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

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast, where we talk about astrology and how it affects you and the people around you. This week, we're going to look at the astrology of February 25th through March 2nd of 2024. You may be thinking to yourself, "Oh shit. Black Love Month on Ghost of a Podcast is over." But the truth is that we at Ghost of a Podcast Industries have decided to extend it for another month because⁠—love. And so, if you are Black and you want a reading with me on the podcast for the midweek episode, then go ahead and send your question to me through the contact form on my website. Just don't forget to use the hashtag #BlackLove.

And yeah, as we step into March, I'm going to give you a little heads-up about something, okay? We are going to have an Eclipse later in the month. Don't worry about it yet. But we are stepping into Eclipse Season in the month of March, and I want to remind you before the internet is flooded with Eclipse data and you get fixated on what it means for you and all these kinds of things that we all do with astrology⁠—I wanted to share that Eclipses are Lunar transits. They're Moon transits. They're very intense, and we really feel them. They tend to be quite consequential so that even people who aren't super into astrology tend to notice Full Moons and New Moons⁠—I mean especially Full Moons. And they tend to notice the intense energy around Eclipses.

It is important to keep in mind that when we're talking about the Moon, we're talking about emotions. So how do you prepare for an emotionally intense or rigorous or activating event? You get right with yourself. You prioritize self-care. You don't try to be perfect. You don't analyze. You don't obsess on astrology facts and figures and all that kind of stuff. That doesn't help you get right with yourself emotionally.

The way to get present emotionally⁠—I mean, that's going to differ for you based on where you're at in your life, based on a myriad of factors, but it's not through the analyzer. So we don't access the Moon through Mercury. In other words, we don't access the heart through the head. An easier way to access the heart, if you have a hard time accessing your heart, is through the body, not through the head. So I want to just kind of acknowledge that while we are not going to start feeling the energy of Eclipse Season until around the 10th, when we have a New Moon⁠—it won't be an Eclipse, but with that New Moon, we kind of burst onto the Eclipse Season scene.

But I want to kind of piggyback off of what we discussed last week around not just having boundaries to keep others out, but instead having them to hold you together, pursuing rituals that are rich with meaning⁠—and I don't just mean woo rituals. I mean recognizing that our repetitive habits in our mundane day-to-day life⁠—those things ideally have meaning associated with them. Ideally, they speak to our spiritual, emotional, and mental health needs. And this is especially necessary given the exceptional times that we are living through.

So, to recap, shit is going to start to get real before too long this month. And at this time, you're in a particularly fertile time to prioritize self-care, to kind of realign your actions and your attention towards the habits and even the motivations that give you meaning, that reflect meaning in life, and that are sustainable. In other words, cross your t's; dot your i's. But dot your i's with hearts, if you can, because Pisces Season.

All right. Okay. So let us begin at the beginning, which is to tell you that the first exact transit we have this week will happen on the 27th of February, and we have a Mars square to Jupiter. We've got Mars at almost 11 degrees of Aquarius and Jupiter at almost 11 degrees of Taurus. This transit will be exact at 12:30 a.m. on February 27th.

Mars and Jupiter are both very energized and energizing planets. Mars is your body. It's competition. It's ambition. It's sex and chemistry. Mars is fighting, but it's also self-defense and having the initiative to assert yourself in defense of what's right. And then Jupiter is all about expansion and growth and the big picture. Jupiter is associated with luck, but it's associated with luck in large part because of its openness and resiliency.

When these two planets are square to each other, as they are now, it's kind of a mixed bag. It's not like a bad, scary square or anything, but it is a little bit of a mixed bag. There's things to watch out for. On the positive⁠—and this is very positive⁠—these two planets squaring each other helps you to be brave, to put yourself out there, to try new things, to just finally jump in the damn pool. This transit makes it easier to flirt or to be open to having new experiences, to have your ego just be like, "Okay. I'm going to do what I need to do for me," and not be defensive about it but to just be like, "Boom. I'm here." That's a good thing⁠—or, I mean, it can be a bad thing depending on your ego and your situation. But it can also be exactly what a person needs to have a little adventure, strive towards the thing you actually want instead of going for the thing you kind of want because it'll be less of a disappointment if you don't get it.

Because of this, this is a great time for taking risks and getting involved, becoming a part of something. Now, it can be a good time for starting new projects. The problem is Mars and Jupiter are sprinters. They are not marathon runners, if you know what I mean. And so what can happen is you start something new, and you've got all the vibes needed in this moment, but you may overdo it, push yourself too far, bite off more than you can chew, and then end up not being able to sustain your efforts.

So, if you have the urge to make a bold proclamation, I want to gently pull you back from that. Don't make bold proclamations to yourself or to others. Experiment. Play. Try. That's what this energy is really good for. Solidify things? Make them permanent? A bunch of days from now. But what this transit is good for is tapping into your courage. It's tapping into your willingness to try and maybe fail, maybe succeed. I'm talking about resiliency.

Now, for some people⁠—and of course, this depends on how this hits your birth chart. I want to remind you these two planets are in fixed signs, so we're talking about Aquarius and Taurus. But if you've got planets in Aquarius, Taurus, or Leo and Scorpio at around 11 degrees, you're really going to feel this. You're more likely to have to deal with the kind of egotistical parts, where you may go forth too boldly, take on more than is really yours to take on. You may rub people the wrong way⁠—that kind of stuff.

Now, luckily, as much as these things can happen, because of Jupiter's presence, if you stay a little humble, if you're willing to just own your piece with just a touch of vulnerability, you can fix things pretty quickly if you mess them up. The big risk is that you act out from a place of passion and activation without any humility. If that happens, you may really just push people and situations away from you in your efforts to get your own needs met or in your reflexive release of shitty emotions⁠—Mars. Mars emotions, right? Anger, frustration, resentment, that kind of shit.

So we're back to this core theme right now of, how do you moderate your feelings and how you tend to them, how you support them? How do you moderate your behavior, how you show up to other people⁠—not just what you do but how you do it? How do you moderate those things? From my perspective, right now especially, through meaning, through having a sense of meaning. You are entitled to any of your emotions. All of your emotions are fair⁠—all of them. However, you're not entitled to act out in reaction to all of your emotions in any way you please. That is the problem.

And so being able to hold space for yourself to experience your own impulses, your own emotions, your own sensations in your own body, in your own heart, your own mental impulses⁠—all of those things⁠—it's really healthy and important for you to create space for yourself for the full messiness of what you experience on the inside, no holds barred. That is a perfectly valid, healthy thing to do.

What Mars square to Jupiter tests, amongst many other things⁠—but one of the things it tests is your own ability to titrate or calibrate how you act because Mars and Jupiter are pushing forward. So how are you going to act in reaction to your feelings, to your situation? Hopefully, the ways that you behave and your motivations for behaving that way are reflected in your beliefs and what you feel to be right or just or fair. Also considering how your impact ripples out through your relationships, your community, the world, whatever it is⁠—that's a really important consideration with a Mars square to Jupiter as well. And all of this is a lot easier to achieve when grounded self-care is a centerpiece to your thinking.

Now, we're going to be feeling the effects of this transit for a minute, till about March 10th. And I want to remind you, if you haven't already listened to my year-ahead forecast, that in April, Jupiter and Uranus are going to meet. And man, they're getting closer and closer. They're coming up on each other. And so this Mars square to Jupiter, I think, is going to give us some kind of meaningful push towards that Jupiter conjunction to Uranus that's happening in Taurus in April 2024.

This will have meaningful effects in your personal life, in your sense of agency, your experience of freedom, how you navigate entitlement and ego and ambition⁠—all these really important things. But we're also going to see this reflected in the world. Mars square to Jupiter can show up as really big moves from big players. So this can be violent because of Mars. It can be expansive and moving towards greater freedom⁠—freedom for who, I don't know, but freedom⁠—because of Jupiter.

Okay. Now, that brings us to the 28th of February. On the 28th of February, we don't have one exact transit; we've got three. We've got three exact transits, and they're all smooshed up on each other, my dears. We've got the Sun and Mercury conjoined at 9 degrees and 15 minutes of Pisces. We've got Mercury conjoined to Saturn at 9 degrees and 45 minutes of Pisces, and then the Sun later in the day conjunct to Saturn at 9 degrees, 47 minutes. So, basically, we have a sandwich. It is between the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn in the zodiac sign of Pisces. If you have anything at around 10 degrees of a mutable sign⁠—mutable signs are Pisces, Virgo, Gemini, Sagittarius⁠—you're really going to feel this one. But this is going to affect us all.

When the Sun and Mercury meet, we tend to be highly identified with our ideas. And how could that possibly go sideways on us in today's world? I mean, my God. It is very easy to become so identified with our beliefs, our attitudes, our ideas, that we take it personally if someone has a different one. And it's really⁠—I just cannot stress this enough. It is really important to know that if somebody has a different idea from you, they are not going to change their mind because you came for them and, a lot of times, because you came at them with facts.

When people change their minds, it's usually because a meaningful exchange has occurred. And when we're talking about an exchange between humans⁠—an active, live exchange between humans, whether it's in a comment section or at a dinner table, whatever it is⁠—most of the time, when people change their minds, it's because they first feel listened to. Think of all the times people have tried to tell you what you should think or what you should be and how you reacted to that, versus those precious few times when people who disagreed with you really listened to you, like really listened to you and tried to understand your perspective, and how that shifted the whole dynamic and even, most probably, your willingness to listen to them and understand where they're coming from.

The act of choosing to be present and to take in other people's perspective and experience without judgment, without trying to change it, without trying to prove yourself or whatever it is⁠—just actually listening⁠—it is way more powerful than most of us think it is. And you know it is from those times when it's happened to you.

When a transit like Sun conjunction to Mercury shows up, what we often experience is our own overidentification with our ideas or somebody else's overidentification with their ideas. And it can lead to real conflicts that are actually not necessary because if your sense of self is well aligned, then it's okay if other people don't agree with you. And of course, I'm not talking about the kinds of disagreements that are issues of life and death⁠—of course. Right? So keep in context what I'm referencing here.

But there is great power in being willing and able to let others show you who they are, to really take in other people's perspectives. It really can help, not just because it's great information, but also because it has nothing to do with you; it has to do with them. And again, the more aligned you are with yourself, the easier it is to take in other people's perspective without taking it on.

Now, with the Sun conjunction to Mercury, we have to be aware of this. Additionally, this transit can kind of fasten the tempo of our lives so that we have more social connections; we talk to more people. Maybe work is a little bit busier on this date, and you're dealing more with coworkers, neighbors, friends, that kind of shit because⁠—Mercury.

The thing that shifts this a little bit is that Mercury and the Sun are also conjunct to Saturn. And Saturn is a planet of consequences. Saturn is the planet that we look to to understand hardship, yes⁠—sometimes yes⁠—but also wisdom, wisdom that is accrued through experience. So Saturn will often have us going through those experiences that build our wisdom, that empower us to learn from our experiences. So it is possible on and around this date you will encounter someone who is older and who is wiser than you or who is more rigid than you. So we can have the Darth Vader version of Saturn, which is oppressive and restrictive and very domineering and kind of patriarchal, but we can also have the Mary Poppins version, my favorite version as a Capricorn, which is magical and inspiring and all about boundaries and deconstructing old beliefs so that we can get to the heart of matters. Saturn goes both ways. It depends where we're at and what lessons we're learning.

Having all of this happen in Pisces strengthens this ongoing theme of needing meaning and purpose to drive us. Piscean energies want to be pointed inwards. They want to be pointed towards spiritual, emotional evolution and development. It is a very energetically porous and sensitive zodiac sign. Again, Saturn is all about consequences. And so this transit of the Sun conjunction to Saturn specifically does favor hard work. It wants us to show up, to be responsible, and to be humble, which requires not descending into guilt if you make a mistake, but instead, being resilient and strong enough to be able to be like, "Okay. I made a mistake, and I'm going to learn from it." That is humility.

This transit can coincide with things coming together. Again, it's a consequential transit. And consequences⁠—I think a lot of people hear this, and they're like, "Oh no. Consequences." But consequences are not inherently bad. You have probably experienced really wonderful consequences to your actions over the course of your life. This may be a transit that brings things together. This may be a moment where your ideas or your identity crystallizes in some way because Saturn is all about crystallization. It's all about taking a thing and making it material.

The thing we want to watch out for within all of this is that Saturn is such a depressive loner. And so you may feel that you need to go it alone, but you don't. You probably don't. I mean, I don't know exactly what's happening for you, but you probably don't. This transit⁠—again, it's asking that you show up, just that you show up and that you own your part. You don't need to isolate other people. You don't need to go it alone. And also, if you don't have the right people around you that you trust, you don't need to bring them in closer.

This transit is meant to teach us boundaries, how to hold ourselves together, not necessarily how to keep people out, unless that's what's called for. It's really about how to hold yourself together. Now, keep in mind Mercury is also conjunct to Saturn. And so this transit⁠—while it can bring up critical thinking, it can also bring up critical thinking. In other words, it can have you being so self-critical or so critical of other people that you're just descending into a saturnine pit where you feel like shit. There's no point. Everything's terrible. It's existential. That's Saturn for you. Or it can help you to cultivate more critical, nuanced thinking where you discern based on evidence⁠—critical thinking. What's the difference between these two things? It's really just proportion. It's just proportion. So, again, we come back to healthy habits inspired by meaning.

This transit can also coincide with problems in your relationships, in your mercurial relationships. We're talking about friendships, coworkers, neighbors, siblings. You may be feeling lonely. And however you typically react to feelings of loneliness is likely to get triggered here. Or you might not be feeling lonely, but somebody that is in your orbit may be dealing with feelings of loneliness, and their activation around that may have them behaving in ways that you didn't see coming and don't really make sense to you.

You can see how when you or somebody else gets activated around something as personal and deep as loneliness, it's so vulnerable. But when you feel lonely and vulnerable, you don't walk around being like, "Oh, I'm feeling lonely and vulnerable today." Right? We try to cover it up. And that effort can make us feel exhausted, just fucking exhausted and even more lonely because now you're acting.

And so, if you are feeling this way on or around this transit, I want to encourage you to find someone⁠—and that someone might be yourself. It might be you and your dear diary. It might be your therapist. It might be a family member or a friend or a partner or whatever⁠—but to try to find a person where you can share a little bit of what's going on for you, understanding that they're going through the transit, too. So ask if they have the bandwidth. Make space to listen, not just to dump.

The other thing I would say is that you might be dealing with other people who are just acting in ways that you just don't get. I want to encourage you to consider, is it possible that they're acting out because they feel bad? Luckily, Saturn helps us to have serious conversations. So I want to encourage you to be open to being real with people and to having hard conversations. You may be confronted with a very difficult truth on or around this date, or the world may be confronted with a really difficult truth. So do your best to locate a place within yourself that wants to create balance or peace, that wants to be free, because accessing a healthy motivation, accessing your own life-force energies, can really, really help you to cope with that heavy saturnine stuff.

Now, one last thing I'll say about this transit is that if you have something tedious to do⁠—your taxes or any kind of tedious administrative task to do⁠—these transits are a godsend because it's really good for putting everything away and just focusing on one repetitive task. So that's a great use of this energy is just focusing, bearing down on focusing and getting something done, because the overwhelming energies of Pisces and these three planets⁠—the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn⁠— sitting on top of each other can make us feel like we're never going to get anything done.

It's kind of that Sisyphus ball problem. It's like I keep on pushing this ball up a hill, and every time I get to the top of the hill, the ball just rolls right back down and crushes me. It can be quite a challenging experience. So having something finite that you can achieve and accomplish and be done with is just an excellent use of this energy and can really help to stabilize you on the insides, which is a lovely thing.

Now, that brings us to February 29th. Yeah, it's a leap year, February 29th. And we have a sextile between Jupiter and Mercury. It's happening at 11 degrees and 13 minutes with Mercury in Pisces and Jupiter in Taurus, exact at 1:53 a.m. Pacific Time. It's overlapping, obviously, with those three conjunctions I was just telling you about.

Mercury sextile to Jupiter is really helpful in the context of these transits that we're going through. Mercury is the details, and Jupiter is the big picture. And so this transit really helps us to get into it, to think in a way that encompasses both the details and the big picture, to make plans, to sort through information, to have conversations that are open and expansive. So this transit is not going to undo Saturn's presence, but Jupiter is absolutely going to help us to feel more resilient, to be more open to listening to others, learning new things, and to find ways of communicating that are more effective. So it's definitely a transit you want to tap into and make the most of because it is a real helper to that Saturn heaviness that we're still dealing with.

And then that, my dears, brings us to March 1st. On March 1st, we have not one but two exact transits and a sneak attack one that I'm going to tell you about. Okay. But let's start with the transits. On March 1st, we have a Sun sextile to Jupiter. It's exact at 4:15 a.m., and it's happening at 11 degrees and 24 minutes, the Sun in Pisces, Jupiter in Taurus. Now, this should surprise you zero percent since the Sun and Mercury were conjoined just a couple days ago, and now they're both sextiling Jupiter.

So, again, this transit is overlapping with that big conjunction involving Saturn. And this transit will be really supportive, but we're not going to experience the full amazingness of it because of the heaviness of Saturn. Now, I almost take that back because Saturn is heavy in many ways, but it's also fortifying. When we have Sun and Mercury sextile to Jupiter, and the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn are all sitting on top of each other, we can achieve really great things. Saturn helps us to deal with reality. Jupiter helps us to not be limited by reality.

So the Sun sextile to Jupiter specifically can make us feel significantly more resilient and open and willing to try new things and even willing to fail. Sun sextile to Jupiter, when Saturn's not around, can bring really wonderful things your way. And when Saturn is around, it can be harder to see that things are wonderful. So, again, it's really important to remember something I say all the time on the podcast, which is not everything that feels good is good for you, and not everything that feels bad is bad for you.

Be open this week to opportunities and shifts that may be a little heavy but are ultimately expansive and in your best interests. Sometimes the work is an important part of the journey. There are many ways and many times in life where, if you just got what you wanted the second you wanted it, you wouldn't appreciate it⁠—worse than that, you wouldn't be ready for it. The labor of getting there can be really valuable and teach you a lot.

Sun sextile to Jupiter helps to facilitate spiritual growth, material growth, psychological growth, all the growth. So be open. Try your best to be open⁠—open to learning, open to having authentic exchanges, open to unlearning things and getting real. This transit overlapping with that Saturn stuff helps us to learn from our past by being able to see the patterns that are playing through our lives. And within that, Jupiter empowers us to identify how we can use our agency to grow beyond the limiting parts of our patterns from the past, whether that's in our attitudes, in our behavior⁠—whatever the case may be.

Now, another exact transit that is happening on this date is a Venus sextile to Chiron. This one is happening with Venus at 17 degrees and 16 minutes of Aquarius and Chiron 17 degrees and 16 minutes of Aries. This transit helps to facilitate really deep growth around your self-worth, around your relationship both to yourself, to other people, to love⁠—that's giving love, receiving love. It can also be related to your finances or your values in general.

Venus sextile to Chiron helps to have you engaging with core wounding that you may struggle with in a way that is generous and kind. This transit can coincide with⁠ maybe not spectacular, but meaningful, shifts towards greater self-acceptance and self-love. And that has a meaningful ripple effect out into your relationships.

Now, listen. It is absolutely possible that this will be more focused on your relationships with other people as opposed to your relationship with yourself. But the truth of Chiron is that it is so much about our triggers. And so, because it is about our triggers, even if this is playing out in your relationship⁠—and again, it would play out in a really positive way; there's nothing to worry about with this transit. But if it is playing out in a relationship, it would be, in some meaningful way, a relationship that somehow triggers some of your core wounding⁠—your limited beliefs about yourself, some sort of painful feelings or beliefs you hold about yourself. So this is something for you to pay attention to because of Saturn, actually, and Jupiter this week. This really strengthens your ability to be able to make sense and make use of whatever insights come up for you.

Now, the other transit that is kind of what I call sneak attack here is on the 3rd, on Sunday, March 3rd⁠—and we're going to talk about this next week in depth, but Venus will be forming an exact square to Uranus. Now, we've been feeling the effects of this transit, actually, since February 27th. So we've been feeling it throughout this week. Obviously, since it's exact on the 3rd and this forecast ends on the 2nd, we're going to be feeling it building, building, building until next week. So I wanted to just kind of give you a heads-up about that.

Venus square to Uranus can be quite a destabilizing transit, and it tends to shake up relationships especially. It tends to create a sense of restlessness in your relationships as the ways in which your dynamics with other people or yourself are in a rut start to become pretty intolerable. That's what this transit does. And it does this so that we, again, get more free. And depending on your relationship to that concept and how that plays out in your relationships and in your life, that's going to look a lot of different ways.

But I can tell you that this transit is pretty destabilizing. So, while we've been going through all of these transits, we have Venus square to Uranus kind of building, building, building throughout the week, making us feel like we have to do something in our relationships; we have to make a change. And if you're somebody who is really scared of change or scared of being alone, you may start acting out to try to stabilize things that aren't quite ready to be stabilized.

So, again, I want to bring you back, in all contexts of everything I've talked about this week, to this larger theme of ritualizing self-care so that you have a way of returning to yourself so that you can assess what you're actually experiencing, what's motivating your thoughts and feelings, and develop some sort of a strategy for how to respond or how to cope with them.

I know it's a lot, but hopefully this forecast will help you to prepare for and engage with the energies at play. And if you're interested in digging deeper and learning with me, I hope you'll join me over on Patreon, where we talk about all kinds of things astrological and spiritual, really kind of going deep into the Nodes, Midheaven, and ego right now. I don't know if those things sound like they're disparate, but it's all connected. So, if you're interested in learning more with me, go over to patreon.com/jessicalanyadoo.

Okay. Let me run through the transits one more time. On the 27th, we have an exact square between Mars and Jupiter. On the 28th, the Sun sits on top of Mercury, and then Mercury and the Sun also sit on top of Saturn. On the 29th, Mercury forms an exact sextile to Jupiter. And on the 1st of March, we have a Sun sextile to Jupiter and a Venus sextile to Chiron.

If you haven't already hit that Subscribe or Follow button wherever you listen to this podcast, please do. It does make a difference for podcasts in general and certainly independent DIY podcasts like this one. And if you get value from the show, please do consider rating it and writing a review. And finally, in case you don't know, I have a written Sun sign horoscope⁠—just to check out your sign, what's going on every week⁠—that drops on my website every Wednesday. So you can check that out over at lovelanyadoo.com. I got goodies.

Take good care of yourself and others, and I'll talk to you in just a couple of days. Buh-bye.