Ghost of a Podcast with Jessica Lanyadoo

January 23, 2022

243: Self Doubt + Horoscope

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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.

 

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week, I've got a question about being stuck, and it goes like this: "I've been feeling stuck in my pattern of insecurity and low self-worth. I've dealt with insecurity since I can remember, and I feel like I'm finally becoming aware of how much it's constantly affecting me. I have a really hard time trusting myself, and I'm often comparing myself to others and seeking approval from people around me rather than being able to give it to myself. This has all contributed to me feeling really out of touch with myself and what I want for my life. I feel stuck, at a standstill, and I'm having a really hard time envisioning a path out of this deep insecurity. Does my chart show anything about where this low self-worth is coming from? And what tools does my chart contain that might help me to begin to truly accept and love myself? Stuck in the Mud." And Stuck was born August 6th, 1992, 5:35 p.m. in Blue Hill, ME.


Okay. Let's get into it. Before I properly answer this question and read this chart, I just want to acknowledge that so many people are feeling stuck and stagnant right now and struggling with insecurity because we're living through a pandemic, and so much of life has not gone the way we planned despite our best efforts. So much of life has been put on hold for so many people. And for those who life hasn't been put on hold for, I mean, I don't know, probably people around you feel that their lives are put on hold.


And so this is a really common feeling, this feeling of being stuck or stagnant. Broadly speaking, what I like to point to whenever I encounter those feelings is your agency. Remembering that you have choices and that you have options and that they may not be great ones, they might not be thrilling to you, but they're there and they're available to you is really helpful. The thing that is so difficult about insecurity and struggles with one's self-worth is that it tends to make us conservative. And when I say that, what I mean is it makes us less likely to take risks, less likely to do anything too bold, because we're feeling demoralized.


However, in order to get past insecurity, something that I believe is really key is that we need to be willing to fail. If you're willing to fail, you can achieve great things. You can also just fail. Either thing can happen. But any person who takes a risk or puts themself out there risks failure. That's just part of the game. And so I want to acknowledge that a lot of what insecurity has to do with is a fear of failure and a fear of not being good enough or not being ready. To a certain extent, we all struggle with these feelings, and there's only so much you can do about it without being willing to fail.


So that is my sweet little preamble. That brings me to your chart, my dear. So there's a lot of things I want to speak to. The first thing is your Nodal Axis, in particular your North Node. And I don't know what's going on on the internet, but I've been flooded with questions about the nodes recently. And if you want to learn more about the nodes, you can listen to my astrology hot take on the nodes, which is Episode 135 or Episode 140. Also, I talk about it in Episode 215. So there's lots of content that I've put out there about the nodes.


But I want to say that in your chart, your North Node is in a really relevant placement. But before I unpack it, I want to remind you the North Node and the South Node—these are spiritual points in the birth chart. They're not planets, so they're not personality markers. It's not like you're always late for work because your North Node's in Pisces. That's not what that means. They're not personality markers.


Very briefly, the nodes refer to where our soul is journeying towards. So the way that our birth chart is written, the details of our birth chart, that's what describes how we're meant to embody and express our Nodal Axis. But the nodes tell us a lot about our core sense of self and the spiritual components to that. And in your birth chart, you've got the North Node in Sagittarius in the first house. When we have the North Node in the first house, one of the major things that we are here to do in this lifetime is to figure out who the hell we are.


So this feeling that you struggle with of not knowing exactly who you are and feeling kind of uncertain about yourself, that is okay, actually. That's actually pretty honest of you. Instead of seeking answers in other people or trying to create proof or evidence that you know who you are and that you're okay, what I would encourage you to do—and this is easier said than done. But what I would encourage you to do is to be interested in the adventure of exploration, of exploring the highs and lows of what you do know of yourself, exploring different ways of being, different ways of relating to yourself and to your life in general.


The reason why I encourage you to take an adventurous explorer's approach is because it's in Sagittarius, and at the same time, you've got your Rising sign and your Moon sign all in Sagittarius. So being willing to chase the adventure of cultivating self-knowledge can be really helpful to you throughout your life. Now, again, this is not a personality assessment that I'm making. It's more of a direction, a motivational direction, for you to point yourself in.


Part of why it is important for you to acknowledge that this is not a personality thing for you is because, listen, yeah, you're a Leo, but you've got a pretty tight Sun/Saturn opposition in your birth chart. Having a Sun/Saturn opposition is not light and playful. It makes you very self-serious and very ambitious. And, generally speaking, people with this placement have a harder time in their 20s than they do in their 40s because this placement indicates that you want to be there already. You feel like you should, quote unquote, know who you are, know where you're going, know what's happening. And when you don't, you can take it really hard.


And so, again, having a spiritual motivation of exploration and a willingness to learn, that can really help you to navigate the heavy-handedness with which you approach yourself. And that heavy-handedness leads to insecurity, depressiveness, and all these other things you're talking about: not trusting yourself, seeking the approval of others, all that kind of stuff. Now, to make matters even more sensitive, you've got the Moon in the twelfth house—along with Pluto, but let's stick with the Moon for a moment.


Having Moon in the twelfth house means lots of things, but related to this specific topic, it can make it so that you're so sensitive to the energies of the people around you and the environments that you're in that it's easy to want to please others and focus on what others are thinking, feeling, or wanting and abandoning yourself in the process. It's easy to do it because there is this part of you that feels like you should do it; if you make other people happy, then you'll be happy. But that doesn't really work. It doesn't work in general, and it certainly doesn't work for you.


And so this is where I want to mention one more difficult aspect in your birth chart. I just mentioned your Sun/Saturn opposition. What I didn't mention is that both the Sun and Saturn in your birth chart form a T-square to the planet Pluto, which is in the twelfth house. And so what this means in plain terms is that you are very hard on yourself, that you need a great deal of space and time—both space and time; very important distinctions—to be in your emotions, to be in your feelings, to sort through things on a deep level, because you really, really, really care about pretty much everything.


And when you're alone with yourself and you're sorting through your emotions, your options, your choices—the ones you're going to make, the ones you've already made—it is easy for you to be kind of a jerk to yourself. And it's easy for you to be a jerk to yourself because of how heavy-handed you are. And so this brings me back to your spirituality. Not only do you have all this Sagittarius in you, but you've got Jupiter as the planet that's highest in the birth chart, and it forms a trine to your Uranus/Neptune conjunction.


What this means is lots of things, but in the context of our conversation, what it is is a resource. And that resource is spirituality. This doesn't have to be religion, but it might be for you because a lot of times, when people have Jupiter in the ninth house, they're really fed by religion. Not always, of course, but for you, spirituality is motivating. It can give you a sense of structure in life, a sense of values and ethics that you can live your life by, and help you to weather the uncomfortable highs and lows and ebbs and flows that are inevitable in life because it's inevitable in life that you will fail and you will fuck up and you will be wrong. Some people won't like you. All of these things are true about you and me and everybody else—everybody.


And so what's important is not to become perfect, not to become beyond reproach, not to never make an error. How can we learn without mistakes? We can't. How can we grow without outgrowing things, outgrowing people? We can't. So, instead of resisting pain, inflicting it on others, instead of resisting feeling pain inside of yourself, it's about cultivating trust with yourself by continuing to show up with responsibility, humility, kindness, and patience for everything that you're dealing with.


And I know that you're a triple fire person, Sun in Leo, Moon and Rising all in Sagittarius. So being patient is not necessarily your forte. That said, oh well. Here we are. Right? Here we are. Prioritizing finding your center before you try to figure things out, before you try to prove yourself to yourself or others—this is really healthy and essential for you. And if you take steps in this direction or in some similar direction, over the course of time, your self-worth will get stronger and stronger.


It's really interesting to me that in your question, you used the term "low self-worth" because there are indications in your birth chart of low self-worth, for sure, but there's also indications that you know your value and you know your worth. And that's part of why it's so frustrating to you to be feeling this way: because there's parts of you that know your value and your worth and other parts of you that say it's not true, and you can't trust it.


What you're needing to do is to build a stable, easy-to-access bridge between these two places inside of yourself so that you don't have to identify with every emotion and thought that you experience. Instead, you can stay present with your emotions and thoughts as they ebb and flow, as your circumstances change or your insights change, and determine your value, your self-worth, over the course of time based on what you actually do, how you participate in the world, how you participate with yourself. Building a healthy and reliable friendship with yourself is a key part of your journey in this lifetime. Luckily, you have a lot of resources, internal and external, that you can rely upon.


And I have one last thing I want to say in response to your question. You name in your question that all of this is making it hard for you to know what you want to do with your life. And I don't know if you mean career. But a person can have really strong sense of self, really healthy self-worth, and still not know what job they want to do. Knowing who you are doesn't inherently mean knowing what you want to do for a job. And being a whole person—a healthy, whole person—doesn't necessarily mean that the work that you end up choosing is perfectly aligned with you.


Life can be compromised. And it can be compromised throughout the course of life, and sometimes we go through periods, years at a time, where we're doing work that really isn't the thing until we figure out the thing or until we amass the skills and the experience we need to do the thing. So I wouldn't encourage you to fixate on cultivating a path. I would instead encourage you to focus on developing skills and healthy practices for traversing the path.


As valuable as astrology and other forms of woo are, therapy is a place where you go and verbalize your own thoughts and feelings so that you can work through them. Being kind to yourself is key, and it's not always easy, but therapy is a useful tool for learning to be kinder to yourself. Talkspace makes it easy to get the help you need to make lasting progress with your mental wellness all year round. Talkspace will match you with a licensed therapist, offering all the benefits of therapy. But unlike traditional therapy, Talkspace fits your schedule. With live chat, video, and audio sessions, you can easily fit mental health care into your daily routine. Talkspace treats your privacy and security as their top priority. Make your mental health more than just another New Year's resolution with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code Lanyadoo at sign-up. That's $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code Lanyadoo.


My loves, let's get astrological. We're going to look at the horoscope for January 23rd through the 29th of 2022. But before we do, you know I've got a couple things that I've been thinking about that I want to talk to you about. The first one is something that nobody's talking about. It's the pandemic. Get it? It was a joke. It was sarcastic. Everyone's talking about it, but it's super confusing because we're getting wildly mixed messages. There are many people who are saying the pandemic's over, while in the U.S. and globally, we are hitting peak infections and people are still getting very sick and dying.


Some people are acting like the pandemic's pretty much over. Other people are still hunkered up in their homes and doing all the things, and it's really hard to know what's right. We can thank Mercury Retrograde for that very immediately, but also, more broadly, we can thank the Saturn/Uranus square and all of this intense Pisces energy for these ongoing mixed messages and confusions. So I know it's confusing, and also, I know that each and every one of us is exhausted by the pandemic and burnt out and over it. All of us.


But I do want to say please socially distance. Please wear a mask. Wear a mask that fits you properly, and if you have access to it, wear a N95 or KN94 mask, a mask that really can protect you and the people around you. And while you're at it, if you're on social media, follow Imani Barbarin, who is Crutches and Spice on TikTok and Instagram, and she's been talking about how long-haul COVID is a mass disabling event. And I fear that she is absolutely right.


If you have COVID or if you're testing at home and you get a positive diagnosis for COVID, please do make sure that you report it to your doctor or your doctors so if, God forbid, you should have long-term health problems, you'll be entitled to support from the government or your insurer. I don't mean to be doom and gloom, and I don't mean to make you feel scared about COVID if you had it or COVID if you have it now. But also, we want to be really careful. We are living through something that we humans have never lived through before. This is a brand-new pandemic. This is a brand-new illness, and there are so many unknowns.


I know so many people feel like, "Oh, the government's lying to us. The media is lying to us." And absolutely, maybe those two things are true. I mean, certainly, they're absolutely true sometimes. But a lot of the time, as well, people are doing their best, and they just don't know because nobody knows. Anyone who tells you they are perfectly certain that they know the long-term implications of COVID, I mean, are they psychic? Are they a psychic you trust? Because we cannot know, because this is brand new.


So, while we are in a state of uncertainty, you don't need to be anxious. You don't need to freak out. But you do need to take precautions. So take them for yourself. Take them for your friends and family. But also take them for the whole entire world, people who are more medically vulnerable than you are. And people are medically vulnerable for a lot of reasons, all of them perfectly fucking valid. So you know what to do. Socially distance, wear a mask, get vaccinated—all that kind of good stuff.


There's one other thing I want to talk about before we get astrological. In the past week in the United States, there were two terrible, atrocious things that happened, both of which were not labeled hate crimes officially. But one was the death of Michelle Go, who is an Asian American woman who was pushed to her death in front of a subway in New York, and also a hostage situation at a synagogue in Texas. Both of these situations were not decreed by the state to be hate crimes, but they are both clearly atrocious and clearly hate crimes.


And I just want to take a moment to say all racism is wrong. Not one kind of racism is more okay than another. Not all oppression is the same, but it is all equally wrong and all deserving of our care and activism. I'm not asking you to become a political scientist or a full-time activist, but I do want to ask you to care. And I want to ask you to convert your caring into action, no matter how small, because whether we're dealing with anti-Semitism, anti-Asian hate, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, any other form of racism or heinous systemic cruelty, we need to care. We need to call it out.


And we don't want to just have thoughts and prayers or love and light. That's not enough. We need education, we need advocacy, and we need action. I know there are atrocious acts happening globally all the time, unfortunately, and some of them trend and most of them don't. And it has to do with so many things, including but not limited to we can only take in so much tragedy. But we still need to really care. We need to make sure that our own internal biases are being addressed, because we all have them. We all have them.


I want to invite you to care, and I want to invite you to remember that through this transit of Jupiter in Pisces, we have the capacity to cultivate greater empathy and greater care. But if that empathy and care stops there—it's just thoughts and prayers; it's just love and light—then nothing really changes in the world. Nothing really changes even inside of us. And some people will disagree with me on this. Some people will feel that "If I do the energy work and I do my love and light work and my thoughts and prayers work, then that is enough."


I want to say it is important, but it is not enough, because we live in a material world. We live in a set of systems that impact all of us but not all of us in the same ways. Our care, our spiritual values, are meant to propel us into righteous action. And when progressives and liberals and people of conscience skip that step of acting, then what we're doing is essentially emboldening and empowering the oppressors. And we don't want to do that, right? So find a way to participate. Find your way. It doesn't have to be my way. It doesn't have to be the biggest way or a daily way, but find your way and make sure you're doing it. Okay? Okay.


So, all of that said, my dears and loves, let's get into your horoscope, which luckily starts off with a Sun conjunction to Mercury Retrograde. The reason why I say luckily is because it does this lovely dovetail from what I was talking about because it's an excellent transit for doing your research, for finding information, for being curious about the world and being curious about yourself and figuring things out, making connections.


Now, this transit typically, when the Sun is conjoined to Mercury, is really good for socializing and connecting with friends, reaching out to people, communicating, but let us not forget Mercury is Retrograde. I mean, who amongst us could forget that Mercury is Retrograde? Because I don't know about you, but I'm having all manner of technical difficulties. So the Sun conjunction to Mercury Retrograde is especially valuable for looking within and doing the inner work we need to do to excavate ideas and attitudes that need to be addressed or, in the context of Mercury Retrograde, readdressed.


So the Sun/Mercury Retrograde conjunction is an excellent time for reflecting on yourself, on your participation, on how you have been engaging either with yourself or with others. And that can be very personally or in the world at-large. What we think and our attitudes, how we process information, how we talk to ourself and others—and I mean that by the language we use, the tone we use—our beliefs, all of these things are related to Mercury. And this conjunction is really valuable for kind of reorienting ourselves in regards to those things, which can be foundational for the success of our relationships, our mental health, and even our projects, the plans we make and the ways we follow through or not with them.


Now, one more thing I want to say about this transit is simply make sure you're being careful in the context of COVID because this transit can make us feel so caught up in our thoughts that we don't pay attention to our material lives in the right way or in a consistent way. And so wash your paws. Socially distance. Wear a mask. Very simple. Keep doing it, my friends. Keep doing it.


Now, the next transit that is happening this week is Mars ingresses into Capricorn on the 25th of January. And this transit is really kind of cool in a lot of ways. Mars in Capricorn is a transit that can allow us to kind of get going, so in other words to convert our ideals and our hopes and our dreams into practical reality. This requires hard work and persistence, but Mars in Capricorn is good for that.


Here's something really important about astrology and in particular the astrology of ingresses, so the astrology of a planet moving into a sign, whether we're talking about Solar seasons like, quote, Aquarius season or Mars being in Capricorn, Mercury in Aquarius, etc. So there is the impact of the transit itself, as I've just described, Mars in Capricorn. But then there is the impact of the transit itself upon you and your birth chart, which is a totally different thing or a potentially totally different thing.


So to have a better sense of how you're going to feel about any particular ingress, a.k.a. planet in a sign, what you're going to do is look at where it falls in your birth chart. Now, this is where you do need to know what your birth chart looks like, and the house system you use is really important. I am a fan of Campanus houses, as I've talked about on the podcast a bunch. But you use what you use. And you want to look at where Capricorn falls, and in particular early degrees of Capricorn falls, in your birth chart. That's what part of your chart that Mars is highlighting or lighting up.


If you have planets in your birth chart that have an easy relationship to the zodiac sign of Capricorn, then this can be a really fruitful transit. And if you have planets in your birth chart that are in zodiac signs that have a hard time with Capricorn energies, well then, that's going to be a pain in your buns. And so there's understanding the kind of technical implications of a Mars in Capricorn transit or any ingress, and then there's understanding it in the context of your own chart.


The cool thing is when we're looking at the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, or Mars, these planets move so quickly that all you need to do is decide, "For a year, I'm going to pay attention to these things," and you'll have a pretty good sense of what to expect. I mean, obviously, if you give it several years, you'll have a much more substantive and comprehensive sense of what to expect, but that's the general approach you want to take.


So take a peek at your chart and look at the zodiac sign on the cusp of whatever house Capricorn falls in, and you will then know where Mars is and where you can apply these energies, these hardworking, persistent energies. Remember, don't just use astrology as a way to freak yourself out about something going wrong. There is positive potential for every single astrological event. There just is. There's positive potential of how you can relate to it, what it can spark in your life, and how you can learn and grow from it. You just gotta—you gotta have that kind of constructive approach to astrology.


Now, all that said, we're not done. On the 28th, I've got two transits to tell you about. We've got a Sun sextile to Chiron that's exact on that date and also a Mercury conjunction to Pluto again. We'll get there. One sec. So let's start with the Sun sextile to Chiron. The Sun sextile to Chiron is a really kind of dynamic transit. This transit empowers us to cope with things that are painful or wounded or sticky—in other words, things that are junked up in our psychology and our sense of self and directly impacting our vitality.


The lovely thing about this transit is that if you are willing and able to directly confront these things and be present for these things, then we can make great progress and strides without the same level of pain that we often experience with Chiron. Isn't that cool? If you find that you're in a really uncomfortable situation and you're doing all your self-care stuff and it's not working, I would encourage you on this date to really pay attention to whether or not you're seeking to protect something that actually needs to be released.


Questioning your own motives and assumptions is a really valuable thing to do as a general practice, but in particular this week, pretty much all of the astrology supports doing that, or if it doesn't support it, it wants us to do that. And so the trouble with this—or not, depending on your nature—is that this takes some amount of strength and bravery and another healthy dose of humility. There is nothing wrong with realizing you've been wrong. There's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with realizing that you fucked up or that you've been going in a direction that is not the right direction for you.


You're not supposed to be perfect. You're not supposed to live a life without any problems or trauma. If that were the case, we wouldn't have Pluto. We wouldn't have Saturn. We wouldn't. So it's okay if you've got struggles. What you want to do is rise to meet those struggles. I cannot say this emphatically enough: we are living through just intense times right now, and also, it's always intense times. It's like the world is what it is, and life can be quite hard at times. Instead of waiting for it to end, instead of figuring out how we got here so that we can blame other people or ourselves, the healthiest, wisest, and most effective and productive thing you can do is come to a state of acceptance with it—seriously, a state of just, "This is what it is. Maybe I hate it. Maybe I love it." It's acceptance.


And from that place, identify for yourself, "Who do I want to be in this? How do I choose to respond to this? If this is the situation I'm in, if this is the situation that we're in, what needs attention? What needs doing? And how can I participate to the best of my ability?" That's it. Luckily, the Sun sextile to Chiron is empowering for that. But also, in general in life, it's a good direction to take. Just a hot tip. Just a hot tip there.


Now, that brings us to the other exact transit that is occurring on the 28th, and that's Mercury conjunction to Pluto. On the 23rd, we had a Sun conjunction to Mercury in Aquarius. And now, on the 28th, Mercury is conjoined to Pluto because Mercury has retrograded back into Capricorn. So now Mercury is meeting Mars and Venus and Pluto in Capricorn. They're not all at the same degree, but they're all in the same sign.


So Mercury conjunction to Pluto may sound like a familiar transit because we went through it exactly on December 30th of 2021, and here we are again, my nerds. This transit is difficult. It stimulates compulsive, obsessive thinking. It often finds us fixated on relationship dynamics, thoughts, attitudes, things we said, things we wish we said, things that someone else said, the way they said it, in a way that is self-destructive even though the capacity that this transit provokes is for it to be healing.


So here are some best practices for this transit. First thing, don't start shit if you don't want shit in your life. This is not a time to poke bears. This is not a time to email someone or call someone or text someone or say some shit that you know is going to really upset them unless you're ready for a conflict because everyone is affected by this transit. Now, it might be pretty mild for you, but you don't know how it's going to be affecting the people around you. Your negative obsessions, whatever they are, are, yes, about whatever it is that you're fixated on, but pro tip, they're absolutely about you. They're about your assumptions and your beliefs. The way that you think, the things that you return to, are a reflection on you, on what you care about, on what you believe, on what you fear.


And so the more that you can fixate your thinking on taking responsibility for your own thinking, the more that you can reflect on your own patterns and the things that you choose to return to, even though it might not feel like you're choosing it, the more you'll get out of this transit. And because Mercury is Retrograde, you can just trust that this transit will have a third hit. So it's retrograding back, and then when it goes direct again, it's going to cross Pluto again.


So we're going to have a third hit of this transit on February 11th, which means that whatever patterns or dynamics that you're dealing with in your mental health, in your relationships, at work, whatever it is that started off December 30th and that you're experiencing on and around this date, a.k.a. this whole week, they're not going to go away magically. They're going to come back in a new form or in an adjusted form on February 11th.


So it's really important to pay attention to this transit and to remember that this is all happening in Capricorn, the zodiac sign that wants us to take responsibility for ourselves, to be conservative with our actions and our energies, and to have humility. It's also a zodiac sign that can find us compromising our humanity by fixating on proving ourselves in public instead of showing up in private so that we can make the foundational changes we need to.


Now, one more thing I'll say about this transit before we move on. Whenever Pluto's involved, we know there can be power struggles. And so we are likely to see some bullshit in public. We are likely to see misuses and abuses of power, and that might be new abuses of power or it might be that things come to the surface so that we are all confronted by the consequences of it. Now, this is a Mercury Retrograde, which means that this transit presents with it the opportunity to reflect, to review, and to reassess—in other words, to fucking change, to do the simple work of looking within and reassessing.


When we decide we need to reassess or when we learn that we need to reassess, and if you can take this opportunity to be humble enough to check in with yourself and own, "Oh, wow. Whenever I'm tired, I have a really short fuse, and I get mad at people and I snap at the people who I know won't snap back. That is shitty of me. Shit. I do that. Okay.  That feels bad," and instead of losing yourself in guilt, instead of being so scared of failing that you just don't say anything to anyone ever, instead, finding ways of—if you've got to make amends to someone, if you've got to make an apology to someone, do that, even if it's to yourself. And set the intention. Make a plan for doing different, doing better. It's a Retrograde. It's a Retrograde, so the opportunity for us is to heal. And that's cool, right? It's not chill. It's not easy. But it is very cool.


Okay. So, that said, we've got one last transit this week, and that is on the 29th of January, Venus goes direct. That's right. Well, she goes station direct in Capricorn. And this is really great news in a lot of ways because Venus Retrograde can be a little bit sticky and difficult in the context of the economy and in the context of our relationships, our body-image issues, all of that shit. And as we are in the Retroshade period of the Venus station direct, what I want to encourage you to do is reflect on what's been going on for you since December 19th of 2021, when this Retrograde began.


What's been going on for you internally? Have your values shifted? How do you know that your values have shifted? Can you see that reflected in your actions and in your choices, or is it something more internal? Have your relationships shifted? What have you learned within your relationships? How have you chosen to participate differently? If you've realized that you're always attracted to people who disrespect you in some way, have you then decided that you're no longer going to engage with those people? Or are you kind of stuck in the noticing phase, and you haven't moved into the proactive doing something about it yet phase? Hey, man. That's cool, because Venus is now direct, so it's going to be a little bit easier for us to take the insights that we've accumulated during this Retrograde and convert them into actions.


Just know that this is the time. Venus is related to so many things, but they all boil down to values. So make sure the way you're engaging with others, yourself, and the world around you reflect your values. We can't all act in ways that reflect our values all the time. That's just not realistic. It's not even a great goal. But we want to point ourselves in that direction, ideally speaking. The good news about this Venus station direct transit is that even though it is influenced by the Mercury/Pluto conjunction, which, as we know, is intense and can provoke power struggles, Uranus is quite tightly trine to Venus station direct, which gives us a bit of a boost.


And, again, this can empower us to be able to put into action the things that we have cultivated or learned during the Venus Retrograde period. It can be great for moving relationships forward or kind of giving it a bit more momentum than we've had during the Retrograde. Now, that said, you may have been doing a lot of relationship work during this Retrograde period. It's important to take space over the next couple weeks to reflect on what's happened in this period so that you can integrate it, learn from it, and apply it to your life.


Now, my loves, those are the major transits of this week. I'm going to restate them just for your notes and your edification. But as always, if you have an interest in tracking the daily transits, I encourage you to subscribe to my beloved astrology pro tool, Astrology For Days, which you can get at astrologyfordays.com or on my glorious new website. Yeah, it's glorious. I'm sticking with that. You can always track the transits, know what's coming, and be able to refer back to what has happened in the recent past. And inside of the app, there is an ephemeris, which is the tool for tracking the movement of the planets. Kind of exciting. If you're first learning astrology, it's a really important thing to be able to read, and that means learning the symbols and the glyphs. But hey, we got a symbol index in the app, so we got you covered there.


Anyways, okay. Recapping, on the 23rd of January, we have a Sun conjunction to Mercury Retrograde. On the 24th, Mars ingresses into Capricorn. On the 28th, we have a Sun sextile to Chiron and a Mercury conjunction to Pluto again. This last happened on December 30th and will happen again February 11th. And finally, on the 29th, Venus goes station direct, ending a Retrograde that began on December 19th of 2021. And that's your damn horoscope, my loves. There it is.


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Be kind to yourself and others and gentle with yourself in the week ahead. I'll talk to you soon. Buh-bye.