like you have a breakthrough. And that breakthrough, if one comes on and around the 10th, will coincide with your ability and willingness to see things from a broader perspective and with more empathy and compassion and largesse of spirit.

I want to really name that these transits are very spiritual in nature. If you have been struggling, this is a good time to connect to your experience of God or the Universe or whatever you call it. For some people, it's going to be nature or the arts. Essentially, the potential here is to connect to energies that are larger than you, not in a way to make yourself feel small, insignificant, helpless, or hopeless—quite the opposite: in a way that reinforces your interconnection with your past and your future, with other people, with the Earth, and with all that you cannot understand.

This is a really lovely set of transits. Now, unfortunately, while we are experiencing this on the 10th, we will already be under the influence of a Mercury square to Mars. That is going to be exact on the 11th, and it's a really annoying transit. Mercury is your friendships. It's communication. It's your attitudes, your ideas, how you listen or not. It's your DMs and your emails, and you can see how it's a really big deal, especially during shelter-in-place times, especially during a time when there is so much tension in our world, both our society but also in our inner world, in our personal world.

Now, Mars is the ego. It is aggression, and it's a warring planet. It is fighting and fornicating and pushing things to a state of completion. It's competition and ambition. It's all that stuff. So, when Mercury forms a square—which is a challenging dynamic aspect—to Mars, you're going to be irritated. You're going to be annoyed. Or you'll be irritating and annoying. Probably, if you're a human, a little bit of both. So expect to be quickly and easily offended around this date or to offend someone else.

When we talk about Mercury square to Mars, your tone of voice is very important. So make an effort to listen because this transit is not going to make you in a really good listening state of mind. It's not going to make anybody in a listening state of mind, which is part of why you're not going to want to listen, because you're like, "This person didn't listen to me. I already know what they're going to say. Fuck that." So Mercury square to Mars is an opportunity for you to have better understanding of your own defenses and ego.

When we acknowledge that this is happening in an overlap with the Sun sextile to Neptune and a Mercury trine to Jupiter, the potential is actually really big for you to do investigation, much like I talked about at the top of the segment, into your own defenses, into your own fears and aggression. There's a lot of potential here for that. There's also a lot of potential for you to slip into some defensive patterning, some irritating irritable patterning. The good news is you have agency and you have choice.

If you're willing to learn, this is a great time. Maybe I'm being idealistic by saying it's great. It depends on your personality, and it depends on how this hits your chart. But I will say that this transit is an opportunity to grow because all transits are an opportunity to grow. So maybe what you need to figure out is your relationship to anger and irritability. Shoving it down—bad idea. Dumping it at people's feet—bad idea. Finding secondary outlets that are creative or neutral—excellent fucking idea.

This transit can be associated with accident-proneness. Usually, Uranus is associated with accident-proneness, but Mars is a close second. And that's just because you act without forethought. So put on a bike helmet if you're going to take a bike ride, that kind of thing. Just be smart. And if you can't be smart, be silent. Work on your listening skills.

Now, luckily, on the 12th, we have an exact Mercury trine to Saturn. So the transits this week are all kind of overlapping each other. So each individual astrological transit has its own individual meeting, right? But then there's the layer of how they overlap and how they are impacted by each other. And then, of course, there's the final layer of how it hits your chart and how you experience it, how it hits the charts of the people around you, and how they experience and express it.

On the 12th, we have an exact Mercury trine to Saturn, which is happily very stabilizing. It is a beautiful connection to these other transits, these other three transits I'm naming. And the reason why it's so beautiful is because it strengthens your ability and willingness to use your willpower and your sense of personal accountability and responsibility to listen, speak, and understand. Isn't that nice? It's kind of nice, especially if we're going to have this Mercury square to Mars, which is just all kinds of messy, honestly. This is a really great transit to have in the sandwich—you know, in the sandwich of transits that I'm naming. So leverage it with trines and sextiles, especially trines, IMO.

We kind of have to do the work to leverage the energy, to use the energy. Trines and sextiles do not kick your ass, usually. So you must lift your own ass and do the work. So educating yourself around this date, great. Listening around this date, great. Finding ways of communicating what you're available for, communicating boundaries, asserting boundaries—fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. The downside is, on the 12th, we will still be under the influence of that Mercury square to Mars. So you want to just keep on checking yourself, keep on checking your ego, and to keep in mind that all this stuff I'm talking about, about being mean, about being aggressive, about being defensive—that shit is not just about how you act towards others. It's how you act towards yourself.

So beating yourself up for not having figured it out yet, for not having written the great American novel yet—whatever the fuck it is, pay attention. Don't be an asshole. Listen to yourself. Keep it constructive or put it down. That's the move. Generally, I think it's a good move: keep it constructive or put it down. But this week it most certainly is.

Okay. We've only got a couple more transits for me to name this week. The next is the long-awaited Venus Retrograde. Venus goes Retrograde on the 13th in Gemini. It will stay Retrograde until June 25th, so it's just over a month. It is not the end of the world, but it is a really brilliant opportunity. And that opportunity is to do what we always do during Retrogrades: we review, we reflect, we reassess, and then we recalibrate. The rule of re's, my friends.

On the forthcoming midweek episode, I am going to do a Venus episode breaking down what Venus is and more on the Retrograde itself. So hold tight for a couple days. It's coming for you. But Venus Retrogrades will often bring up relationship problems. Let me just acknowledge that. They will bring up preexisting relationship problems. So let me be really clear: it's not going to create problems in a relationship that doesn't have them. It's going to bring them to surface so that we review and reflect and reassess and recalibrate.

It can often bring up exes. They just resurface. This is not a thing to fear. A problem is a problem whether you're in denial about it or not, whether you're coping with it or not, whether you're confronted by it or not. This is an opportunity to get authentic, which is one of Venus's things: authenticity, when it's not busy being superficial, that is. So we have the opportunity to look at things more openly when it might be easier to try to put lipstick on the pig, as it were. The truth is true whether or not you want to look at it. So don't pretty up the truth. If it's kind of ugly, sit with the ugly. Ugly's not bad. Ugly's not immoral. Ugly is ugly. Beautiful is not good. It is not moral.

Get in there. Get in there and get messy with it, my loves. This Venus Retrograde is so perfectly timed for this period where we are looking at our relationships, and we are being confronted with our issues around beauty and the value of the way things look. We are also being confronted with a financial crisis, and Venus is related to your possessions and your finances. Essentially, the centerpiece of Venus is what you value. And that is why it's related to beauty and relationships and money.

So, last week, I talked to you about this Venus square to Neptune, this transit that's very important. It happened last week. It's going to happen again this month and then again in July. But here's the thing. In this chart, it's still a wide square. It's a wide-ass square. And so the ways in which we lie to ourselves, the ways in which we idealize ourselves or others or we are fantastical or overly romantic or dissociative around any of those Venusian themes—that's up. That is really up for all of us around this Retrograde, and it's coming at a time when we all are engaging more than ever via video chat, which is very Neptunian. Being on screen is Neptunian.

So, as I said, I will give you more of a thorough, dedicated breakdown next week. Maybe I'll do a couple episodes on Venus. If you all want me to, LMK. But for now, put that in your pipe and smoke it. But honestly, don't smoke anything. It's bad for your health.

Now, finally, I want to tell you about the last transit of the week. On the 15th, we have a Sun trine to Pluto. That's a great transit. I like this transit. And the reason why I like this transit is because it compels us to do the work. Pluto, even by trine or sextile, is really intense. And when we have a Sun trine to Pluto, there is energy compelling us to do the work, to be investigative, to transform something. You've heard me and probably other astrologers talk about Pluto as both the healer, the creator, and the destroyer. Pluto is the Phoenix rising from the ashes, but it is also the goddamn flames. And a Sun trine to Pluto, it makes it relatively easy to engage with Plutonian content. Don't you want that? Don't we all need that? Don't we deserve it? I think we do.

The Sun trine to Pluto is going to be a facilitator in getting deep, in getting engaged, and in healing. It's not going to do the work for you, but if you choose to do the work, you can go into some deep places that need your light and attention. Pluto is the underworld, and the Sun is kind of a bright star, don't you think? So point your light towards some dark places. Healing is not a thing that you do and then are done. Healing is a process. It is a journey, and it has twists and turns. Staying associated and willing to do the work is a big part of that. And sometimes what that means is being associated with your lack of willingness or ability to do the work for a period of time. That's fair. But staying associated with where you're at, what you're choosing, and what the consequences are, that's something to pay attention to and to not forget about.

My loves, those are the major transits of the week. Now, I forgot to do this last week, but I promised you the week before I would do it, so let me do a quick recap of the transits, okay? On the 10th of May, we have a Sun sextile to Neptune. On that same day, we have a Mercury trine to Jupiter. On the 11th, we have a Mercury square to Mars. On the 12th, we have a Mercury trine to Saturn. On the 13th, we have the long-anticipated Venus Retrograde in Gemini. And on the 15th, we have a Sun trine to Pluto.

I want to thank you for joining me for another week, and I want to encourage you to keep on doing the work both to be right with yourself on a personal level but also within your participation in the world. There's so much that I want to say about Saturn in Aquarius, and I'm formulating it. I'm formulating it. But we are all global citizens. We are all individuals within a community. And your job, my loves, is to figure out what your role to play within that is.

And don't be distracted by hero stories or fantasies of it needing to be some massive, big thing that changes the world. Find a thing to do. Educating yourself is a thing to do. Listening is a thing to do. It doesn't always have to be some grand action. But doing nothing, that is not the thing to do, you see. We are all here for a goddamn reason in this wild time in human development. Show up. Keep on showing up. Keep on learning. Do your damn best. That's all you can really do.

I love you guys. You know that. If you haven't already joined the community over at Patreon, I'm getting into it. I'm dropping more and more content for you. So become a puppy. Become a kitten. Become a supporter. And one more thing. No one is doing it perfect. None of us are perfect. There's no such thing. We are all bumbling through it. Don't beat yourself up for where you're starting from. Start from wherever you're at, and mobilize to the best of your ability from there. Take it one step at a time, my loves, and know that I super love you. Bye.