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

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Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. I am recording your horoscope for October 29th through November 4th of 2023 on the day of the Lunar Eclipse, kind of actually within hours of its exactitude. And because of this, I want to stick to matters of the heart because, of course, the Moon in astrology governs our feelings, our heart, and our capacity for experiencing and expressing emotions.

This is a really terrifying time. And when I say that, I want to slow down and unpack that terror is an emotional and psychological experience that has reverberations throughout your whole system, including your body, your psyche, your spirit. Bearing witness to the genocide of a people⁠—and of course, I am referring to the genocide of the Palestinian people from the State of Israel⁠—is harrowing. And while we are bearing witness to this atrocity, we are also seeing governments' and individuals' indifference to what's happening or willingness to justify what's being done to Palestinians. And that is its own form of heartbreak.

When we feel heartbreak and terror, sadness, fear, anger, indignation, it's exceptionally hard to stay in the body with our emotions. That's just what it is to be a human. No one is good at feeling bad, especially when things are ever so bad. When most humans feel these devastating emotions, we tend to take refuge in our heads. And in this time where we have these pocket computers that are constantly screaming news at us, it's really easy to do. It's much easier to be in the thoughts and in our nervous system than in our feelings and in our bodies. And this doesn't help the heart or the soul.

The details of this week's horoscope, which I'm going to unpack, of course, in a few moments, are going to unveil for you how tempting it will be to stay in the realm of the mind. And in and of itself, that's not a bad thing. It's good to be educated. It's good to have discourse. It's good to make plans. All of these things are Mercury; they're the mind. But in these exceptionally harrowing times that are calling upon us to be in our emotions⁠—it's Eclipse Season, right? It's about being in our emotions. In these times, we must guard against becoming like the Great and Powerful Oz, which is to say little, scared, helpless dudes hiding behind big, angry thoughts and words.

When we become like that Great and Powerful Oz, when we hide from our feelings with our thoughts, that is when we find ourselves pointing fingers, judging, policing others or ourselves. While judging and pointing fingers is not always the wrong thing, I want to invite you to consider if, at this time, part of what you're doing is evading and avoiding emotions by taking in more data or doing other Mercurial things⁠, taxing the nervous system, communicating, analyzing, staying in the realm of the mind.

Now, again, I will reiterate it's a very important realm to be in. But when we hide in one realm to evade the other, the problems of the realm we've succeeded in escaping for the moment wait for us. And again, my hope and intention is to stay focused on the emotional and the spiritual components of what we are going through at this time. And I am never going to "thoughts and prayers" you. So there's very real shit happening in the world, and I encourage you with my whole heart to do anything and everything you can to advocate for and call for a cease-fire now.

There are apps like 5calls.org⁠—they spell it with the number 5⁠⁠—5calls.org and Resistbot, and there's other ones out there. And they can help to make reaching out to your representatives exceptionally easy, like stupidly easy. There are many other forms of activism, from demonstrating to organizing, fundraising, mutual aid. There are so many ways we can participate, and I hope you will participate. I hope you are participating in the world in a material way.

But again, in this moment today, I want to focus on the emotions piece. And I want to invite you to take a moment, this moment, to consider empathy and care and what it means to have a big heart. A lot of times, it hurts to have a big heart, and empathy fatigue is real. But I want to encourage you to take at least a moment to step back from ideology and constructs and isms, and to cultivate the capacity to feel what you feel, whether it's heartbreak or fear or empathy and love and genuine concern for yourself and for all people who are trying to survive at this time.

And I, of course, am centering Palestinians whose actual real material survival is at stake. I also want to acknowledge that we can have genuine empathy and care for all people in the world right now who are scared, who are experiencing real terror and responding to those feelings in really terrible, maladjusted ways, and those who are experiencing those feelings and handling them in pretty graceful or healthy ways, and everyone in between. And to be fair, that in-between is probably most of us, doing a terrible job of it sometimes and a good job of it others, because emotions are really hard. They are private while also socially so relevant.

And whenever any individual human experiences emotions⁠—the Moon⁠—we are not just experiencing this individual moment. We are also experiencing all of the emotional triggers that exist in our energetic system, our psyche, our bodies. We are experiencing all of those past memories, the assumptions, the narratives, the feelings, the all of it getting triggered in our systems. It is really hard to have emotional capacity and emotional intelligence, and it is exactly what we are being called upon to cultivate and to center at this time, not at the expense of participating in the 3D in our lives but alongside it.

There will be those of you who hear me reference having empathy for Palestinians and Israelis and think I am making some sort of political equivalency between the suffering of the two peoples. But I can assure you it isn't. I am wanting to speak, really, about empathy, being able to hold space for the humanity of all people regardless of what nation they live in and what their governments are doing. There is this⁠—probably a quote that I'm misquoting in this moment from Amma G, who is also referred to as the hugging saint, and she said something to the effect of⁠—forgive me because I'm going to butcher this⁠—that her love runs like a river and that whether others spit in that river or throw things in that river, it does not change the flow, strength, and direction of her love, of that river.

And that is the true nature of empathy and humanity and compassion, not to eat shit, not to be a martyr, but instead to be able to hold your humanity, your love, your care, and your empathy for others because it's in alignment for you, because it's a reflection of what is authentic and true for you and your humanity, not because of the way other people do or don't treat you or do or don't show up. Again, I'm speaking really emotionally and spiritually and not on a material level, because there are different levels upon which truths exist.

And I want to hold space here today for being in the complexity and the nuance and the paradox of these fucked-up, messy times and to acknowledge how easy it is to lose ourselves, to lose our humanity, to lose so much of what makes us who we are when we are sufficiently emotionally triggered, which many of us are right now. We are all, all of us, because we're here for a reason. We're here right now for a reason. We are all being called upon to have the emotional chops, the emotional willingness and intelligence, to sort through the complexities of being humanistic in the true sense of the word. And don't be surprised that I'm motivated by humanism. I am a humanistic astrologer, and you are listening to a humanistic astrology podcast.

We are being called upon to hold emotional complexity, which is an essential skill for being right with yourself in general, and certainly now as we have to navigate a propaganda-infused world where strongmen leaders seek to pit us against each other. When we lose sight of the humanity of others, we start participating in and consenting to terrible acts of violence on all levels. Whether you are new to activism, whether you are wishing me and everyone else would shut up about the world and you wish you weren't being asked to care so much, whether you are a seasoned activist⁠—wherever you're at, preserving your humanity in the presence of cruelty and abuse is essential for your soul and for our movements.

So, again, I want to invite you to reflect on this stuff and whatever emotions come up around this, and to add it to your considerations and your tool kit for staying engaged with the world, participating in the world, because this is not a sprint, my loves. This is a marathon. We are in harrowing times, and they are not going to be over quickly, at least not from my astrological perspective. And so what this means is we must find ways of sustaining our empathy, our care, our ability to show up.

Pace yourself so that you can stay engaged and you don't burn out and turn away, because that is what systems want us to do, many systems. You know the systems. You know the patriarchy and capitalism and fascism and all these things. They want us to burn out. They want to bombard us. What do they call it? Shock and awe. The want to bombard us so that we dive in headfirst with our participation and our care, and then we burn out. We stop caring. If you live in the U.S. as I do, you know we're really good at that, making a lot of noise for 15 minutes and then burning out and stopping.

And I am of the mind that if we do the emotional work while we are in the throes of our passions and our activation, then we are doing the internal work on ourselves that can empower us to sustain our movements, which is truly what we need. We are living in a global community that is really destabilized, and there is no good or easy way to go through something so hard. And, that said, we humans⁠—we tend to act our worst when we are terrified, when we're scared.

And so, if you have the safety in your material circumstances, I want to invite you to return to your heart so that you can cope with whatever is in it at its roots. And while that might seem, in some ways, like toxic individualism⁠—it might seem in some ways like a waste of time⁠—from my perspective, tending to our roots and our foundations in tandem with showing up for truly hard things is essential. It's essential if you want to be able to sustain the work. And I hope you do want to sustain your care, your activism, your empathy, which is really hard. It's hard. That doesn't mean it's not good work; it's just hard work.

Now, finally, before we get into your horoscope, I want to acknowledge one more thing, which is that I know that I got a podcast and I have a somewhat steady voice that I am using here. But I am a person. I'm just a person, and I'm in it with you. And I am really scared and heartbroken and really uncertain, as much as you are. Astrology gives us predictions. It gives us insights. But it doesn't do the emotional, spiritual, material, psychological work that needs to be done to be a person.

We are living in the fog of war right now. That's an expression for a reason, the fog of war. It refers to the exceptional and dangerous amount of uncertainty and propaganda that exists during wars. Anyone who promises you absolute certainty, only one way of dealing with things, only one way of looking at things, only one news source that you can believe, is missing out on the nuance of the situation and the inherent uncertainty of this situation.

And it is okay to not know how to cope. I don't. I don't know anyone who does. That's part of being a human, allowing yourself to be unsteady in an earthquake. So I want to again encourage you to have empathy for the spiritual and emotional complexities of embodying your humanity during inhumane conditions. And I want to invite you to hold space for that complexity in other people and trust that it's going to look really different and sound really different and show up really different in different people, and that doesn't mean that we're not all trying. And it doesn't mean that we're not all deserving of respect, care, and empathy.

Okay. Now to your horoscope. We are looking at the astrology for October 29th through November 4th, 2023. And it's a busy week. We are still very much in the throes of the Eclipse. The Lunar Eclipse is over, and Eclipse Season is unwinding and shall continue to unwind until the next lunation in November. But we want to keep in mind that Eclipses take about six months to unfold, and that is in the world and in our personal lives.

Just to add more than a little bit of complexity, this week starts off on the 29th with a Mercury conjunction to Mars. This transit is happening at 11 degrees and 54 minutes⁠—let's round it up to 12 degrees of Scorpio⁠—and is exact at 7:22 a.m. Pacific Time. This transit promotes fighting, defensiveness, aggressiveness, secretiveness, passions. What could possibly go wrong?

Mercury conjunction to Mars in secretive, deep, and emotional Scorpio is a transit that is likely to make us feel quick to defense and, because of the speed of Mars paired with Mercury, quick to jump to conclusions, quick to respond to people and ideas, quick to engage. For this reason, this can be a bit of an accident-prone transit, although it doesn't technically show up as an accident-prone transit. I find people tend to do stupid shit when we're aggressive or we're defensive or we're agitated. So that's something for you to pay attention to, especially when you're on your bicycle governed by Mercury or your car governed by Mars.

This transit empowers us to speak or act up⁠—that's Mercury speaking, and Mars is acting⁠—speak or act up for what we truly believe in, for what we are passionate about and what is important to us. This transit can help us to mobilize and move things forward. It can just as easily kick up defensive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, policing, and demanding impulses and actions from us and the people around us.

Sometimes you need to fight. Sometimes you need to identify and hold a boundary, and that is fucking real. Other times, it feels in the moment like that's what's necessary, when in fact what's necessary is something else. It's our individual job to sit with our impulses long enough to assess what is what. Hold back on that trigger finger when it comes to engaging in comment sections or online because the internet is a place where we don't have to process our emotions. We can just angrily type, type, type. And Mercury conjunction to Mars, yeah, it's real big for the angrily type, type, typing.

So I want to encourage you to be protective⁠—Scorpio⁠—of your own very precious energies. If you're going to fight, if you're going to take a stand, do that, but do that in a way that is efficient with your own energies, in a way that is valuable and impactful, and not just in a way that makes you feel better in the short term but doesn't actually move the needle. A lot of times, a lot of us confuse making noise on the internet with activism. And while making noise on the internet is a meaningful part of activism, it is not the whole enchilada.

So I want to encourage you to use this transit to the best of your ability to cultivate self-possession, possession of your own essential energies, which involves self-awareness around your ego and how you navigate it interpersonally, mentally, internally. This transit is explosive and provocative and intense, and it would be in any zodiac sign, but in Scorpio, it's a little extra all those things. And so be emotionally brave enough to explore your emotional and energetic psychic landscape, which includes the minefield of your own traumas and triggers, before you act in reaction to your strongest, sharpest, and hottest impulses. This is a good way of keeping your side of the road clean in any interpersonal or social dynamic.

You may have to deal with other people being defensive or mean or aggressive or throwing their ego or their might around, trying to control or condemn you or people that you care about. And so, in this case, again, it is wise to be somewhat judicious about what you do and how you do it. This transit kicks up our reactiveness. Mars makes us hot under the collar, and Mercury is very reactive. And when our ideas and our attitudes and our thinking⁠—Mercury⁠—are sitting on top of Mars, which is our ego and our drive to prove ourselves and to get shit done, it can make us act out in ways that we did not plan and we did not think through the consequences.

And it is important to acknowledge that every one of our actions⁠—and inaction is an action⁠—has consequences. So, again, this is an important transit within which to tap into your own inner landscape, to sort through the depth of your Scorpionic intense feelings, so that you can assess the message and the delivery in your life, whether you're reacting or enacting. The message and the delivery are both equally important.

Now, overlapping with that transit is actually kind of a nice transit, the only easy transit of the week, unfortunately. Happening on Halloween, on October 31st, we have a Venus in Virgo trine to Uranus in Taurus happening at 21 degrees and 36 minutes and exact at 5:51 a.m. Pacific Time. Now, this transit is truly lovely, but in the context of everything that's going on, what it can really do is help us to get grounded⁠—because we're talking about earth signs⁠—into our values⁠—because we're talking about Venus, but also Uranus, which is liberty and humanitarian concerns and individual activation in the zodiac sign of Taurus, Taurus, of course, being ruled by Venus. So we can get into the service of aligning with our values.

On a lighter level, Venus trine Uranus is good for socializing, which⁠—I know a lot of you are going to be out partying on and around Halloween. And if you do, may I invite you to soberly and with great respect take a moment to acknowledge the dead, our ancestors. It's a meaningful time for that, both in the world with all of its unrest and with all the death and destruction that we are bearing witness to, and also, it's just a good practice. And Halloween and Day of the Dead are a really powerful time for doing that.

This is a great transit for socializing, for getting out there, for dressing different, for flirting, for having fun social connections. It's just a lovely transit. I personally am going to focus on the part where we can ground into and align with an updated, more informed and liberatory embodiment of our values. But again, it's also good for putting on a costume and feeling cute and flirting. So let's not ignore all the levels of the damn transit.

I will say, because we will still be feeling the effects of the Mercury conjunction to Mars, it is wise to pace yourself. If you're somebody who's planning on drinking, doing recreational drugs, whatever, definitely pace yourself because the astrology of this week is⁠—it's just coming hard and fast. And so, yeah, don't forget that you are the steward of your body, and it's nice to steward it in a sustainable and kind way. So, even if you plan on taking it sleazy, take it slow and easy as you do. Okay?

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And that brings us to November. On November 2nd, we will have a Sun opposition to Jupiter. Now, I should have said⁠—so let me say it now⁠—the Mercury/Mars conjunction, we will be feeling its effects through the 6th of November. Because of that, everything I said about that transit, which will be exact on the 29th, will be influencing all the other transits we're going through. So we are still in a kind of defensive, quick-to-react, hot-under-the-collar, passionate frame of mind. Our egos are stimulated. And now, on the 2nd of November, we have a Sun opposition to Jupiter exact at 10:02 p.m. This is happening at 10 degrees and 30 minutes of Scorpio and Taurus respectively.

And you probably already know this, but I will take a moment to say if you want to be tracking the transits with me, you can always subscribe to my astrologer's pro tool, which is called Astrology for Days. You can find it at astrologyfordays.com, and track the transits and your predictions and the predictions of other astrologers like myself within the app.

But the Sun opposition to Jupiter is a big transit. And so is the Mercury conjunction to Mars, if we're being honest. Jupiter is expansion, and Sun is identity. Sun is our drive to be seen and understood and validated, and Jupiter is about making things bigger. So, yes, a lot of astrology content will affirm that Jupiter is about Lady Luck and good fortune. And I will not say that's wrong, but it's not quite as right as I think that old-school astrology would have you believe.

Jupiter makes things bigger, and it increases our sense of resiliency, of "Everything's going to be okay." But this can exacerbate all manner of things, things that are maladjusted and things that are well adjusted, things that are in alignment and things that are not in alignment. Bigger doesn't mean better. Better means better. And Sun opposite Jupiter can often teach us that. This is a transit that can kick up a drive to direct and control how other people think and feel. How could that possibly go wrong?

This transit is definitely associated with propaganda, and alongside that is, of course, the inevitability of misinformation and disinformation, as well as potentially groundbreaking truths being articulated or revealed. It's hard to know what's what. This transit intensifies our thirst for the truth, but it also intensifies our thirst for things happening quickly and a sense of restlessness when we're not quite there. And so this is where half-truths or misunderstandings can often get propagated during a Sun opposition to Jupiter.

This is a time where you may feel like, "Fuck it. I'm just going to take a leap into the unknown. I'm just going to try something out." And I want to say⁠—not the greatest time for that, actually. Not the greatest time for that. This transit in a different context could indicate that it is a good time for taking a leap of faith, but in the context of the astrology of this week, unfortunately, not so much. So what I want to direct you towards is having all leaps of faith being internally focused, working through your own impulses and convictions, your own theories, philosophies, and embodiment so that you can explore your own motivations, therefore refining your actions.

So, again, the astrology of this week is really giving us this hot temptation to act out before acting in. And this can lead to all manner of problems. So you may experience, either within yourself or from other people, themes around soapboxing or having a person's truth shoved down your throat, themes around envy and wastefulness and excessiveness, which can be related to all manner of addiction. It can also be related to a sense of entitlement that can empower you to not consider the needs or perspective of others.

Jupiter⁠—it makes things bigger. It doesn't make them more nuanced. This is a transit that is not good for nuance. Want to know another transit not good for nuance? Mercury conjunction to Mars. And so it's incumbent upon us as individuals and communities to make sure that we are mindful of how we engage with that kind of energy. This transit is essentially about excess, trying to force something to happen before its time, trying to force your own certainty or clarity before you're ready.

You might feel that you have to get something done and that you shouldn't wait for the right time because the right time is never going to come, so you have to do it now. And that is unlikely to be the case this week, especially if you have any planets in your birth chart or important points at around 10 or 11 degrees of a fixed sign. And fixed signs are, of course, Taurus and Scorpio, Aquarius, and Leo.

Now, the good of this transit is massive. A Sun opposition to Jupiter can empower us to work on our own resiliency. So it's kind of like head to the fuel station and pump yourself full of gas kind of thing. And that can be done in any number of ways and on any number of levels. But this is a good time to work on recharging yourself, and if you don't need a recharge, then putting your energy towards things that do need a little infusion of energy.

This transit, similar to Mercury conjunction to Mars, is reactive by nature. And so, again, I want to keep on bringing you back to your values. I want to keep on bringing you back to your heart, the center of empathy that exists within you that empowers you to acknowledge nuance and to act in ways that reflect your humanity and not just your impulses. This is going to be a really noisy week. It's going to be a really noisy week. There's going to be so many important things being said and so many things being said that don't need to be said in so many ways and loud, loud, loud, loud. There's going to be a lot of noise.

The Sun opposition to Jupiter can help us to channel our attention and our energy, and also, it can promote our addictive tendencies. Jupiter is a gambler. Jupiter is all about excess. And so, if you are somebody who has a hard time moderating your own energies and attention into behavior, then this transit plus the Mercury conjunction to Mars is really going to trigger you. And so, if you know that that's your nature, the assignment is to be intentional about your own embodiment in relationship towards pace, pacing yourself.

All of these transits⁠—but in particular Jupiter and Uranus, both being planets that are in the zodiac sign of Taurus⁠—are helping us to become more authentically embodied in the truth of who we are and what we are convicted around, what we believe, what is authentic and true for ourselves personally, socially, politically⁠—all of it. It's gotta happen on all the levels if it's going to happen on any of the levels because, as we know, self-care and community care, sociopolitical care⁠—they are intertwined with each other.

But these transits are helping us to become more actualized and aligned. And they're happening in really challenging ways, really stimulating and triggering ways. But astrology does a lot of things, and it doesn't do a lot of things. It doesn't do the work. It doesn't do the integration. But it does help us to identify what the assignment is. So do with that as you will.

Now, that brings us to the next transit. On the 3rd of November, we are still feeling the effects of the Sun opposition to Jupiter, which we'll feel on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of November. We are still very much feeling the effects of the Mercury conjunction to Mars in Scorpio. And here comes Neptune in the group chat. Shit. Okay. So Venus sits opposite to Neptune on the 3rd of November, and the transit is exact at 3:06 p.m. Pacific Time. This is happening with Venus at 25 degrees of Virgo, Neptune at 25 degrees and 11 minutes of Pisces, which, by the way, we have been feeling since October 29th, day one of this week's horoscope, and we'll be feeling until November 11th, so through next week.

Venus opposition to Neptune is a stressful transit. Venus is our sense of belonging, a sense of social diplomacy and interaction. Venus governs our values, our personal finances, and this between our sense of safety in relationship and our finances. It is related to security, to stability. Venus is such an important planet. This planet is also very much about how you feel about how you look or how you imagine other people feel about how you look and how you feel lovable or how you love others or how you received or don't receive care and love and sensual tenderness.

And then Neptune is anxiety. Neptune is a formless planet. Its effects overwhelm us. They give us so much information that we don't know where the information is coming from or what to do with information. When we talk about the fog of war or any fog, we are talking about fucking Neptune. So we're feeling this Venus opposition to Neptune overlapping with the Mercury conjunction to Mars and the Sun opposition to Jupiter. And it is throwing a lot of anxiety and fear into the mix. It is intensifying our feeling of wanting to do the right thing, not just because it's right but because we're scared of what other people will say. It intensifies our need to sit with nuance, complexity, and paradox. That's Neptune for you, Neptune in Pisces of all things.

And the complexity here is that with all of our impulses being really activated⁠—and Venus, when it's opposite to Neptune, tends to feel really just scared in a corner, anxious, uncertain of its place in all things. This can easily lead to serious destabilization and anxiety, which, as I hope I've addressed sufficiently, tends to make people feel defensive and act out or self-harm, or both. So what's really important in the context of this Venus opposition to Neptune transit is that you identify, cultivate, and respect boundaries, your own boundaries and the boundaries of others.

This is not the time to push on someone else's boundaries once they've established them with you. This is not the time to abandon your own self and your right and need to have energetic, emotional, mental, or behavioral limits. We all have limits. It's okay that you have limits. And it is healthy to be able to identify what you don't know and what you do know. We are not stories with concise beginnings, middles, and ends. We are messy universes going through a messy time.

And so I want to encourage you to give yourself permission to feel anxious, to feel of many minds, to feel like, "Okay, I know I need to take a nap, and I also know I need to keep going." These are two truths that may contradict each other. But if you can accept that they both exist at once, then you may take a nap and wake up and commit to mobilizing instead of running on empty and then not quite getting shit done that needs to be done and also not tending to your own needs.

Again, I want to ground you into and center your focus on nuance. I want to center your focus on paradox and duality because we are dealing with a lot of that right now. I mean, I think that's an Eclipse Season thing a little bit, and it's also a 2023 thing a lot a bit. But it's really activated this week. This transit can coincide with being screwed, with someone fucking with you on purpose or unintentionally. This can be like energy vampirism. This can be somebody telling you that the sky is green when you're looking at it and you're like, "Shit. That looks like blue to me." Somebody's just trying to convince you that your take on things is wrong, and because of the nature of this transit, we have an anxiety response. And because of the nature of the other transits happening this week, we have a defensive, quick-to-react anxiety response.

In your personal life during this transit, you may be dealing with people who are acting really nicey-nice but actually kind of screwing with you or not respecting you. Or you may be acting nice on the surface when you're secretly fucking furious with somebody or just barreling through their boundaries. It is really important to recognize that when or if it's happening so that you can course-correct. You are allowed to have boundaries. You are responsible to respect boundaries of others and, if you can't do that, to own that.

This transit can really trigger feelings of loneliness and anxiety, like a panicky loneliness. And it can make us feel really panicky about the way we look and whether or not we are deserving of love. This is a terrible transit under which to spend a lot of time in the mirror. Don't do it. I would say don't do it. You are likely to fixate on negative stuff and not be especially helpful. This is, again, a boundary I'm encouraging you to explore and see if it's a match for you.

Venus opposition to Neptune is rough on the self-esteem. And we've already acknowledged that two out of the three transits that I already described tend to artificially boost the self-esteem. So this can lead us to doing stupid shit that we didn't plan on doing and that we feel really weird or bad about doing. So, again, I urge you to bring your energies back into your heart, into your body, into your system, and to explore your own motivations and impulses before you convert them into actions. And for some people, that's going to be moments of reflection, and for other people, it's going to be days of reflection, or weeks. I don't know. So you just want to know who you are, where you are in a given situation, in a given moment.

This is a terrible time for major purchases. This is a wonderful time for getting into nature. This is a terrible time for consciousness-raising drugs, terrible, fucking awful. Don't do it, okay? And again, I will reiterate we will be feeling the effects of this transit on October 29th through November 11th. I am aware that that coincides with Halloween and Halloween weekend, which is a boner killer for a lot of you. But I'm a triple Capricorn. I'm okay with killing a couple boners now and then. I'm all right with it if it keeps you safe, if it helps you to keep your grounding in these really ungrounding times.

Another good thing to do during this transit is tapping into art, which can be revolutionary and healing, whether it's making art, listening to music, staring at a painting that moves you⁠—whatever it is, however you experience art. This is a really powerful time to be healed and uplifted and inspired by art, and so much art is revolutionary. So this is a world to tap into as a way to recharge your soul. Similarly, again, getting into nature, connecting to the earth and its fucking majesty, is really fortifying and a really good move during this transit.

Unfortunately, whenever we're dealing with a personal planet opposite to Neptune, we want to be on the lookout for charlatans. We want to be on the lookout for propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, people who are offering to sell you magic beans and our own desire to believe in magic beans. What I'm talking about here is not magic. What I'm talking about here is simple, easy answers for complex and nuanced problems. Venus opposition to Neptune does⁠—I know I've said this, but it's worth repeating⁠—stimulate anxiety. So we are likely to be feeling a fair amount of anxiety this week.

And as much as Mercury, Mars, Jupiter would like us to feel like we just need to barrel through it, I want to say these transits are lasting too long. The collective conditions that we are under are too deep to barrel through it, to push through it. It's not necessarily brave or strong to be like, "Fuck it. I'm going to force myself to do it in this way that I know I can't sustain." I would contend that true bravery is to find a way to do it that you can sustain. It necessitates your whole heart.

Now, one last thing I'll say about this transit⁠—it may coincide with feeling really fucking overwhelmed. You may in fact be overwhelmed by the consequences of some of the shit you did as this transit was mounting and we were going through the Mercury/Mars conjunction and the Sun/Jupiter opposition. So I want to remind you that you have tools for coping with anxiety, and you have tools for coping with overwhelm. I know you do because you're listening to this podcast; I talk about this shit all the time.

And so, whether it is that you have those tools organized in a folder or you've got a therapist who is fucking excellent and you talk to them and they really help you with it, or you just have kind of scattered, saved TikToks and YouTube videos or whatever the hell it is⁠—whatever it is, don't forget to bring your self-care and your anxiety management tools closer to your chest this week. Have them closer to your chest so that they're available to you, they're easier to resource, and they're easier to share because that's the cool thing. The more grounded and aligned and we are, the more helpful we can be to others, not just ourselves, which is, again, pretty fucking gorgeous.

And that brings us to the last exact transit of the week. On the 4th, Mercury forms an opposition to Uranus. So Mercury is at 21 degrees and 26 minutes of Scorpio, opposite to Uranus at 21 degrees of Mars. Now, fun fact, Uranus and Mars are the two most individualistic, independent, and therefore potentially kind of "me, me, mine, mine" planets of the zodiac. And this week starts with Mercury sitting on top of Mars, and it ends with Mercury sitting opposite to Uranus. So, again, we have really intense energies to work with.

Mercury governs your mind, and Uranus is your nervous system. When Mercury and Uranus are opposite to each other, it really fucks with your mind and your nervous system. It makes your nervous system a little more high-strung. And here's the thing: who amongst us can afford to have our nervous system more taxed right now? This transit from Halloween, October 31st, until the 8th⁠—we'll be feeling it through the 8th of November, but it is exact on the 4th.

Now, Mercury opposite Uranus hastens our thinking and the pacing of events. So, if you may have noticed that things are moving faster, or so it seems, yeah, you'd be right. And this is not in any way helped by the other transits I've told you about, especially Mercury conjunction to Mars/Sun opposition to Jupiter, which both speed up the tempo of our thinking, the events in our day-to-day life, and our bodies' response to it.

So this transit is downright chaotic. Now, again, if you've heard this podcast for a number of years, you've heard about this Mercury opposition to Uranus before, because Mercury moves fast enough that it opposes all the planets⁠—it happens frequently is the upshot here. So this is where it's important to remember that with astrology, just like all things, context fucking matters. And so, with Mercury opposite to Uranus in the context of these other transits, things are scattered and intensified and hastened; they're a lot quicker. This can lead to nervous tension. This can lead to anxiety, mental anxiety.

So Venus opposite Neptune⁠—it's Neptunian anxiety, which is a fear of things happening and not being able to handle things, and, "Oh my God. What could happen next?" and, "I don't know. And within my uncertainty, I have all kinds of fears and panic." Uranian anxiety is more an overstimulation. It's a different form of anxiety. It's an overstimulation. It's your thoughts being scattered, your energies and your attentions being scattered, and then the tempo is too much to stay in your body around. And so it's that kind of anxiety.

Now, during a Mercury opposition to Uranus, things go sideways. Shit does not go according to plan. Communications are not clear. This is where, again, in the news we can expect misinformation and disinformation, miscommunications and misunderstandings. I beg of you, for the sake of the world and your own mental health, stay out of the fucking comment section. Don't read the comments. Don't be the comments. There are other, more effective ways of both regulating your nervous system and participating in the world around you.

In general, this is a terrible time for concentration, being focused on a particular task or idea and sticking with it. It's not a good time for making plans or following through on plans. If you can avoid signing contracts or making any major permanent decisions on and around this date, I want to say good on you because Uranus is the unexpected. It's really hard to rein in Uranus. Uranus is explosions. Uranus is earthquakes and thunderstorms. It's things that are really hard to predict because they don't have a consistent pattern.

This transit ultimately wants us to free our minds, to have liberatory thinking, to expand our understanding through learning or unlearning, through experiencing. Pretty cool, except for it also kind of messes with our nervous system in such a way that it's hard to not jump to conclusions. And we want to keep in mind this shit is all happening in fixed signs, which intensifies our desire to be like, "All right. I learned this small piece of information, and I'm going to make assumptions about it and run with it." It can kind of go that way.

So all of that to say Mercury opposite Uranus is another anxiety-provoking transit that makes us quick to jump to conclusions and make connections where there may or may not be them. This makes us susceptible to having fights with people when we could just be having exchanges. It makes us susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. I have said before, but I can't repeat it enough: cultivating media literacy is really important.

It is really easy to forget how social media companies are serving us algorithmic posts. They are serving us posts that we engage with, that capture our attention, which is often our outrage and our strong emotion. So, after a while, our feeds become like echo chambers where we basically see things that confirm our preexisting bias. And that is problematic. That is not expansive. That doesn't empower us to learn, or it only empowers us to learn certain things. So we want to keep that in mind as we navigate our online lives as much as we keep it in mind as we navigate our relationships, which are likely to be really stimulated this week.

I know I said it before, but again, bears repeating: this transit makes us defensive, just like the other Mercury transit. And so, if you find yourself quick to react, I want to invite you to sit with those reactions before you turn them into responses, so that you can process hopefully emotionally, mentally, energetically what actually needs to be said or done instead of jumping to conclusions around that.

Now, my loves, I am very happy to say that's it for this week. And that was a lot, right? I mean, I think that it was a lot, and I think it's going to feel like a lot. So I hope that you use this information to empower you to cope in the healthiest possible ways. And when things get really activated inside of you or you see other people getting really activated and potentially acting out in reaction to that, that you have your self-care tool kit at the ready so that you can participate with others and in the world in a way that reflects your healthiest bits instead of your sharpest and quickest-to-respond bits.

Now, I'm going to run through the transits one last time really briefly for you. On the 29th, Mercury forms an exact conjunction to Mars. On the 31st, Venus forms an exact trine to Uranus. On the 2nd, the Sun forms an exact opposition to Jupiter. And on the 3rd, Venus forms an exact opposition to Neptune. And then, finally, Mercury opposes Uranus on the 4th.

I hope I get to see you on my November 5th class, which I am very excited to teach, Astrology for Intuitives: Identifying Your Psychic Strengths Through the Birth Chart. Tickets are available, I think, until the morning of the event. So, hopefully, you'll join me there. As always, I hope you take good care of yourself and others, and I will talk to you again in just a couple of days. Buh-bye.