Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

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Welcome back to Ghost. This week, I am so excited to be joined by Yael, and we're going to do a little reading.

Jessica: So, Yael, what would you like to know from me today?

Yael: Yes. I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you for having me. My question—at the heart of it, it's about my relationship to cannabis, marijuana, to smoking weed, and why I do it, why it feels so good, and what it is that I am losing through my experience. It's not an awesome experience all the time for me. I have friends who smoke weed all day every day and love it and have no shame about it, and they're just highly functional stoners. And I am not that person. I mean, sometimes I'm that person, but oftentimes I'm not. I love getting high sometimes, and other times it creates this whole experience of shame and now anxiety for me. So now it's started impacting my sleep, and just not a great experience for me. And I'm like, "Then why do I keep coming back to it?" You know?

Jessica: Yeah. That's a lot. And so let me just ask you a couple kind of qualifying questions. How long have you been smoking weed? When did it kind of turn sideways on you? And how frequently do you smoke—or imbibe? However.

Yael: Yes. I started smoking as a teenager, but it was not a thing. I smoked because my friends smoked. I was way more of a drinker. I just kind of got high because that's what the kids were doing and never really had—I had some partners who were stoners, and they would get me high. But it really started to become a thing about five years ago. I had just returned from a three-month trip in Brazil where I was doing pretty intense plant medicine work there, and I came back and I just didn't know what I was doing with my life, and I didn't know how to integrate that experience. My housing was unstable. And I just leaned into smoking, and I started smoking as a way to comfort myself.

I think comforting myself has been the thread through all of it. It just provides a lot of comfort for me. I don't smoke so much, honestly. I'll go a month without smoking, and then I'll feel great. And I'm like, "Great. Now is a good time to smoke." And so I'll buy a few joints, and I'll smoke all day every day for three or four days. And then I'll have a shame spiral, and I'll stop for a week. And then I'll smoke again for three or four days, have a shame spiral, stop for two weeks, start again. So that's the cycle I've been in for a few years.

Jessica: Interesting. So, first, let me pause to say you were born June 23rd, 1990, at 2:52 a.m. in the Big Apple of New York. And I'm just going to dive in, but I want you to interrupt me with questions as they emerge, okay? I don't have any moralistic views on drugs, and I think it's an important thing for me to name. Whatever shame is coming up for you, hopefully we can unpack that a little bit, but also, drugs aren't good or bad. They are what they are, right? And we can use them in ways that are healthy or not, or good or bad, I guess. But I think that's an important place to start. This kind of moralistic judgment vibe—so Saturn. So Saturn. And of course, what planet governs weed? Saturn. So weed has CBD, THC, all the parts. All the damn parts. Saturn. So what planet is the highest planet in your birth chart? One guess.

Yael: Saturn.

Jessica: Fucking Saturn. Yeah. And so we're going to talk about this, but I will name something else. You have the Sun and Moon in Cancer. You were born on a New Moon in Cancer, and you're very, very Cancer. You got four planets, including Chiron, in Cancer. And so that you would seek anything with the motivation of comfort—yeah. Check. That makes perfect sense, and that's really healthy and self-appropriate for you. The tricky thing is, because you have a Jupiter/Chiron conjunction in Cancer and it's in your third house—because you have this conjunction, proportion is not always your strength. You're likely to, one, always go long, go hard, or not go at all. Does that make sense for you?

Yael: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. If something brings you comfort or safety or happiness once, all that Cancer in your chart is like, "Okay. So it'll work again if I just try it again. Wait. Was I wearing a T-shirt instead of a long-sleeve shirt? I'll just wear a T-shirt when I do it." You get a little on the superstitious side with all that Cancerian stuff, and it can make it hard for you to pace yourself or to quit things, and the motivation's emotional as opposed to physiological. Does that resonate?

Yael: Oh yeah. For sure. I feel like weed is not good for me physiologically. I have chronic illness. I've had chronic Lyme disease for almost 15 years, and I feel like weed totally fucks with my joints and it's just not good for my physical health. It lowers my stamina. But it's emotionally comforting. It feels good, and so I do it. So my motivations are and always have been deeply emotional.

Jessica: Deeply emotional. Yeah. And then, to make things more complicated, you've got Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and the Midheaven all in Capricorn. The Cancerian placements that you have, I would say, are more personal, and so they can feel a lot stronger. You are likely to feel more identified with Cancer. But you have just as much Capricorn in you. So it's moralistic. What are the rules? Is this right? Is this wrong? Is this working? What service is this providing?

I think that this feeling of comfort or this drive towards comfort is a really good one, but it is likely to feel elusive, in part because of how half your chart practically is in Cancer and the other half is practically in Capricorn. Right? And Lyme's disease—is that the one main thing? I know Lyme's disease has a million tentacles to it, but is that the one thing that you have going on, or are there other things as well?

Yael: That's my main physical health issue. I have some mental health stuff that started about three years ago, but that's my main physical thing. Yeah.

Jessica: I mean, I think it's worth naming a lot of us have had mental health stuff spike during this period, which doesn't take away from whatever is specific to your physiology and your lived experience, but because of a lot of things in your chart, when the collective is angry, you have a hard time with anger. When the collective is grieving, you are extra sad. You are very, very permeable. You have a T-square in your birth chart. So I'm going to come back to the Capricorn stuff/Saturn in a minute. But in your birth chart, you have a T-square. You've got Mars in Aries in the twelfth house, intercepted in the twelfth house. That is not chill. And it is part of a T-square that involves a bunch of planets. Mars is square to Saturn and Neptune and Chiron and Jupiter.  Neptune, Chiron, and Jupiter and Saturn—they're all involved in oppositions.

So, for you, finding ways of relating to your energetic wellness or your spiritual body is really difficult and deeply motivating for you. Unfortunately, oftentimes when people have a square opposition, sometimes a conjunction, between Neptune and Mars in the birth chart, it predisposes people to having autoimmune issues or immune issues, or people get misdiagnosed or have things that are just like, "We don't have a clear treatment plan." So Lyme's disease is kind of probably all of those things. I've met very few people who got a diagnosis for Lyme's straight out the gate. Right? It's like you get misdiagnosed a bunch and gaslit, I'm assuming.

Yael: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. I'm sorry. But it is all kind of interconnected to your weed question because part of what you're describing about what happened for you in your relationship with weed that kind of got more serious is you would come back from being in the deeply introspective and spiritual time, and you came back to harsh realities that you didn't know how to cope with, and you turned to weed as a way to make you feel better through difficult times. Again, very Saturnian. And it was probably very effective for like 15 minutes.

Yael: It was effective for that time period, yeah.

Jessica: Which lasted about how long?

Yael: Probably three months.

Jessica: Three months. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. I refer to that, yes, as 15 minutes, like not long, but long enough for it to be deep in your habits. Right?

Yael: Yeah. I mean, it didn't feel great while I was doing it, but it was helpful in that I was not feeling all my feelings and I was able to cope with reality.

Jessica: Yeah. So what I want to kind of stay with for one minute is that you were trying to take care of yourself. There were a million things that you had to do to take care of yourself, and this was one of the things you put in place. And you actually put it in place as a Band-Aid, not as a suture. It's important for you to really hear this because the part of yourself that's going into judgment is like, "Why did I do this to myself? Why am I doing this to myself?" So you're being really hard on yourself.

But for you, changing your mind is not always the easiest thing. It's not as much about your brain; it's about your habits, actually. It's about your behavior. Once you're habituated to things, it's really hard for you to make a change. And that's very intensified around all that Cancer/Capricorn stuff, but there's a lot of things in your chart that articulate that. And so you put it in place because it was effective. It was an effective medicine for the moment, and I think that's an important thing to kind of return to when you're in your shame spiral.

What I'm seeing has happened is a number of things. Now, you kind of just named that you were doing spiritual facilitating drugs—that's what I call them. I don't know what people call them, but like ayahuasca or something, I'm guessing—yeah. And you were doing it for a two-year period; is that correct?

Yael: I was in that world for about four years, but I was in Brazil for about three months that time studying. I wasn't doing it all the time, but that was the world I was in, studying with traditional healers.

Jessica: So I would love to tell you—and to me, as I'm sitting here with you, I'm like, "Oh, this is why we need to talk in person," because yes, it's about weed, but it's not just about the weed. This is so much more intense than just the weed because part of what happened was what was going on for you over a four-year period, but I'm seeing in particular the last two years of that period. It was a lot of things. Some of it was kind of you taking yourself out of traditional reality, like out of your traditional reality, and that felt really good at the moment. But I'm also seeing that there was a lot of positive growth that happened, but there was—to use your words, it was like a lack of integration. Did you say that, or did I just hear that?

Yael: It was hard to come back from that.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. It leveled you a little bit. And so I wonder if you did ten years' worth of spiritual work in two and a half years. And in the short term, that seems like a great idea. I mean, lots of Capricorn placements to lots of Capricorn placements, we're just like, "Yeah. Get it all fucking done as quick as possible. Move on." But with spiritual work, it doesn't really work. Everything has to be so slow, unfortunately. It doesn't have to be, but it usually is or often is. And so part of what I'm seeing is, honestly, it looks like after a death, how it changes you, how it really, truly changes you, and you get kind of flattened and you can't participate in the world in the same way. You're changed by it.

That's the best comparison or analogies I can make. After what you were doing, you needed to grieve so many things, like what you once were, what did and didn't work for you in that period of your life, the world as you step back into it—there was a lot of grief waiting for you there. And what happened was a lot of things, but in the context of this part of our conversation, you turned to a different plant medicine. It's a continuation and not weed on its own. I think that's a really important piece of this. Did that journey, did that period—did it help with the Lyme's disease at all?

Yael: Well, that's what brought me to it in the beginning.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, I can see. That's why I was asking.

Yael: As you know, Lyme has—it's so hard to heal from Lyme.

Jessica: Yes.

Yael: And Western doctors were not helpful, and even herbalists. It just wasn't touching the depth of my pain and suffering. And so I was invited to a ceremony and kind of found myself through that world and through that community. But I ended up coming back and feeling this sense of I have to now serve my own life. I have to live my own life. I have to be rooted in this world and find my own purpose and passion outside of this other world and this other community because it had stopped being about myself and my growth at that point.

Jessica: Yeah. It looks like you were living in a literal bubble, like not just in a theoretical bubble. It almost looks like you literally went into a physical bubble to do this work. It's really weird when I look at it energetically. And it looks like it really did help your physical health until it didn't.

Yael: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: So it's the same exact pattern as you're experiencing with weed. It really did help you. It helped you with your mental health, with your physical health. It helped you with things that you hadn't even gone to it for. It was great until it wasn't. And you did kind of what I said at the very beginning: you were just like, "If I try it with a T-shirt, if I try it with a tank top, if I try it with a hat"—you just kept on trying. And every time you did, I think that there's two things. One is it wasn't good for your physical health or your mental health anymore, and instead of being like, "Oh. This isn't working for me," you were like, "What's wrong with me in relationship to it?" Right?

Yael: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: So that's something I just want you to remember because that plays out in your life in a million contexts. And so it's a good question to ask yourself. When you notice yourself saying to yourself in any issue, "What's wrong with me here?" I want to encourage you to check in with, "I am feeling this way. What's going on around me? What am I engaging with? What does and doesn't resonate with me?" not, "What's wrong with me?"

But to pull back—bear with me for a moment. Yeah. I think you have grief. That makes sense that I'm—now I'm seeing this. It makes sense that I'm seeing it as a death, because you have grief over the ways in which you kind of abandoned yourself in that process. And there's a lot of ways you did, unfortunately. And you have grief because you don't want to believe that's true. There's just a lot of stuff there. There's a lot of stuff there. And I don't know that it would be possible to separate that from your weed use because it's linked into your relationship to plant medicine in general, but also, dissociation—not that that's all that either of those things were or are, but they're linked in that way.

It's interesting you say shame, but I see grief more than shame. I mean, you know what your lived experience is, but I really see grief when I look at this. Shame—what do you do with that? We can talk about that. But the remediation for grief is different than for shame. So, if you try to treat the shame but it's not actually shame, it's actually grief, then yeah, it's going to feel like you're treading water and you can't make any movement. Does that make sense, what I'm saying?

Yael: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. You're having an existential/spiritual crisis around whether or not you want to be here. It's not a psychological crisis. It does not look like you're suicidal. It does not look like it's anything like that. Am I right about this?

Yael: Anymore. Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. Okay. Good. I'm glad to hear anymore.

Yael: Yeah.

Jessica: And also, the spiritual condition underlying the ideation is very present. It's not something you can talk through and work out because it's not a cognitive issue. It's a spiritual issue, which is why plant medicines or drugs make sense on this one level to a part of you, because you're like, "It's a spiritual issue. I'll deal with plant medicines, which are magical." Yes. There's a logic in that. But this is like dark night of the soul, Albert Camu kind of shit. You're in a meat suit for a specific but undetermined amount of time. And whether you like it or you hate it at any given hour or day or year, it is the current assignment.

My advice to you around this is first to practice being present with those feelings without pairing them with thoughts or looking for a fix. Yes. You have—and it looks—because it's intercepted in the twelfth house, it is very clearly inherited from your ancestors, not your long, long-ago ancestors. This is like the shit that your parents deal with. This is the shit that your grandparents deal with. This is very deep stuff in your epigenetic experience. And honestly, astrologically, the Lyme's is connected to this, because it stopped you in your tracks. It slowed you down in your life so that you would have to do things that are healthy or bear consequences quickly.

Oftentimes, we can do unhealthy things for decades and not have to even think about it, except for, "Why am I unhappy?" But with your body, you do something that's unhealthy for you for a day; your body is mad. Right?

Yael: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. Immune issues are like that. And so the wisdom in that—not the happiness, but the wisdom in that is it is like a very instantaneous feedback loop between your spirit and your body. And smoking weed for you is like tapping on the brakes, tapping on the brakes, so that you don't really have to get that feedback. You're getting feedback, but you're distorting the feedback, so it's not like a smooth drive.

If I'm speaking to the part of you that really isn't sure she wants to be here, then there's a lot of wisdom in that. Even if it makes you miserable, even if it's like you wake up and you have more joint pain and are not healthier, that part of you is doing a really good job because what it's doing is it's supporting you in not feeling this core wounding around, "I don't know if I want to be here." This part of you that I'm speaking to, that I'm looking at that is really like, "I'm not sure if I want to be here. I don't know if I want to be alive in this body at this time"—sorry. So I want to just acknowledge, as I'm talking about this, it's really hard for you to stay in your body. You're really pulling out. And so it's hard for me to keep my focus, because I'm feeling this with you.

And so I want to just acknowledge this is actually it in motion. This is it. When things start to touch in on this core wounding, it's really hard for you to stay associated. You really leave your body. The feeling is kind of like being overwhelmed slowly but wholly by anxiety, like a low-grade anxiety. And then, if I hadn't interrupted it, if I had just let it go and I had kept on talking about what was stressing you out, it would have sparked into a real anxiety moment, like a "bleh" anxiety moment. And this happens because—it's very meta of what I was talking about. It's like your system starts to feel so overwhelmed, it's like, "I can't stay here for this. I have to go." And then you abandon yourself completely. You do your self-fulfilling prophecy of abandonment, which is torture for you. And now you have a real reason for anxiety: because you're alone.

Yael: (laughs)

Jessica: I know. It's funny because it's actually genius. It's not funny at all.

Yael: It's funny because it's so accurate. That's why I'm laughing.

Jessica: Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. I'm sorry/good/sorry. So you're 50/50 in now, right? And so you can feel anxiety.

Yael: And the overwhelm that you said is really accurate, like this internal feeling. It's almost like drowning from the inside. It's like—

Jessica: Yes. Okay.

Yael: —this overwhelm that's just—this overwhelm that's overwhelming, if I may say.

Jessica: Absolutely. And I want to just hold space for, when doing deep psychological or spiritual work, you need breaks. You need breaks because you're now like 70 percent back in. So I'm assuming your anxiety is still a little there but lower. Yeah?

Yael: Yeah. I think it's the connection for me. Connecting with people really helps to alleviate my anxiety.

Jessica: Great. Okay. Good. You're not scared of going deep. You like going deep. But this part of you that I was speaking to, its function is to keep you safe but still keep you out of this life in some meaningful way. That's its function. That's its whole entire survival mechanism thing.

Yael: Why, though? Why wouldn't I just be fully in?

Jessica: That's a great question. So were your parents or grandparents—are they survivors of trauma or abuse in some way, some sort of physical crisis?

Yael: I mean, two things come to—my mom has experienced trauma for sure. She experienced a pretty harsh trauma when she was about 16. And then my grandparents grew up in poverty. My great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors. There was a lot of trauma and stress for sure.

Jessica: Yeah. So your great-grandparents survived the Holocaust.

Yael: That was the generation. Yeah.

Jessica: So this thing of not wanting to be here but insisting on being high functioning—very classic of survivors of survivors, of like Holocaust survivors. There's been tons of studies on it. The answer to why—it comes, again, from inherited trauma. But you don't need it to come from inherited trauma. If you're a highly sensitive person who looks around you, yeah, there's lots of things to be scared of and there's lots of reasons to not want to be here. And I imagine that you've clocked all of those things. The question, "Why is this? Why do I have this?"—it's the right question to ask an astrologer. That's what people go to astrologers for. But from more of a healing perspective, it's the wrong question because if we go in like tiny capitalists or colonizers in our own psyches and we're like, "Why is this here? How can I fix it?" what we end up doing is becoming an interjected perpetrator. I don't know if you've ever heard this term.

Basically, what the interjected perpetrator is is if you grew up and you were around people who were like, "You're an angry person. You're always angry. You're a terrible person because you're angry," and you're like, "No, I'm not. No, I'm not. I'm not a bad person. I'm not always angry," and then you grow up and you hit like 25, and all of a sudden, every time you get angry, you yell at yourself about it again—in other words, you take on the voice and the messaging of the perpetrator that you pushed away when you were younger. This is a common thing for those of us who are from any kind of trauma.

So—sorry. This is happening again. So you're flooping up. So I want to just slow down and acknowledge—

Yael: I can't believe you can track that. It's amazing.

Jessica: It's a blessing and a curse, as you may imagine.

Yael: Yeah.

Jessica: And were you aware it was happening before I named it?

Yael: Yes.

Jessica: Okay. And what do you do when that starts to happen and you're interacting with someone?

Yael: Well, sometimes it happens when I have something to share. Talking about my feelings is a big way that I calm myself.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. Verbalizing things.

Yael: Yeah.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. So, fun fact, that is superficial. Just like weed, it's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. So I'm not saying it's not an important part. It is an important part. It's essential to who you are. You got Mercury in the first house and Gemini. Who are we kidding, right? Yes. Talk about your feelings. It is good. Connecting with people is good. But it's a form of self-soothing that anchors your wellness on someone else, whether it's ayahuasca, weed, or humans. It's not bad to use natural resources, unnatural resources, to support ourselves. But it's a different version of abandoning yourself because you don't have a thing you do in and for yourself before or instead of. That's just like the one that actually does soothe you.

So, again, if we're exploring why you smoke weed, this is why you smoke weed: because it's the thing you know how to do that is kind of for you, by you, and doesn't require other people. So do you smoke weed alone more than with people now?

Yael: Yeah. When I smoke with other people, it doesn't have the same bad feeling. It's really when I smoke alone that I have the bad feeling afterwards.

Jessica: Yeah. That makes sense. When you're alone with yourself, what you're doing is you're self-medicating something that doesn't want to be medicated and that you don't have skills around. And so, again, if you were to not medicate yourself, I'm guessing you're just sad and depressed feeling—

Yael: Yes.

Jessica: —because that's what you're medicating: sad, grief, and depression. You've spent however many years you've been alive now repressing these feelings. I mean, actually, you haven't been doing it your whole life. You've been doing it since your teens, your early teens. But you're repressing your emotions. And so, when you start to have emotions and you don't repress them with a drug or with anything else—you just let them sit around—they're like, if you have a bunch of clothes and you've smooshed them down in a suitcase, maybe they'll take a minute—it's like you've compressed them, and it's going to take them time to open up.

Who's got the time to sit around feeling compressed and terrible and sad? Nobody. You've got to go to work in the morning. You've got shit to do. And so maybe you'll just smoke a little bit of weed. Maybe you'll scroll for several hours. There are so many ways that we can dissociate, and Saturn loves cereals, loves TV and watching things. So I'm assuming that's part of the self-care regime, is just zoning out in front of TVs.

Yael: I scroll for sure.

Jessica: Scroll. Yeah. So there's that, and then there's doing things, like sweeping your house. That actually works for you. Might not want to do it all the time, but when you do do it, it's because it's a form of self-care that a little bit helps you to distance yourself from emotions because you're focusing on the task. Is that right?

Yael: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: Yeah. So all to say smoking socially is fine, or edibles. Whatever. Weed, socially, totally fine. I don't know that it's realistic for you to only imbibe socially. It, to me, feels like—I mean, you've got a Pluto opposition to the Ascendant in your birth chart, so I would imagine that you're kind of in or you're out with it. So I would recommend out, if those are our only choices. We talk about addiction, and there are so many ways of experiencing addiction. I don't think you have a classic form of addiction with weed. I think you're habitual, and it does a very good job at doing something for you that is an unhealthy thing, which is why it feels like shit. But it works.

Yael: I would love to be able to just smoke weed with friends, but I'm scared that once I start, I'm not going to be able to stop. And not with friends, but it's like, "Oh, I just got high on a Sunday afternoon with friends hanging out at the park. And so I just did it already, so I may as well just go to the dispensary and get weed for the week." And then—

Jessica: Of course.

Yael: —I'm in it already.

Jessica: Yeah. I agree.

Yael: And then it's a week later, and I'm like, "Where has my week gone?" So…

Jessica: I agree.

Yael: Slippery slope.

Jessica: It's kind of like some people can't have casual sex but don't want to be in a relationship. What's a girl to do? It's that same kind of thing. It's like there's a part of you that would just—it would be so cool if you could not really drink, just smoke around people when it's fun, and then move on with your life. But we wouldn't be having this conversation, likely, if that was an option because you would already be doing it. Right? So your pattern is taking three months off; is that right? Or is it one month you said?

Yael: Like a few weeks. A few weeks.

Jessica: Okay.

Yael: Yeah.

Jessica: So three weeks, two weeks?

Yael: Three weeks.

Jessica: Okay. So let's go with seven because Saturn is the seventh planet. Let's just be nerds about it. So let's say you take seven weeks off. You're doing a cleanse. And in this period, it's not just that you're not smoking weed; you're not going to do any drugs that are—any kind of trip-taking. No trip-taking. So, first of all, does that feel doable?

Yael: I like it. Yeah.

Jessica: Okay. Cool. Cool. I do believe you can do this. Sometimes it's too much of a goal, but I do think you can do this, and I think that having a structure is good for your brain. It also could be torture for your brain, but in this moment, it looks like it's good for your brain. So that's great. So you're taking seven weeks off, and at the end of seven weeks, you're going to check in with yourself, and you can reassess. And you can decide, "I need to quit." You can decide, "I'm going to take seven more weeks off." I'm honestly recommending that you take seven weeks off because I'm recommending that you quit. When I look energetically at telling you to quit, there's no fucking way that's happening. But you definitely could take seven weeks off. Did that make sense?

Yael: Yeah. It just feels impossible.

Jessica: Yeah. But seven weeks seems totally accessible. So—

Yael: Not because I don't want to—it really feels like because I don't believe that I can, and because it feels good, and because I like it. But there's still so much confusion and ambivalence about it.

Jessica: Yeah. I think, from more of a—if I can give you my psychic interpretation of what I'm seeing, your survival mechanisms are perfectly okay with you taking breaks because your survival mechanisms are aware that you're physically and mentally suffering from your weed use. So taking a break doesn't trigger off any of your flight or fight. When we say quitting, now we're taking something away that once worked or that you believe in on some sort of core level—not a psychological level, but more of a visceral level. And your survival mechanisms are instantly engaged, which is why you're like, "I can't. It's not possible."

And that "I can't; it's not possible"—classic double Cancer stuff, because instead of being like, "I feel a no. I say no to this," you're like, "Oh, I'm not capable." Right? It can kind of go into that victim vibe. And so, from that place, you have the sense of like, "I don't have the agency to do it." And in a way, it makes it safer for you to then say no. But you are somebody who's incredibly capable of doing massive, difficult things in bite-sized pieces, not all at once. When you think of it all at once, it's the best way for you completely to shut down and for all these emotional compulsions that are part of your psyche to start being loud, basically.

In general, not just on this topic, if you can find ways of setting short enough goals that you're being challenged by the goal—otherwise you won't do it, because your brain's like that—short enough goals that you're challenged but you're not tortured by the goal, do that. And then set a date in your calendar to reassess whether you want to reset and how long you're resetting for. Then schedule a date in your calendar with an alert being like, "You need to think about this today." You can just reset every seven weeks until it's boring because you don't have to reset it anymore.

And that is, BTWs, my prediction of what is likely to happen for you. If you do the second part of my advice, which is get into trauma-informed therapy to explore this kind of core wounding that is this Mars in the twelfth house intercepted in Aries we can call it—but I don't want to encourage you to think about this astrologically, but instead, viscerally, like how it lands in your body. And the trauma-informed therapy that I would encourage you to pursue is people who, yes, want to talk to you about your trauma, but you're like a therapist's dream. You love talking about trauma. You're so smart. You're willing to be humble. You're willing to do the work. Psychologically, you'll do anything. You're brave, bold, chill. You're not chill, but you're a dream for a therapist. Dream client.

Yael: I seem chill, so…

Jessica: Yeah. Exactly. Yes. You're chill for the process of therapy is what it is. It's like you're not defensive in the process of therapy. But it doesn't work for you. I mean, it works as a lovely maintenance, but it doesn't get into that trauma stuff because the trauma's not psychological. It's more epigenetic. It's more in your body. You absorb a lot, and when it resonates with anything in your system, it kind of becomes a part of you in this way. So you have a lot of things, and you're like, "I guess I can connect it to this thing, but it doesn't really make sense," when you're analyzing. But when you go into the body and you stay with the body and you practice not abandoning yourself and sitting with it and being inquisitive, then you're dealing with the real roots, and that's what changes the growth pattern of the whole damn tree. You know?

Yael: I do have a trauma-informed therapist, and she does EMDR.

Jessica: How are you liking EMDR?

Yael: I like it a lot when we actually do it. We don't do it all the time, and we're on Zoom. But I do like it.

Jessica: So, if I was giving you a homework prescription, it's to in your next therapy with your shrink say, "I don't want to focus on EMDR more, but I need to focus on EMDR more." And the reason I would preface it with "I don't want to" is because you will always come with a topic, like you always have something to say, so it's hard for you to lead a session in that direction, because you can talk. Right? So it's kind of acknowledging that you might be giving some sort of behavioral mixed signals but saying, "I need this."

You and I are not talking about your lived trauma. We're not even getting into details of your inherited, lived—you know, your parents' or your grandparents' lived trauma. And I want to just acknowledge that, because it's not necessary for us to be able to acknowledge the parts of you that have been driving the car for so long and how it's, in some ways, actually really worked and some ways you're having to deal with how it hasn't. That's what you need to focus on, really. And the more we've unpacked things, the more I can't help but interpret the shame you're feeling.

It's not about weed. It's about—you've been at this pit stop for a minute, and you're not ready to make a decision. I mean, you actually are ready to make a decision, but that's what you've been telling yourself, right? "I'm not ready to make a decision. I'm not ready to change." But you absolutely are. This brings me to two really important things. One is what you got out of the spiritual group you were affiliated with around the ayahuasca—I don't have any moralistic thing with any drug, actually. I got two issues with ayahuasca, and it's not with people who do it. But here are my two issues.

One is, unless your whole entire life is—I mean, you know, because when you were there, it really worked. And then, when you pulled yourself out of that space, that bubble space, you're just not well suited to pretending that things are chill for you when they're not. So that's the thing is that people don't integrate. And then the other part is that I do see, unfortunately, the impact that it has on people's energy bodies, and I've very rarely seen people not have problems after ayahuasca because it does tear holes in your auric field in some ways, which is how the healing happens. It's kind of like the only way to build muscle is you have to tear up your stupid muscles. But again, there are so many other things that need to happen around that that most people don't have space and time for or don't create that space and time.

Yael: I don't know if this was the only issue. I'm not sure energetically how it impacted me. I'm sure it did impact my aura and whatever, but it was that I was in service to this community. And when I was in it for four years, that was my life. And it was very culty—like you said, a bubble. It was super culty in all the different relationships and dynamics and leadership. And I think when I left, I was like, "Wait. What happened to my life? What happened to my calling?" I've been in service to this community in the Amazon for however many years, and that was my whole life for when I was doing it. And I spent all my money and did all my life work with them. But I was like, "That's actually not my calling. I need to focus on my ancestral tradition and my voice and my work."

And so I think that's also part of the shame when I came back, was I was like, "Oh my God. I've been focusing on all these other people and their mission that I got so pulled into it that I forgot who I was."

Jessica: Yeah. That's it. So I'm really glad we got here. So it was a cult, first of all, from what I'm—when I look at it, it just looks like a cult. It's not culty, because I don't know what the difference between culty and cult is. It kind of checks every single box, it looks like, of the definition of a cult, so for whatever that's worth. And I think that's what you're speaking to. It's like, "Shit. How the fuck did I end up in that situation?" And the answer is because you were looking for a way out. And that's the thing that cults offer, and in particular that community offered: a way out of everything.

Yael: And healing.

Jessica: Yeah. And lots of beautiful things. It's not like it was a torture—you weren't hidden in a basement somewhere. You were having a lot of really positive life experiences, but it required that you left everything behind. So that's the cult part, right? And it's also the part that—for that part of you that's like, "I don't want to be here," this was a way for you to find meaning and pass time and not be here while also honoring your personality by doing the work of life. You were doing a lot of work on yourself for others. So it was perfect for you, in a way. Again, it's like this perfect medicine for medicating the wrong thing. And again, it worked for a period. It wasn't bad for you the whole time—just to hold space for the complexity, because when we start going into good and bad stuff, we lose out on the value.

You were taking care of yourself. It kind of got away from you. But that part of you that was like, "I know what I'm doing. I'm finding a way out without leaving"—that part of you, we want to appreciate it because it's a survival mechanism that's very young, that's very visceral, and it's good to recognize the value of our survival mechanisms, if that makes sense. But you know better. There's more of an adult central "I've actually done a lot of fucking therapy" you. And that part of you knows that you have to make a choice to be here over and over a million times, a million ways. It's so annoying. I'm so sorry. It's tragic, and I hate it. I'm so sorry.

But that's the work of being a person. And you know that mentally. You know that mentally. You know that emotionally in lots of ways. You don't in others. But you don't know it, and you're working on. This is where the shame, the grief, the depression is, because if you choose to be here, you're going to feel grief about that. And if you choose to not be here, you're going to feel grief about that. I mean, I'm not going to tell you to feel good about being alive. Are you kidding? The planet's burning. Have you read the papers? I mean, no one reads papers, but you know what I mean, the websites that used to be newspapers. I'm not going to tell you to feel good about the world. It's a terrible place, terrible, but it's also beautiful.

I can see both when I look at you energetically and when I look at you astrologically that you've already chosen to be here. You've already made the choice. You have 100 percent made the choice. But there's a survival mechanism that you have. Its very existence is to say, "No. This isn't safe. We gotta go." And we can't leave all the way, so we've got to find another way out. This core piece is—it is a part of you, but it is not you. This is why we thank the goddess for therapy. It really doesn't want to change. It doesn't want you to change. There's something core that doesn't want you to change. I do want to encourage you to practice being present with that without reacting to it, because the reaction could be guilt. It could be shame. It could be anger. It could be frustration. It could be whatever.

None of those emotions are helpful, because with our survival mechanisms, we can't strongarm them into changing. We can only practice becoming friends with them and building new survival mechanisms that those old survival mechanisms can actually see working before we can integrate those survival mechanisms. But we can't really do that unless we're actually present with engaging in conversation with our original survival mechanisms. And that's the work here. That's what weed helps you not do, and that's why you want to fucking quit smoking weed the way you've been doing it.

Now let me add one last layer of complexity, which is you have a Pluto conjunction to your Midheaven right now. It's a big-deal transit, once-in-a-life transit. Pluto is also trining your first house Venus, and you've got some other things going on astrologically. Saturn and Uranus are messing with your Pluto and Ascendant. But I want to name that the Pluto conjunction to the Midheaven represents a time where you are transforming your vision in relationship to what you want to do with this life. If you Google it, you're going to get a lot of career stuff, and it can certainly have to do with career. But I don't think that's what it is for you.

I think that this is more about you choosing to be here. This is your time for getting really present with and as an adult, an individual adult making decisions around what that means for you as a person. And that has to be spiritually, psychologically, physically, and in terms of how you relate to the material world around you, a.k.a. career, home, all that kind of tenth-house/fourth-house shit. Capricorn, Cancer, shit. So welcome to it. It's two years. You've only been going through it a few months.  This is a great time for quitting any substance or any—it's not about the substance. It's about the habit.

Of course, doing that, because it's Pluto, means you're going to have to dig into the bowels of your stuff so that you can really heal the issue. If you heal the issue, maybe we won't be such a big deal for you afterwards—maybe will. Doesn't matter. We can't heal for an outcome. We can only heal for the process because as we heal, throughout that process, we become changed. And so the outcomes that we decide we need when we're in pain and struggling are not always the outcomes we actually need. I'm speaking to your stelliums.

You don't have to have it written in stone. You don't have to have it figured out. You just need to be on the path and to, to the best of your ability, nurture and comfort yourself throughout that process, but not do it in ways that take you out of the world and that are unhealthy and unhelpful. You've got to leave the world a little bit here and there. Come on. You got a lot of stuff touching your twelfth house. You can leave the world. But you want to do it in ways that you don't have to then rebuild every time you come back to "reality." That's the move. It's proportion. So we come back to that Jupiter/Chiron conjunction. It's about determining what is proportion.

So a lot of words were shared. Do you have any final question for me?

Yael: Well, thank you so much. You may have already answered this, but it's so hard. Life is so hard, and without getting into my trauma, the last few years have been really hard. And I experienced a lot of relational trauma in the last few years that I'm healing from, and also dealing with childhood stuff, and just all the trauma, right? And I'm just like, how am I supposed to choose to be here? And I know you shared a few things, but—

Jessica: That's the great question.

Yael: —might be too meta, but just how do I choose—it's just so hard. And I feel like I'm often sitting with my feelings and I'm just like, "They're so hard." I keep saying it, but…

Jessica: Yeah. No, I completely hear you. So, first of all, Pluto was conjunct your Saturn for the last two years. Now it's on your Midheaven. So, whenever we have a conjunction or a hard aspect to a planet that's involved in a conjunction, even when that planet is not actually in aspect to the other planet in the conjunction, it gets triggered because the whole conjunction gets triggered. And so, yeah, you've been going through a fucking hard time. Of course you have—childhood issues, plus you went through your Saturn Return. I mean, we could talk about the last two, three years for you and spend hours on it and barely scratch the surface. I can see that.

So one part of the answer is I don't know. I don't want to be here. I don't fucking want to be here, so you're asking the wrong person, which is also why you're asking the right person. But people will tell you, especially spiritual people, "Look at the sun. It's a miracle. And babies are magic," and all this kind of stuff. I am not the one who's going to—it's not how I experience the world. You know what I mean? Personally, me—happiness is not my goal in life, and that's okay. We don't have to have fun the way other people tell us to have fun. We don't have to choose to be here in the way that people do. And we're kind of whispering at your North Node and the tenth house in Aquarius, just BTWs. Just BTWs. You're too young for me to really want to fixate on it, but finding your purpose in life and your own path—I'm just giving you key words on these two things. Just put that in your back pocket.

Okay. But my personal answer to this question is choose to be here because that's the assignment, and if that's the assignment, you're here and these are the fucking conditions, whatever they are, whether they're external, internal, or a mishmash of the two. If that's what is real, if that's what's happening and you accept it, a.k.a. choose to accept the assignment, then you can work on it. And maybe you will suffer for your whole entire life. I don't want to make things worse; this is just my personal attitude. It's my life, how I live. Maybe I'll suffer forever. Maybe things will get worse, like a lot worse. I am prepared for everything all the time. Absolutely.

But if I'm stuck here, I'm going to make the most of it so I don't have to fucking come back, A, and B, if I'm going to be a person on a planet, I'm going to be as constructive as possible within my nature. I'm not going to do it in someone else's nature. So this is where we pull away from comparison. Everyone's advantages and struggles, traumas and resources—we have to deal with those things so that we can be constructive. And so, if it takes five years or if it takes 50 years, it's your path. It doesn't matter. That part—I mean, it matters very fucking deeply, but there's no moralistic component to it. It is what it is.

So, in terms of how do you choose to be here, you're already here, so accept it. Accept that on some level, either you somehow got shoved like a sausage into a sausage container, and then here the whole Earth is a sausage container—this is my worldview. I'm sorry it's not pretty, but it's real. Either there's some grand system that just forces people into meat suits living complicated, traumatic lives, or on some level spiritually, you chose to fucking be here. You chose this shit. Isn't that ridiculous? But here you are, choosing things. And if you're going to be here, you might as well make choices. Find ways of being constructive in this case.

My word is "constructive" because I'm a Capricorn. You're going to find your own languaging around an ideal like this if it resonates for you that matches your nature, a.k.a. your chart. Right? And I don't think that we have to be happy in order to have healthy, whole lives. I don't think that we have to be at ease or even at peace to have healthy, whole lives. Ideally, we want to have ease and peace. We want to have happiness and health. And if this world produced a human condition full of health and ease and happiness and health, explain to me literally almost everything. That's not the human condition. To me, accepting this is the first step. And the second step is saying, "Okay. So what will I do with what I've got?"

Yael: I mean, I think there's still part of me that's like, "But what do I do with the hard?" And when I ask that internally, I'm like, just acknowledge it, I guess.

Jessica: Yeah. You acknowledge it, and through the process of acknowledging it, it reveals itself to you more. And through the process of it revealing itself to you more, well, then you have more options, more choices, more things you can evaluate. That's where change happens. And you've already experienced this in other parts of your life, right? You—I don't know. Maybe you accept parts of your sexuality or your preferences, and at first, you might feel weird about it. And then you're like, "Oh. This is just what it is." And then, all of a sudden, more options come up and more things that you prefer and that you know about yourself emerge. This is how things go, and it works that way with trauma.

I am a big fan of identifying what are the roots of the issue. That's different than the reason why. The roots tend to be in our body. So, again, this is where weed makes sense. It's a good choice because you're treating your body. And also, body-based therapies, trauma-informed therapies—that is actually a good trade for that part of you that chooses weed.

So, my dear, I think we're at the end. I want to thank you so much for joining me. I'm really glad we got to have this conversation.

Yael: Yeah. Me too. I'm super grateful. Yay. Thank you so much.

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My beautiful nerds, let's get astrological. We're going to look at the astrology of April 10th through the 16th of 2022. But before we do, let me share a couple things that I'm noticing. I'm getting a real influx of questions, which feels perfectly in alignment with the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces. A lot of you are asking about the special significance of spiritual things, like seeing the number 2 or having super cute days every Full Moon, stuff like that. So I just want to say, my loves, be careful in this period of chasing waterfalls. TLC told us that it's best to stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to. I personally wouldn't go that far, but we want to rein it in. Again, we don't want to over- or underestimate spiritual significance in this period. And a really common way of overestimating the spiritual significance of events in life is by kind of getting hung up or fixated on situations instead of present with situations. So, if you're seeing a repeat of the number 2, check in with yourself emotionally. Check in with what's happening for you every time you see the number 2 or whatever it is.

And don't expect to have answers immediately. Generally, when we perceive patterns playing out in our lives, we need to bring greater awareness and emotional presence to those patterns while they're activated. And that will take time. If something's happening once monthly, it takes time to really be able to be present with patterns enough that we can extrapolate meaning from them. And as interesting as it is and as tempting as it is to Google things and all that kind of fun stuff that we do, nothing really replaces being present and doing self-investigation. We don't want to let things get so complicated that we're in our head about them instead of being in our heart, because when we're dealing with matters of spiritual significance, our heart is the bridge that we want to be able to travel. And when we stay too in our head about things, we're trying to skip that bridge. We're trying to go around that bridge.

But the heart is the part. It's the part to stick with. So I want to encourage you to do that, and I want to also acknowledge that we are in Eclipse season. The first Eclipse doesn't happen until the end of this month, the last of this month. But feelings—so many feelings—they are running high and hot. So, again, for me what this means is you don't need to freak out. You don't need to try to figure out what it means to you or what's going to happen. None of that is especially useful. It's interesting, but it's not especially useful. What's useful is to stay with your emotions, to investigate your emotions, to stay present with your emotions, to find ways of nurturing your feelings.

And so, if you're having unpleasant or difficult feelings, nurturing them means not abandoning yourself and not pathologizing your feelings. Nobody is perfect. Nobody. Nobody's perfect. You're for sure imperfect. I'm for sure imperfect. We all make mistakes. And when we're in big lunation times like Eclipse seasons, we can feel really overwhelmed or overcome by our emotions. And because the Moon is related to many things, including the past, what can happen is we get into kind of a mode where we're reliving the past or we're experiencing things in the present that are really just triggers from our past.

The opportunity is to do emotional work. Whenever it's the Moon, it's emotional work, not analytic work. And that's hard, and it's slow. And it looks kind of subtle. It doesn't necessarily look like you're doing anything. Doing emotional work is a lot of sitting with yourself. But that's the damn season that we're in. That's just what's happening. So, again, I want to just remind you that whatever is happening in this week's horoscope or in the kind of bigger picture of your life, there is so much happening astrologically that will inevitably intensify what you're experiencing or how you're feeling and the ways that other people are showing up in the world.

And even if you are somehow a miraculous tra-la-la kind of person—you are not feeling any kind of intense feelings; everything is chill for you, nothing too hard, nothing too easy; everything's just dandy—you're still in the world. You're still dealing with people who are feeling all kinds of ways, and that will change you and your life. So, again, you just want to be present with that. I mean, listen. You may not want to be present, but I want to encourage you, I want to invite you to exploring this present moment and in an empathetic and kind way.

Okay. That's it. So now let's get into the details of your horoscope. On the 10th, we have the exact square between Mercury and Pluto, as I mentioned to you last week. And this is also the date that my Plants and Planets Boundaries Allies class is happening at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. If you're listening to this early enough and you haven't yet registered, you can join us there. You can also go to my website to get a download of the class, and it won't just be a download of the webinar, but with that webinar comes a ‘zine that herbalist Rachel Budde and I created for this very moment to help you with boundaries. In it, you may or may not—no, you definitely will—learn about some energy work exercises that I like to do for boundaries. So giddy-up on over there and get yourself that webinar.

Okay. So, on the 10th, we have the Mercury square to Pluto. Now, you've been feeling this transit building for days, and you've already probably noticed the intensity in the world. This might mean having conflicts or confrontations with people. It might mean that some sort of work colleague situation or friendship situation or neighbor situation occurred where somebody really bugged the shit out of you or you bugged the shit out of them. This can be basically a time for power struggles.

The thing that makes it especially difficult is that Pluto intensifies the function of Mercury. So Mercury governs our thoughts and our attitudes, and not just our thinking, but also the pace and veracity of our thoughts and our attitudes. Pluto just—again, it puts its thumb straight on Mercury's head. It just intensifies all of those things, and that can lead to compulsive thinking, resentments, jealousy, anger, and other crimes of passion. It can be difficult. It can be really intense. It can be really unpleasant. You might find yourself feeling really bothered by someone, and it may be based in something substantive that you need to deal with and that's appropriate to deal with, and it might be that your roommate is chewing in a way that makes you want to pull your hair out. And that is really not about them chewing. It might feel like it, but it's not really about that. It's about whatever it's triggering within you.

So some things do need to be dealt with and confronted, and some things don't need to be dealt with and confronted in an external way. They need to be dealt with on a dear diary, self-help, psychological/emotional level. And when we're dealing with Mercury specifically, we are dealing with the mind as opposed to the Moon, which is the heart. And so it's not divorced from the heart, but it's absolutely a cerebral planet.

Now, another thing that Mercury is related to is listening. So you may be so caught up in your own thoughts that you're not properly listening to what other people are saying. And that can get you into trouble, right? It might be that you're not listening because you don't want to listen, but more likely, it's because again, you're caught up and caught off guard. What I want to say with this transit is it's an opportunity for you to be interested and to go deep and investigate your own thoughts. And to be interested and be willing to go deep and investigate, how that shows up in your relationships interpersonally—how do you communicate your needs, your feelings, your perspectives, whatever it is?

It is very tempting to lash out with the full breadth of our feelings when something goes sideways. But it's not always effective. In fact, it's often not effective. But when we're caught up in intense thoughts and feelings, it's hard to stay present and not chase those thoughts and feelings—like waterfalls—into an entitled or defensive state. What we want to be able to do is be interested not only in the content of whatever comes up but also in our own internal processes and response or reaction to that content. It's not complicated, what I'm suggesting. But it's very difficult. It's sometimes more difficult to do the simple thing, to be humble, to listen, to wait. But here we go. This is what Pluto wants of us when Mercury forms a square to it. So, my friends, be on the lookout for this.

If you have a tendency to cyberstalk people to compare yourself to others, to start shit with people, to gossip, yeah, this transit can bring out the worst in you. It's a good time to follow the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you don't want people to talk shit about you, don't talk shit about them. If you want people to celebrate your successes and to be there for you on your hard days, try to do the same for them. And if you see evidence that you are in relationship with people who are not capable or willing of being in healthy relationship with you, then you gotta get your boundaries together and figure out how to change or end those relationships so you can make room for relationships that are healthier for you. Right? Mercury square Pluto.

That brings us to the 12th. And on the 12th, we've got two transits worth talking about. One of them is a Sun sextile to Saturn. It's a nice stabilizing transit. It simply means that we have the energy to stay or get grounded, to invest in material things in our lives that advance either our needs or our goals. Pretty good news, especially because of the rest of the shit that's happening this week. This transit really has no downside to it. It is just a good time for sorting through details, getting things done. This is just a great stabilizing transit. And if there's things that you know you should be doing—you know what I'm talking about. We all have those things where you know you should be taking a walk around the block whenever you get anxious, and you just don't do it.

This is a really great transit to try to set habits in motion. So, if there's things you know you should do for self-care or to in some way stabilize or advance yourself or your life or the people around you, this is a great time for doing it. It can have a nice impact on your life in general. So word to the wise. The other thing that's happening on the 12th is the Jupiter conjunction to Neptune. It is exact on this date. Already, what we have been seeing from this transit is deeply concerning and unfortunately not surprising. We are seeing new variance of COVID-19, more people getting sick, this kind of spike in global idealism—removing of mask mandates. The CDC has just said, "Positive for COVID? No problem. Hop on a plane. Just walk through airports. No problem at all."

There's just this idealism—that's me maybe being generous about what's motivating it, but it's an idealism or dissociation about where we're at and having a positive set of assumptions even when the evidence all around us tells us that this is not endemic. This is still pandemic. We are learning more about long COVID. We have so far to go. We've got so far to go. There's so much we don't know about long COVID, but we are learning more about it, and it is concerning because COVID is a mass-disabling event. And that doesn't mean everyone who gets COVID will end up with long COVID or any kind of disability, but a lot of people have and will. And it's devastating. It's heartbreaking.

This is a time where I want to remind you the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction is one where we can have more empathy in practice, or we could just tra-la-la ourselves off a damn cliff. So it's important that your actions reflect empathy and reflect generosity and care for your fellow human person, animal, planet, everything. As we are leading up to the exactitude of this transit on the 12th, there has been very dire reporting about the climate crisis that we're in, and it is really devastating, what has been happening, what is happening, and the lack of action from global leaders.

And the climate crisis is such a topic with so many tentacles to it. But the way in which it really relates to the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces is how it affects all of us. It is a global crisis. And so it can unify us, or it can continue to be rich countries taking whatever they want with that Jupiterian entitlement and poor countries suffering. And that'll last until the planet decides what really happens. But this is something very important to be paying attention to and to be educational about. And in terms of this transit, in the news, we're seeing continued attacks on Roe v. Wade and people's ability to get a safe legal abortion, and we are seeing attacks on Trans people—Queer people and Trans people, but especially Trans people.

In fact, just this past week in Alabama, lawmakers passed a bill that will criminalize gender-affirming healthcare for Trans youth and could put medical providers in prison for ten years for giving gender-affirming care to their patients under the age of 19, I believe it is. That's just what's happening in one state. There is a far-right set of attacks against basically everyone who's not a cis man that are happening right now, and they're very effective. There's law after law after law being passed. This is all coming from religious extremists. And this is unfortunately what we tend to see when Jupiter falls into the sign of Pisces, but this particular transit has really intensified that. So that's the shit side, and there are a lot of layers to the shit side.

On a personal level with this transit, it is really important to be thinking about and feeling into boundaries. And as I talk about in my Plants and Planets class, boundaries on a spiritual level are not about a constriction. Boundaries are an expansion, and they're an expansion because when you are able to hold your own energy and protect it, then you have a lot more flexibility and freedom in how you engage in life. And that's really powerful. So, if you have spiritual practices around boundary work, I encourage you to do it this week, especially on and around the 12th. This is a great time for performing service, for being of service to others, for transforming your anxieties or your care into action, and action that supports others, not just yourself but certainly yourself and others.

This can be a time where you go through a meaningful spiritual shift, and that spiritual shift can be a great improvement and it can be a setback. But it will be a reflection of how you have or have not integrated your spirituality into your life and into yourself. A lot of us have our spirituality as the central component to our identities, and a lot of us have our spirituality as something that we return to on the weekends or when nobody's looking. And there's not a right or a wrong way of being. There's lots of ways of being, and there's different phases in life for different things.

But again, this transit is going to reflect some of whether or not what you're doing is working for you. If you are over- or under-identified with your spirituality, there can be trouble that emerges here. It's important to remember that so many wars are waged because of religion. So much of the evil that humans perpetuate—not just now, always; not just in capitalism, in every system—comes from spirituality or religious beliefs.

And so what we, again, want to kind of extrapolate from that is our spirituality is meant to facilitate and foster greater human connection, kindness, empathy—not to control others or punish others. This is one of those things where you want to keep your eyes on your own damn homework, understanding that focusing on your own self and your own journey includes—it is not limited to, but it includes showing up for others in the world. Right? So doing those things because they're in alignment for you instead of because you want to be some sort of savior or hero or out of obligation, guilt, whatever it is—that's the goal. That's the dream right there. And the cool thing is the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces can be a transit that really kind of leads to some sort of "aha" moment or integration around these themes. So that's really cool and certainly worth investigating.

This transit can really trigger any kind of dissociative stuff you have, whether that's drug use, doom scrolling, watching endless hours of TV or whatever it is, shopping for happy—there are so many ways that we check out, and they're not inherently bad. I mean, some of them are. Some of them are really unhealthy. But it's not about being moralistic or looking for purity or good or bad. It's more about recognizing that this is a period where we can evolve spiritually and creatively. In the presence of that, if you find that you're wasting time or just trying to wait for time to pass and not actively living or seeking adventure or expansion or connection—whatever it is, whatever resonates for you that is in line with these planets' energies—then it's a missed opportunity.

And I have to reiterate none of this is so that you judge yourself or your friends or your family. And again, this is kind of like the shadow side of these planets meeting is looking for some sort of puritanical good versus evil. This is instead just information for you to sit with and explore. Jupiter and Neptune, but especially Jupiter, are really into exploration. So, to the best of your ability, strive to create some sort of adventure, some sort of play, some sort of exploration that is life-affirming and is inclusive of your spirituality.

Now, as I mentioned last week, this is not a great time, especially on the 12th, for consciousness-raising drugs. With all of this Piscean energy, try to tap into source energy, psychedelic energy—whatever it is that you're resonating with, try to tap into it without a facilitator because in this period, that's what the energy's there for. So I'm not talking about drugs that you need for functioning. I'm talking about recreational spiritual facilitators. Avoid it on the 12th.

So, all of that said, pay attention to the world. You're a part of the world. Pay attention to how you're participating and showing up in the world. Check in with your emotions. Do your best to be generous with yourself and others, and be interested in what happens. Again, this transit hasn't happened—Neptune/Jupiter conjunct in Pisces—since the 1850s. So I'm really interested to see what happens domestically here in the U.S. and globally because I think we're going to continue to see some important themes unraveling. And we all are here for a reason, so we all have a role to play.

Now, that brings us, my friends, to the last exact transit I'm going to tell you about for this week, and it is a Full Moon in Libra. The Moon is full in Libra on the 16th of April, and it's exactly full at 11:55 a.m. So this is not an Eclipse, but we are in Eclipse season. Yes, you should be feeling all the damn feels. And a Full Moon will do that anyways. So let's get into it. As you know, Full Moons always happen when the Sun and Moon are exactly opposite each other by sign and degree. And this Full Moon is happening at the 27th degree, or specifically 26 degrees and 45 minutes. The Sun is at that degree of Aries, and then the Moon is at that degree of Libra. And it is, as I said, exact 11:55 a.m.

Now, there's a lot going on with this Full Moon. Generally speaking, you probably know Full Moons are a time for letting go. They're the closure of a cycle. They're when emotions bubble to the surface so that we deal with them. And there's lots of ways that this can play out for you, depending on your nature. But some people get really agitated. Some people get really weepy. Some people get really passionate. There are so many ways we can experience the tide of emotions crashing in that is a Full Moon. What we are ultimately meant to do every Full Moon is assess and evaluate where we're at and to be emotionally driven within that evaluation, so not to be too in our heads, but instead to be very in our hearts about it.

Full Moons happen every month, and they are a really handy reminder of where we're at in our cycles. And I mean this in the smaller cycles of development that lead up to the big picture of life. The tension between Aries and Libra is the tension between me and us or you and us, Aries being the me or the you, and Libra being the us. So it's about partnership in some ways because it's a Libra Moon, right? But themes within a Libra Full Moon are going to have to do with how we handle and manage the tension that we experience in relationships. Do we get to be ourselves, or do we feel like we're constantly compromising?

This is the kind of question that a Libra Full Moon is going to want us to ask. But this Full Moon forms a T-square to the planet freaking Pluto. That is not a small potato. That is a very large potato. Let me tell you what the potato means. It means that this is going to feel really intense. There's something very transformational and explosive in this Full Moon. This Full Moon will have—I would characterize it as very little chill, very little chill, because Pluto forming a square to the Sun and Moon brings up compulsions, resentments, triggers. It makes us compulsive in our feelings, demanding of others and ourselves—it's really intense. Pluto is kind of relentless.

It intensifies this theme of needing to let go. When it comes to Pluto, I always describe it as the undertow of the ocean. And if you've ever been caught up in the undertow of the ocean, then you know that if you fight, if you try to fight the ocean, yeah, the ocean will win. It wins every time. But if instead you let go, then you just kind of organically move to safety. And the lesson in this is when your strongest and most compulsive impulses and emotions are demanding your attention, don't engage with them. Instead, identify for yourself, "Oh, I'm feeling this intense kind of way, and I don't have to engage with the content of it until I feel a little more calm, a little more centered or grounded. Instead, what I'll do is acknowledge I'm having these feelings and identify, how can I manage those feelings, soothe those feelings, work with those feelings?"

It's focus on the feelings, not the content. You want to focus on the content when you're not as activated emotionally. We might experience power struggles, and it's important to remember that Pluto is our flight-or-fight mechanism. It's our survival mechanisms. And so you may feel a threat to your survival. There may be something big and scary in the news or in your community or your life in some way, and it just may be your feelings. There's nothing to worry about. You don't need to freak out about this in advance. Instead, what you want to do is strive to be present. And if something comes, have faith in your ability to deal with it. And if you honestly don't have faith in your ability to deal with it, perhaps you can have faith in your ability to ask for help. And if you don't have faith in your ability to do either of those things, then maybe this Full Moon is a time where you're going to kind of come to a sense of reckoning about that and figure out ways to either develop more confidence and resources in yourself or in the world and with others.

Kind of as an aside to that, another theme that I'm seeing in my questions for the podcast recently is a lot of, "Is it too late for me to do X?" It's never too late. I mean, listen. It's too late to do certain things sometimes, but for the most part, if you don't take on this bullshit idea that your happiness, your success, your wellness is on some sort of externally imposed time frame, then it's not. There's no time like the present. Seize this present moment, whatever that means for you. Now, we want to keep in mind that during this Full Moon, we've also got the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction very much active. So it's still within one degree of each other, so it's not in its perfect exactitude, but man is it close.

And so we have all of the themes of the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction. And in the context of this Full Moon, that could play out as us feeling more resilient, more open, more generous, more empathetic, or more idealistic, willing to climb onto our soapbox and tell other people how they should feel, live, think, and pray. This can go in a lot of directions. Unfortunately, this can go in a pretty nasty, kind of religious extremist direction. This is not a great time for giving up your power to a religious leader. In fact, I personally am of the mind that no religious leader should be demanding that anyone give up their autonomy and their independence in order to find spirit. But that's me. To each their own.

But during the Jupiter/Neptune, you definitely want to watch out for that. This energy can be very culty. So, if you have appreciation, respect, reverence for someone or something, don't give away your autonomy. Don't let it cloud your judgment and point you away from your own agency. And within that, this Neptune/Jupiter conjunction in Pisces with this Full Moon is an opportunity to better marry your spirituality and your emotional body. And that's really beautiful. So, if you're going to do spiritual work this week in general, certainly on and around the Full Moon, then yeah, your best move is to think about nurturance and fortification of your emotions or your emotional body, whether that means working on past trauma, working on your childhood issues, tending to your home now, tending to your gut.

There are so many ways that we can see the Moon present itself. This is not a great time for starving yourself or fasting in general. This is a better time for fortifying. So strengthen your system to the best of your ability this Full Moon. Now, at the same time, we've also got a couple other things worth naming. One is the Saturn trine to the Moon. This is a great transit. Again, it's very stabilizing and fortifying. We love to see it. There's really no downside of this transit. It's also forming a sextile to the Sun. So Saturn is in Aquarius forming a sextile to the Sun in Aries and a trine to the Moon in Libra. This is a wonderful transit for us to see in the midst of all this kind of intense and particularly fraught energy.

So yes. Saturn is stabilizing. It empowers us or supports us in the cultivation of healthy habits, staying grounded, staying realistic, and it empowers us with the energy or the willingness to do the damn work. Saturn can be really tricky and difficult at times, but it's really what we need in order to get grounded, to set down roots, to move things forward in the reality principle. I know a lot of people don't love reality. I'm a fan myself, and so is Saturn. So lean into that. As overwhelming and potentially messy as this Full Moon is likely to be, Saturn is there for us to lean on. And it's important because I know talking about astrology can sometimes be really practical, sometimes be really woo. When I talk about leaning on those energies, you can think of it as a celestial resource to tap into and lean on, or you can recognize the Saturnian energies and principles within your own nature, within yourself, and choose to focus on and activate them.

In this Full Moon chart, we also have a Mercury/Uranus conjunction in the zodiac sign of Taurus. This transit signifies that we may be jumping to conclusions, super distracted, really adventurous, open-minded, willing to change our perspective—can kind of go either way. That's how a conjunction works. It's a lot of energy. Now, the Mercury/Uranus conjunction paired with the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction can lead to jumping to conclusions, following through on half-baked ideas, that kind of stuff. And that on its own—it could be very problematic. It could be kind of no big deal. It could lead to something spectacular and adventurous and new.

But in the context of the Full Moon forming a T-square to Pluto, it's a little more concerning. And so, again, you want to vet your sources, whether we're talking about gossip or news. It's important to recognize your feelings are running hot, and so is everyone else's. And so there's a lot of room for, again, mistakes or messiness. And for your part, you can just know, "Okay. This is how I might be feeling. This is what might be coming up for me," and when you have that impulse to jump to conclusions, jump down someone's throat, feel that compulsion where you have to put your two cents in before you've really listened, you will remember this messy, messy Full Moon chart and you will rein your shit in. And when someone else acts out—because someone's going to. Someone's going to act out. That's for sure. When that happens, you have choices to make: whether or not you're going to engage and how much you engage.

We're going to be feeling this Full Moon as it builds up, so you're going to feel it kind of building throughout the week, and then it's going to hit and it'll be whatever it is, and we're going to do our best to show up and be emotionally present and accountable for however we're feeling or whatever's going on in the world or in our immediate life. That's the assignment. That's what we're going to do. But you want to keep in mind that as we are in Eclipse season and this is a Full Moon, this feeling of expectancy, this feeling of importance, is active for all of us. And we're all going to experience that in different ways. Some people are going to get really shut down and exhausted by it. Other people are going to get super woo. There's a million ways that we can experience this because we are individuals.

That said, it is a lot. And so, if you're feeling a lot, you're not alone, and there's some context to it. And the context hopefully is validating for you, but again, I don't want you to overthink it. Instead, I want to encourage you to use it as an invitation towards knowing yourself and developing a healthy emotional landscape. When I say a healthy emotional landscape, I mean a healthy way of engaging with how you feel internally and then also how you feel in relationship and in dynamic with others and the world in general. It's a lot, but it's an opportunity for healing and for release, and it's what's happening. So, love it or hate it, here we are. Let's deal with it.

My loves, that's your damn horoscope. I am going to run through the transits one more time while also reminding you, if you want to track the transits on your own, if you're a student of astrology or a professional, check out Astrology For Days over at astrologyfordays.com. It's the pro tool that I use every day multiple times a day for tracking transits and taking notes.

Okay. Running through the transits. On the 10th, we have an exact square between Mercury and Pluto. On the 12th, we have an exact sextile between the Sun and Jupiter, and that's the day that the Jupiter conjunction to Neptune is exact. And I should say, if you missed last week's episode, Episode 253, I talked about that transit a great deal, so it's definitely worth checking in with. And also, if you haven't listened to the year-ahead 2022 horoscope, I talked about it there. And also, I talk about it in the month-ahead horoscope on the kittens level on my Patron.

Okay. On the 16th is the final transit of the week. It is a Full Moon in Libra, and it is exact at 11:55 a.m. Pacific Time. And that's it, my loves. That is it. That's your horoscope. That is my love for you placed in audio form and pushed into your ears. How do you like them apples?