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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My darlings and my dears, well, just another week in paradise for us all, wouldn't you say? Let's get into this week's question, and it goes like this: "Hi, Jessica. I hope you're safe and healthy. You've talked a lot about microactivism and the many ways we can engage with what's happening. Still, I feel like donating money or signing petitions feels so much more comfortable and the safer option for me, maybe a little too much. I do love feeling comfortable but also know that discomfort is necessary, too. Any interesting things about my chart that could instigate reflections and questions about that for me? Please don't share my name or birth info. Sending love."

So I want to just, first of all, thank you for sending me this question. I get just a million versions—I mean, a million is a great exaggeration. I get many versions of this question frequently, like every week, sometimes every day. It's a tricky question. I'm going to unpack it, and I'm not even going to focus on your birth chart to answer it because we kind of don't need to. Let me tell you why.

I am so grateful that so many of you are motivated to change and to grow and that so many of you are really feeling called to participate in the social system around you in new ways. I want to just say—not just to you, my dear questioner, because again, I've gotten so many questions like this—I think everyone is special. I think we all have our own path, and I think we all have our own callings. And, also, there is a trouble with individualism when there is a collective or systemic problem because if you—any one of you—are like, "I have to find my way, and I don't know what my way is," and you turn to astrology as a way to find your special, unique way of participating in activism or being engaged as a microactivist—if you are only looking for your unique way, then what you're doing is focusing a little bit too much on yourself.

So let me explain. And, again, no judgment here. This is not like a criticism. It's a perspective. Social change doesn't just occur through acts of genius. It occurs through a lot of mundane actions taken by a lot of individuals who have a shared idea about the collective. I want to encourage you to take some time this week to watch some videos of ants or bees, some smart creature who knows how to work collaboratively with other creatures for the long haul for a shared goal. Make that your inspiration.

Another way to think of it is do what Beyoncé says and get information. I don't know. But the upshot of what I'm trying to say to you is this. There are so many organizers, there are so many organizations, that are led by the people who are most directly impacted by any number of social ills and systemic problems that we have. What I want to encourage you to be doing is to be listening to them and doing what they say. If you want to deal with something like anti-Black racism, I'm not encouraging you to go to all the Black people that you have access to and ask them what to do. Please don't do that.

I'm saying learn from Black women. Buy their damn books. Pay them for their classwork. Support them on Patreon. Find ways of really taking cues from people who are already out there putting out so much content and so much information that can empower you to know what your next steps are because it's true that making your donations when you can, where you can—it can feel like maybe not enough. Signing petitions, for sure, can feel like not enough. I am of the mind—and, hey, I'm a triple Capricorn. But I'm really of the mind that calling your member of Congress is impactful. Anyone who is elected is going to respond to masses of people emailing them and calling them to say the same thing because they are elected officials. Right? Not spending money, if you can, depending on your finances—not spending money to support companies that you know are shitty and that are supporting things that you don't believe in and you don't want to see in the world, that's really powerful. That's a powerful thing to do.

But I understand what you're saying. You're like, "It's not quite enough." Right? It doesn't feel like enough. So I'm going to give you really specific, clear advice in a minute. But before I do, I just want to say this. Your birth chart is not the answer for this. Nobody's birth chart is the answer for this. If what you're trying to do is to integrate best practices into your day-to-day life so that you can be an active part of the world's healing, what you want to do is take an assessment of what your skills are, what your resources are, what your capacity is. If you're somebody who has the capacity to read contracts and understand them, you can donate that service to an organization that might need help with it.

There's a million things that you can do with what might seem like not-that-useful skills. But you have to make a choice from a place of embodiment because here's the thing. When you're in a state of fear and you're in a state of terror, what tends to happen is we leave our bodies. We cycle out of our bodies, and then we start looking for an answer, a fix, a way to stop feeling bad, instead of when we get present and when we get grounded, we start to figure out, "Well, what is my truth? What is it that I can hold? What is it that I can sustain?" When you approach things from that perspective, you more gracefully and easily find the answer.

So you kind of gotta drop this idea of, "What is it that I'm supposed to do, or what is unique to me?" and instead look at, "Where is my heart the most engaged? What issues are the most compelling to me?" I want you to notice that I'm using the words "engaged" and "compelling." It might be a topic that brings you a lot of stress, but you keep on returning to it. Sometimes our defensiveness is actually a really good indicator that something is getting activated within us that we don't know how to cope with, and that's a place where we would be very wise to investigate instead of continuing to defend it.

So this is where I'm going to give you a really simple rule of threes. Rule of threes. You're going to do this over the course of four weeks, or it can be three months, whatever you prefer. But I think it's easier to start with a one-month commitment to things in general. Do what you want to do.

So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to locate one concern that impacts you personally. And that might be an emotional or mental health issue. That might be birth control or food access. Maybe you live in a food desert and it's food access. I don't know what it is. I'm not even sure from your question if you're in the U.S., so you might be dealing with different issues than I might list out living in the U.S. myself.

So you're going to identify one issue that deeply impacts you, and you're going to center finding actions that slowly chip away at solutions for it. So that might mean elevating the message of an organization. That might mean finding an organization or a person who is doing something about it already and needs help. You want to think like an ant. This is a time for community effort. This is the time to be a community member doing your part within the effort. And there's a lot of ways to participate within community effort. So one concern that impacts you.

The next thing you're going to do is you are going to find another concern that directly impacts your community. Now, you can define your community as your circle of friends, your neighborhood, your town, all the people of the same demographic that you are—however you conceive of community, however you experience community, find one thing that serves your community. And what you're going to do with these points, with these bits of homework I'm giving you, is start where you're at.

Starting where you're at might look like, once a week, you're going to give yourself the job to do education. It could mean reading. It could be watching videos—learning from experts, not asking individuals who are on the front lines to hold your hands through anything, but doing research and consulting with experts, and, if you have the financial resources, making sure to pay the people who are teaching you and making sure that the people who are teaching you are representing a diverse demographic of humans and perspectives. So it could start with education. It could start with engagement and action. It really just depends on what you're choosing to do and where you're at.

The third thing is you're going to choose to do one thing for the world. You're going to do one thing. Set one bit of microactivism or activism for the world, so not for you and your friends, not for you and your immediate community, but something for a broader demographic of people. So, for you, that might mean any number of things. It might be something like the environment, which absolutely is for you and your community, but it's not exactly like that heartfelt thing that you and your community are focused on right now. Do that.

So what I'm trying to get you to do is to feel empowered that you are doing more, but not take on so much that it's not tenable; it's not sustainable. It's also about creating some sense of order within how you approach this. And this is a good thing, like I said, to do for a month. You can choose to engage with this content every day, every other day, once a week, whatever is sustainable in your life. But commit to it. Really commit to it. And if you can do this for a month, you might want to try it for three months. And if you try it for three months, it might become a lifestyle.

This is really what we need. We need changes in our lives, and not just Band-Aids for bullet wounds. There are so many ways that we can show up for the people in our community, we can show up for the world. It might look like finding the assisted living facility in your area and seeing if you can—I don't know—visit with people on the other side of a glass from outside the building or something. I think what's really important for me to say is that it is really great that you are doing something. And I want to encourage you to continue to donate the money you can and contact your members of Congress and sign your petitions. I think those things are really powerful, and hopefully you'll make it a consistent part of your life. I think it's also really great that you know it's not enough for you at this time, and it's not enough for the world at this time.

Okay. So next steps are figuring out, what more can you do? And the only way to do that is by engaging with the world, and so understanding that our spirituality, our birth chart—they're really meaningful resources, but sometimes the most practical thing to do is actually the better thing to do. You could look at your birth chart to determine what delicious meals you'd like to eat, or you could open a cookbook and just pick a recipe. You know what I mean?

So, basically, my answer to you and to everyone else who sent in a version of this question is pick up a cookbook and pick a goddamn recipe. Follow the leadership of organizers and people who have been at this for a minute who have already created public resources that you can learn from and take direction from.

Okay. Just one more thing. I went onto Instagram to crowdsource what other people are doing as ways of participating in the system at this time. So, if you go to my account, @jessicalanyadoo—it's linked in the show notes—you can see it in the highlights in my bio, and you can get tons of advice from people who are figuring out how to participate in the world in ways that are sustainable and meaningful to them.

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Let's talk astrology. But you know I've got some things to say first, as I like to do. The transits that have marked 2020—these big transits, not just the day-to-day transits, but the outer-planet stuff that I have talked about in lots of different episodes on the podcast—they, over the course of time, like in a big-picture way, have a crushing impact. And whenever we experience the crushing weight of consequences, of systemic problems, of our fears, and of the evils that humans often do, whenever we're in that, it's like a test of our humanity. It's a test of our ability to stay with our feelings, to find a level of boundaries that protect our wellness.

But when we're suffering or when we bear witness to the suffering of others, it is ultimately a test of our humanity. And it is not an easy one to bear. But when we make space for our humanness, the fact that we all have a learning curve, the fact that we all have shit days that have nothing to do with any of the big issues that are at play in the world at this time, and we all have shit days in the specific response to and context of all of the things that are going on in the world at this time—all of it is happening. The psychic toll of this time is heavy. Care for yourself. Allow yourself to be loved and to receive love.

There's so much happening in the world. There's so much happening in the United States. There's a woman named Jessica Yellin. She does something called News Not Noise. Something that she shared was this really simple infographic, and it said this: it has taken 98 days for the United States to hit one million cases of COVID. 98 days to hit one million cases of COVID in the U.S. It took 43 more days to hit two million cases. It took 27 more day to hit three million cases. And then, 16 days after that, we hit four million cases. Listen. COVID is very fucking serious, and it is clearly, in the United States, getting more serious very quickly. And COVID-19 disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities and poor rural communities.

It's really important that we understand that part of the activism, part of the social consciousness and our civic duty that is required in this moment in time in human history is wearing a mask, and it is washing your damn hands. It is being conscientious about the vulnerable communities and understanding that as you take responsibility for how you conduct yourself, how you engage with the world in such a simple and specific way, wearing a mask in public, it's a form of civic duty. It's a form of civic responsibility. And it's a really essential one right now. My loves, wear a damn mask.

I will, like I've been promising, drop an episode in the next month or so about the September 9th Mars Retrograde in Aries. It's happening September through November, and it doesn't look fantastic for COVID. So I want to just really ground you into the current statistics and facts and make sure that you are being conscientious. And within that, if there are people in your life, whether they're family or coworkers or friends, whatever it is, who refuse to wear a mask, who are putting themselves at risk, you don't need to feel guilty or bad for having a boundary. Masks are literally a boundary. They're literally a boundary, and it's a really great time to practice healthy boundaries.

Now, there's one more thing I want to say before I get into our horoscope, and that's Portland. Fucking Portland, Oregon, is going through a thing right now. The federal government has released camouflage-clad officers that don't have clear identification badges. So they're not the military. Let's be really clear. They're not military. They are not trained to do what they're doing in Portland. There's no reason for them to be wearing camouflage because you know what they're not doing by wearing camouflage? Blending in. They're not in the bush. No, they're on the streets of Portland. And they're starting up shit.

The mayor of Portland doesn't want them there. The DA doesn't want them there. The federal government is insisting that they're there even though local officials don't want them there. That's not how the United States of America is supposed to work, maybe surprising no one, but I want to say don't let your cynicism and your awareness of how broken the democratic process is in the United States make you miss what should be a deeply alarming descent into fascism or authoritarian rule.

I was actually chatting with somebody over DM this past week, and she said that she felt like Americans are waiting for a memo, like a memo from a trusted resource to say, "Hey, this is a fascist state. We are living in an authoritarian regime." And that's just not how it happens. It's not how it happens anywhere. The reality is that this government is acting in ways that are completely outside of the most conservative right-wing approach to policing, to governance, and to capitalism. It's dangerous. It is important that we understand it as dangerous.

I also want to just acknowledge that in Portland, these federal agents are deployed against Black Lives Matter protestors, people who are standing up for Black lives. Right? This is very important. And it's also important to acknowledge that there's a Wall of Moms who are using their white-passing privilege—it's majoritively white or white-passing people who are doing this, who are using their privilege as women, as moms, on the front lines to make a difference.

And from what I understand—and I'm obviously not a journalist. You should get your news from other sources than me. Come on, guys. Go find journalists to really listen to. But from what I understand, that Wall of Moms that was protesting inspired a wall of vets and a wall of dads and a wall of teachers and a wall of lawyers. And that is fucking gorgeous. For me, it is a great source of inspiration because it is so easy when tensions are high and when social media makes us so connected to each other—we're a lot of strangers that are very connected to each other—it's so easy to forget who your enemy is sometimes.

There are so many people who have common values and common goals but different viewpoints about how to achieve those common values and common goals. Those people are not your enemy. They may be annoying to you. They may be people you find to be insulting or just wrong. But they're not your enemy. If you have rage, if you have time to post a million things about some random person, take all that rage, take all that mental energy, and direct it towards people with power. And people with power, I'm talking about people in politics, policymakers, business owners of large businesses that actually have social power through capitalism.

That's where you can make a difference. It's tempting to feel like policing people on social media is a way to make a difference, and some of you might feel that it is a way to make a difference. Maybe it does make a difference for you. For me, it feels like a misuse of energy. You know what I mean? There are people who can make a difference. If you're not reaching out to elected officials to tell them what the hell you think—and they can be your elected officials; they can be other people's elected officials. Reach out to elected officials. Anyone who's elected has to give some amount of fucks.

If you're giving money to companies that you know back terrible things and then yelling at people on Twitter because they have a different approach to your same shared goal, then you're misusing your own energy, IMO. Now, listen. I'm an astrologer, so I understand that different people have different charts. And our different charts and our different parts incline us to have different viewpoints and different realities. It's okay that many of us have different approaches to things, different approaches to finding the world's answers. In fact, I think it's quite necessary.

But what we want to not do is tear each other apart from the inside. And there is a fine line, and I think that fine line is in a different place for different people and in different situations. But there is a fine line between having a conversation with someone, saying, "Hey, I feel differently than you. Have you considered my perspective?" and going after someone and allowing all of your rage and your upset and your hurt and your fear to pool up and be unleashed on someone who actually isn't your enemy. We have got a major fight in front of us on all the levels, on all the damn levels. And so, when you stand up and make a whole lot of noise, try to make it count.

Now, I'm going to get into your horoscope, but I'm going to say one very last thing, and it's something I've talked about in a different episode before, surprising no one, as I am Sun, Moon, and Rising all in Capricorn. I believe in working within the system to change the system. I believe that republicans wouldn't have invested as much money and as many years and as much manpower into suppressing the vote if the vote wasn't valuable. I'm really a strong believer in voting. If it's bullshit and it does nothing, then the worst thing that you've done by voting is wasted some time. And if it does something, if it has some power, if it has some meaning, then thank fucking God you did it.

I want to encourage you to register to vote, and if your state allows, register to vote by mail. Vote. Vote early. Vote in all elections. That is my PSA for you. Okay. Now we're going to get into the horoscope.

Your horoscope this week is covering the dates of July 26th through August 1st, 2020. On the 27th of July, as promised, we have that Mercury square to Mars. Now, you'll remember, July 8th, this transit already occurred. So you can expect whatever it is that was up for you to come on back up. Now, that doesn't mean specifically the identical thing. For some people, it might be like, "I had a fight with my best friend, and things seem to have gone under the surface; things are going to come up again on the 27th"—it could be something like that, or it could be more of a theme that is your theme, so the theme of boundaries or organizing your time or some sort of physical health issue.

So the Mercury square to Mars is likely to kick up agitation, irritability, and activation of boundaries. The downside of that activation of boundaries is that it can occur in a really defensive way. It can make you feel really aggro and irritable and like you just, again, want a day to dump on people. Or you might have to deal with someone who's doing a day to dump on you.

This transit's low-key rough, as I've talked about it a couple times before on the podcast, because it's really been a huge part of this whole month. And so defensiveness is big for this transit. If you find yourself in a conflict with someone or a miscommunication, I want to encourage you to notice your ego. Notice your ego because what other people say and what other people do is their problem. It may directly impact you, but it's their problem. What you have the opportunity to do on this date is to gain greater self-awareness around your ego and how it functions or doesn't function or overfunctions. You want to become more self-aware so that you have more choices, especially when you feel like you have no choices.

This transit, it really can be difficult to bear because so many of us have such a hard time with our ego and with anger, both of which are governed by Mars. The reasons why we have a hard time with it, they're cultural; they're often things that are put upon us that we eventually kind of take on and take in ourselves. But, regardless, this is an opportunity for greater self-awareness, which is the essential—I won't call it first step, because it's like the first step and then the third step and then the fifth step. It's every other step, we have to kind of bring ourselves back to self-awareness.

But as we get more self-aware about our own ego drives and how we experience and express anger, we become capable of having clearer, more consistent boundaries, of doing what needs to get done when it needs to get done, and not losing or misplacing our energies in a way that creates consequences that simply provoke the need for greater defensiveness and all that kind of shit. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you know what I'm saying?

Now, one quick little note about this transit is that it's occurring at a different degree than it was on the 8th of July. And so it's going to feel different. It's going to be a follow-up to what happened on and around the 8th. So whatever it is that happens to you or happens in your life or happens around you, I want to encourage you to really regard it as an unfolding that you can learn from. Something is unfolding in yourself or in your life, and that's actually really useful. Even if it's fucking annoying, it's really useful.

Now, on the same date, the 27th of July, Jupiter will form an exact sextile transit to the planet Neptune, and Venus forms a square to Neptune. So I'm going to start with the Jupiter sextile to Neptune. I've talked about it on the podcast before. When we see these transits from outer planets to each other—Jupiter and Neptune are both outer planets—we are seeing really societal shifts. So the positive potential of this shift is absolutely greater empathy, a greater sense of interconnectedness between all of us as humans. So it's really good for social change in that regard.

These two planets are inherently spiritual. They're about empathy and broadmindedness and openness and the transformation of spirit kind of as a gateway to more material transformation. So the downside of this transit can be dissociation. It can be checking out and just being on a TV binge that lasts you 24 hours or totally losing hours and hours on things that actually don't matter to you. This transit can be associated with the high arts and the healing that occurs from positive stimulation, creative stimulation.

This is a great day to center whatever creativity gives you life. And so that might mean organizing your day so that you have an hour-long break at some point where you can listen to music that uplifts you, or you can actually scroll through your favorite artist on Instagram or whatever it is. It doesn't have to be a deep meditation, although that would be fucking awesome, doing some sort of meditation or body-based practice that encourages greater connection to self and the planet. That would be wonderful. Get into nature? Amazing. But maybe that's idealistic for your situation.

So there are so many ways of going about things that don't require you to cancel work and change your life and throw away the kids or whatever. Right? Whatever way is accessible to you, center it so that basically you're getting a bit of a break, and you're centering self-care and even some rest, but not to the exclusion of engagement with the world.

Now, that brings me to the Venus square to Neptune. I don't know why there's three transits that are exact in one day. Why? You gotta take that up with, I don't know, whoever makes the rules. Okay. So Venus square to Neptune. This transit—man. This transit at the same time as the Mercury square to Mars, I'm not going to lie to you: that doesn't sound awesome.

So Venus square to Neptune, the first thing I always think is have safer sex. Around this date, have safer sex, whatever the hell that means for however the hell you have sex. And the reason why is because under this transit, we have a harder time with boundaries. It can make us feel just really anxious, like we don't know our place in other people's eyes or in the world. It really is an exhausting transit.

So this is where we really want to pay attention to the ego with that Mercury/Mars transit because here's the thing. That Mercury/Mars transit is happening. It's happening, and it's triggering egos. And at the same time, Neptune—its unhealthy expression is really about victimhood. It's the power of victimhood. And so Venus square to Neptune really can increase your sense of martyrdom or victimhood in a way that is really just you trying to get yourself some space and give yourself permission to have a boundary. And if that's activated within you or you see that activated in someone else, I want to encourage you to greet it with compassion and empathy but also firm boundaries. Firm boundaries. You are allowed to take a break because you need a break. You don't need to justify. You don't need to justify.

And you want to really pay attention to your desire or impulse to defend your feelings or your needs. Venus, as you know, is related to our values. And Neptune is related to our anxieties and our ideals. And so there can be a tension that feels anxious between your ideals and your values. There can be a tension between what you need to do in the material world to get things done and what you actually think is the proper and ideal way of conducting yourself. We have to accept our humanness. Nobody is perfect. Nobody is doing the right thing all the time in all the situations. Nobody. So what you want to make sure is that the compromises you make aren't actually compromising you; they're not compromises of things that cause harm.

The downside of this Neptune/Venus transit is that it can make you feel so anxious that it incurs defensiveness or martyrdom. So it could be like an unhealthy experience and expression of "I have no choice." What you want to be able to do is be like, "Okay. I'm making this choice, and I feel really messy about it because it is really messy. And it's the choice I have to make at this time. How can I take responsibility for it moving forward?" That's what you want to try to get to if you can.

This Neptune/Venus square can be real shit for personal relationships, and that is because it makes it so that things are fuzzy or unclear, and again, you're not sure of your value with others. And so having this Mercury/Mars square and the Venus/Neptune square, it's kind of like if you say something, if you try to process, it's likely to come off a little defensive or a little aggressive or harsh. Or you might find yourself overwhelmed with emotions that you're like, "Where are these fucking feelings coming from? What am I supposed to do about this?"

It's rough. I'm not going to lie to you. It's rough. It's messy. Avoid interpersonal processing on and around the 27th. Just avoid it altogether. Give yourself permission to be in the messiness and the chaoticness of your thoughts and feelings so that you can sort out what are you really feeling, what is really going on for you about this situation or this person versus, "Are all of my emotions kind of pooling up and focusing and fixating around this dynamic or this person or this situation?" because it's going to be really hard to tell, like really hard to tell.

So give yourself permission to take some space. And if you verbally communicate very clearly to another person, "I need some space to figure this out, and I'm not rejecting you and I'm not walking away from you. I'm making sure that when I say something, I know what the fuck I'm saying. So give me some space to figure it out," and they do not respect that, that's really important information for you to have. When people don't respect your boundaries, that's a reflection of them, not you.

Okay. So there's more. On the 30th, we have a Mercury opposition to Jupiter, and it's also trining Neptune. When Mercury forms an opposition to Jupiter, what happens is we run at the mouth. I mean, there's no other way of saying it. We run at the mouth. There's a way that we can just speak before we think. We can be pushy in a way that we don't think we're being because we're so enthusiastic about our perspective. Or you might have to deal with somebody else who is doing that to you, somebody who's trying to really emphatically tell you what you should be thinking or what you should be doing or feeling. And it can be very frustrating.

Oppositions are often experienced as, like, a polarized relationship dynamic. So that could be some rando on the internet. It could be your partner. It could be your mom. I don't know what it is, but it's in relationship to others. So the good news is, because Mercury is also forming a trine to Neptune, that is more likely to incline people to have more empathy and more willingness to listen or hold space for different ideas and different ways of going about things. But this whole transit, really, it's a damn thing. It's a damn thing.

So rein it in. Pick your battles wisely. Not everybody needs to agree with you. Now, I'm not talking about disagreements that are rooted in hate and violence and oppression. I'm referring more to different approaches to same shared goals. I'm talking about more, do you really need to argue with your partner about the way they put the dishes in the dish rack? Is that actually necessary? I mean, the truth is, according to me, a totally chill triple Capricorn, there's a right and a wrong way of drip-drying a glass, obviously. And it's super annoying to see someone—and I won't name names—putting a glass in a weird way on the dish rack.

This is not the day to pick a fight about that. This is not the day to allow yourself to mutter loudly about something like that so that your roommate or your partner or your parent or your kid hears it. Just rein your shit in. Pick your battles wisely.

The one other thing I'll say about this particular transit is, if you have the inclination to learn, this is a great day for reading and for listening. It is. If you're doing public speaking, this could be actually a really great day for public speaking. But in general, this is a great day for soaking up new information. You just have to make that decision that you're going to do it, and then do it.

Okay. And then, finally, last transit of the week, on the 1st of August, the month starts out chill—that's sarcastic—with a Mercury opposition to Pluto. Jesus. So this whole week is going to bring up defensiveness, unfortunately. Mercury opposition to Pluto can really find you obsessing, just obsessing, on something that's really painful. Pluto is paranoia, obsession. Similar but differently than Mars, it is defensiveness. Similarly but differently than Neptune, it is victimhood.

Pluto is where we have shame. It's where our flight-and-fight mechanisms happen. So, when Mercury forms an opposition to the planet Pluto, it can be really intense because Mercury is your mind. It's your thinking and your attitudes, and it's what you say and what you text and what you email. And so this particular transit, honestly, it's just—it's a little bit of a land mine in terms of those things.

And what's very important is to make sure that you don't start something that you don't want to finish. You know what I mean? Pick your battles very fucking carefully under this transit, seriously, all week long, all week long, all week long, but certainly the most around this date, around the 1st, because this Mercury opposition to Pluto acts like a boomerang. Whatever you throw out there, it will come back at you. It will come back at you. And so, if you're putting shit out that you actually wouldn't want to have to eat, then maybe don't do it. Maybe don't do it.

I would expect this to be a day where the trolls are out. So it's totally healthy and lovely and reasonable for you to decide—if there's a day of the week that you're not going to be on social media, you're just going to take a break from your phone, this would be a great day to do that, honestly, because the transit is—it's likely to basically stir up really hard-to-feel feelings and really hard-to-sit-with thoughts. And so what humans tend to do is project them out on others. It's what we do.

If you can make it a goal to sit with your compulsions and not chase your negative obsessions and not empower them with your attention, instead to starve them of your attention, that can be really powerful. And it can be powerful, in part, because you're unlikely to do a great job at it, and that's a great opportunity for you to learn about your own compulsions.

This is a wonderful time to really engage with mindfulness concepts, mindfulness practices, because it'll be really hard to do. The best possible use of this energy is for self-discovery, self-analysis, and healing. This transit absolutely—just like all oppositions, this transit absolutely gives you the tools for doing exactly that. But it's kind of like you have to walk into a windstorm and walk against the current in order to get it done, which is hard, especially in the context of everything else that is happening astrologically this week. And so give yourself some grace. Do your damn best.

Now, there's one last thing that I want to say to round up this week's astrology. There is a great rise in propaganda. And within that, there is these fucking conspiracy theories, some of which may be right and a lot of which are not. We must be discerning in how we engage with news and making sure that it is not propaganda. And, to a certain extent, I guess maybe all news is a little bit propaganda. But, seriously, this particular week with Mercury opposite Jupiter and Mercury opposite Pluto, it really can coincide with an increase of propaganda or a propaganda campaign kind of hitting the internet. And you might find yourself more susceptible to ideas that match your feelings but maybe don't have a whole lot of factual base to them.

So a couple simple best practices: look at the year that something was written. Make sure that you look for three other articles or resources from that same writer or publication. Do your damn due diligence. When I was a teenager and I had my first job in retail, I was told in my training whatever color the person is wearing who comes into the store, sell them that. And it doesn't matter what they ask for. Sell them the color that they're wearing. And I was like, "Fuck you, capitalists. I'm not going to fucking do that." And then, after a couple months of working there, I was just humbled. I was so demoralized to find that people bought the color they were wearing over and over and over again because the reason why they put on that color that day is because they were feeling it.

There is a way that we have, as humans, a tendency to agree with things that match how we feel in the moment. And you want to stay aware of that impulse and make sure that you're not convincing yourself of an idea or allowing yourself to become convinced of an idea because it matches your feelings. Make sure that you believe something because it is accurate and true. That's all.

Okay. Now, here is your recap of the transits for this week. On the 27th, we have three separate exact transits. The first one is Jupiter sextile to Neptune. The next one is Mercury square to Mars. And then, finally, we have a Venus square to Neptune. On the 30th, we have a Mercury opposition to Jupiter and a Mercury trine to Neptune. And then, finally, on the 1st, Mercury is opposite Pluto. And that's your horoscope.

As always, I thank you so much for joining me here on Ghost of a Podcast. I want to invite you to join me at Patreon, but honestly, don't join me this week. Put it in your calendar and join me on August 1st because there's no point in paying for one week of a month. You know what I mean? Just join on the 1st, and you get a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast where I run through all of your transits for the month ahead. And in the month of August, I'm dropping my last teaching videos of the Rider-Waite deck. And then, in September, I'm moving on to the Thoth. So get behind that, I say. Get behind that. Bye.