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 to Ghost of a Podcast, and this week I’m doing something unusual. I have asked people over on Patreon if they have any questions about how to Queer astrology, in other words, to look at astrology and use astrology outside of the heteronormative, cis-centric, binary perspective that so much traditional astrology is. This is just a small excerpt from a much larger video that I have posted over on Patreon. So if you are interested in hearing more about this and engaging with this content more, then just join me over at Patreon, and you won’t be disappointed. 

Okay, I will just briefly say that there are many ways of using astrology, of course, and there are many perspectives on Queerness and astrology in general, and what I’m sharing is simply my own based on my expertise and experience and perspectives.

So the first question came from Liz. And Liz said, “This is kind of general but what would be the top three implicitly heterosexist ideas that get circulated around astrology and astrology charts?”

Let’s just unmask them. And I love this, and this is the best place to start this conversation because when we look at the birth chart from the perspective and assumption that the baseline assumption we should make of humans is that they’re heterosexual, or that their sexuality is normally, quote/unquote, heterosexual, and that there’s aberrations from there, that is inherently problematic. Deeply problematic. 

The second, I would say, is when we make the assumption that the baseline of gender is binary and unchanging, that is a massive problem. Neither of these things are reliably true, and when we Queer our understanding of gender and sexuality, which of course are very different things, what we’re doing is we’re not making everyone gay and non-binary. That’s not the point. That’s not the motive. That’s not the outcome. It’s being willing and able to look at things from a more expansive perspective that is less influenced by patriarchal, heterosexist views that are ultimately limiting to every person of every gender. For reals. 

And I’m not saying that binary, gender, and heterosexuality aren’t the truths and the best possible truths—for many people, they are. Not for all people, maybe not even for the majority of people. We’ll never know. And the reason why I say we’ll never know is because for as long as we have this religious and societal force of straight is right, binary gender is right, and if you deviate from these plans, then you are wrong, then we won’t really know how many people would choose to be any number of ways because we don’t really have the right or the ease to make those choices. 

So anyways, the third thing to Liz’s question is almost every single thing about women, almost every single thing about women—unfortunately, astrology, it’s an ancient practice that has been used across cultures and time, and like so many things across cultures and time it has been primarily written by men. And men’s understanding of women is limited it so seems, and that is true on a million different levels. We do have a lot of astrology that has been written and taught by women; however, a lot of the astrology that we see in the world is geared to be very gendered, and this leads to the sillification of astrology which is something that I’ve talked about on the podcast before. 

Now, a lot of astrology is interpreted using gendered language and references and this seems to really trip people up, especially people who are Queer or super feminist or just wanting to move outside of men are from Mars, women are from Venus, boys like blue, girls like pink. 

Okay, so when we talk about masculine and feminine energy, from my queered perspective, we are not at all talking about males and females. So this bleeds into—and this is a question I got a lot on Patreon—the Moon is mom and Saturn is dad. This is a limited and literalist perspective. If we think of male and female energy, we are thinking of energy. When we look at male and female energy, we are looking at energy. When we look at men and women, we are looking at genders. It’s different. 

So what we want to do is to explore and understand what is masculine energy and what is feminine energy. To understand these things outside of gender binary roles that have been assigned from patriarchal societies takes some work, but luckily not that much work. A lot of times we talk about male or masculine as active and female or feminine as passive, and we hear this as passive as a bad thing and active as a good thing, and it’s not about that. It’s just about different ways that energy functions and flows. To receive, to reflect, to incubate, to be in a state of like passive action, it’s still action; it’s just a form of energy and how it runs. 

When we talk about the Moon being like the female parent—which you are unlikely to ever catch me saying—when we talk about that what we’re really talking about is the receptive and nurturing parent. We’re not actually talking about mom. It’s just that historically when men were writing shit about astrology and many straight women writing shit about astrology, what they would do is be like, well women are nurturing; we give birth. And I reject that. I reject that women need to be defined by birthing or by nurturance or that men can’t give birth or non-binary people can’t give birth and that men can’t be deeply nurturing and caring and receptive and vulnerable. It’s really important that we unpack our own shit around gender and gender archetypes so that we can start to expand what is possible for people of all genders. 

I have another question and it came from many people actually, but I’m going to just read what Eric said. “Honestly, I’m still unpacking old Sun sign horoscopes that were like Aquarius men are this way and Aquarius women are that way.” So the question here that Eric is asking is, “Do planets even manifest differently based on identity or what?”

Okay, great question, and the answer is as complicated as you’d hopefully imagine. Men are not one way and women are another just on their own, and also, yes, men and women are different and all other genders included in that. The reason why old school Sun sign horoscopes and Sun sign astrology works for many people—boys are like this, and girls are like that—is because of the constructs and the freedoms that different genders have had. So in other words, up until very recently in, for instance, United States history, women couldn’t vote or own property, so what would be the fucking point of talking about an Aries woman being forceful and knowing what she wants and creating a life that she can really be adventurous in? What would be the point in that? You wouldn’t focus on that at all because culturally that wasn’t possible for an Aries woman, as an example. 

Why would we talk about a water sign man really wanting to focus on family and that being the center of their lives when men were defined by their ability to make money and to go into the world and beat shit up. You know what I’m saying?

So in other words, and I think this is much rougher for women, and when we talk about the Sun sign gendered astrology, we’re, of course, ignoring all genders outside of the two binary genders of male and female. So it’s not that there’s no truth or value to these things, but it’s important to unpack where that value comes from and where that truth comes from. 

Many people do have really binary genders and very heterosexual lives, and they read Sun sign horoscopes where women are from Venus and Men are from Mars, and they are like, “Yes, women are from Venus, and men are from Mars; I resonate with that.” And that’s cool if that works for you, but it’s not a comprehensive understanding of, first of all, the truth of gender, second of all, the truth about humans, and third of all, the truth of astrology, okay. 

So what I personally would recommend doing if you’re not trying to be an astrologer, you’re just trying to get value from astrology, is to read about, for instance, Aquarius women and Aquarius men if you are an Aquarius or if you’re dating an Aquarius, to understand that these are different parts of that person’s nature. Because what we’re talking about is energy, you know what I’m saying. 

Whether we’re talking about something from a psychological lens—I am feeling depressed today—or from an astrological lens—I have a crush on a cold-hearted Aquarius—we’re talking about energy. We’re talking about the energetics of an experience. And so, if you have some measure of flexibility with how you work with that energy and you don’t get locked into rigid definitions—wow, cool stuff can happen. You can learn a great deal. 

Okay, so Dot has a great question. They say, “I spoke with a friend about how we experience our genders—both of us are non-binary. They explained their experience as always escaping them and hard to grasp. They love to play with their gender, and it changes depending upon how they dress, pronouns they use, hormones, how they flow, etcetera. I, on the other hand, locate the experience of my gender in my bones. It does not change over time if I cross dress or change pronouns or whatever. I wonder if there are many more experiences? I find it fascinating and under-discussed, and maybe I just don’t know the right resources, but is there an astrology to how and where we experience our gender?”

The answer is yes. There is absolutely an astrology to how and when and where we experience our gender. And I want to be very clear that that doesn’t mean that people live authentically. This is a really important point that I think really emerged for me as I was reading through the questions that I got on Patreon. There are just countless ways that we do not allow ourselves to live in a way that is authentic. That we do not actually honor what is our truth, sometimes out of choice, sometimes out of necessity. 

When we look at something like being non-binary, whether we’re talking about gender or really anything that’s outside of the binary of what is expected from whatever society and culture you live in, what we are talking about is a willingness to live in your difference—the way that you are different from what is expected of you or whatever. And not everyone is able to do that, again, for a variety of reasons. And so, that said, absolutely some people experience their gender as incredibly fluid, and some people experience their gender as pretty damn fixed, and many people for sure experience their gender as different over the course of time. 

If your gender experience never changes over the course of decades, that’s cool, but it certainly makes a lot of sense that it would change over the course of decades. And I think that there is more room for out Queer people to experience and explore their genders than there is for heterosexual people or closeted Queer people, and that’s nothing to do with your astrology; it’s to do with your choices, and it’s to do with culture. 

And so, in my ideal world view, as a Queer person but also as an astrologer, we would allow ourselves to be responsive to our lives, to what’s actually happening for us internally but also what’s happening in our lives in the world around us. And there is a fluidity to gender, period. I mean there is a fluidity to gender even for the most like binary, rigid person, trans, cis or otherwise, there is a fluidity to gender. The question is how do you experience it? How do you express it, and what permission do you have or not in your life for those things?

So that said, generally speaking, Neptune and Uranus I personally regard as the queerest of the planets, and that doesn’t mean gay; it means Queer. Neptune is a fluid, non-binary energy, and Uranus is not a fluid, non-binary energy. And so, Dot, to your question, you are likely to find that you have more of a Uranian nature, and your friend has more of a Neptunian nature. We can also say a prevalence of fixed signs or planets in fixed houses can incline you to be more fixed in your gender experience and expression, and your friend may have more mutable zodiac signs in their birth chart or have planets in mutable houses and therefore have a much more mutable experience of their gender experience and expression. 

Okay, so we’ve got more. The next question I have is from Natalie, who asks, “How to interpret the fourth and tenth house, slash, the mother and father figures, when you’re coming from a non-traditional family?” 

So I already kind of touched on this but it’s important to return to because while I already touched on how we want to look at the more nurturing parents or parental figure for the fourth house and the more paternal or organizing, demanding, structure giving parent, which would be more the tenth house or Saturn and Moon, when we’re talking about this from a non-traditional family, whether we’re talking about a single parent or genders that are not boy and girl genders in the home as the parental figures, you simply look for the more lunar of the two, if there are two parents, and the more Saturnian of the two if there are two parents. 

And if there are not two parents, that doesn’t mean anything other than there are not two parents, which you can generally see in the birth chart. And also, there are other ways that we get structure. That tenth house stuff or your Saturnian stuff can show up as society, or maleness in general, or a grandparent, or an aunty or an uncle, or whatever. We just need to be somewhat flexible with our understanding of who can fill the role of the energy we are seeing in a birth chart. 

So Michelle asks where to look in a chart and what to look for around gender identity and when that might come out, and also wondering the same about sexuality and sexual identity. So the process of coming out is not exclusive to self-realization. It’s when you feel safe and comfortable to tell the people in your life that you are Queer or that you are gender Queer. That, again, has to do with your free will. I can tell you when you are, quote, meant to, but that’s not very helpful. 

I think it’s also very, very problematic to look at someone’s birth chart and determine if they are gay or straight. Queer or not is different to me because it’s not inherently about sexuality; it’s about sensibility, whereas who we fuck and our gender identities, this is Soul in a body stuff right here, and when we read for these things, again, we are first and foremost presuming a baseline of cis gender, binary gender, and heterosexuality, which is a problem. 

So we can only look for signifiers of gayness if we are assuming that there need be no signifiers for straightness. There are as many signifiers for heterosexuality as there are for homosexuality. There are as many signifiers of fluid gender as there are for static gender. But we don’t look for signifiers of heterosexuality or static gender, do we? And that’s a problem. And that’s a human problem. It’s a societal problem. It’s a values-based problem. It’s not a problem with astrology; it’s a problem with how we use astrology. 

And so, I don’t advise looking for signs of these things per se. But again, if somebody is very, let’s say, Uranian or Aquarian, maybe they’re very Neptunian or Piscean, and they don’t want to fit inside a society, if somebody’s like, I don’t give a fuck about fitting in, they’re going to have an easier time coming out. They’re going to have an easier time expressing the ways in which they are different from the mainstream and all of the privileges associated with that. 

If somebody is more Saturnian or more Jupiterian and wants to get along with everyone and wants to be super conventional and doesn’t want to have to deal with any extra problems, they are going to have a harder time or a less comfortable time coming out. And when we talk about coming out, it’s not like a one and done thing; you have to make the decision to come out in a million life circumstances, a million times a day, a week, a year, and a lifetime. 

So this is a lot to do with values. It’s a lot to do with safety. It’s a lot to do with circumstance and with nature. It is a problematic thing to read it in the birth chart though. You always want to ask yourself, am I presuming a baseline of this person having some sort of class privilege, or this person coming from a heterosexual home, or this person having two parents, or this person being healthy? There is a million ways we make assumptions, and those assumptions can be very destructive. They often work. Stereotypes and assumptions come from something. 

So we look at the mass of people and they’re straight, so we presume straightness when we look at the birth chart, but that’s wrong. It’s just not right, you know what I’m saying. And I’m not saying like some moralistic it’s wrong, it’s just there’s no way for us to really know that because people across time have not had the freedom to be who they are, and if you don’t have the liberty to be who you are, then how can you really make a choice about who you are? 

Parker asks a really great and complicated question. “I have a question about HRT—that’s hormone replacement therapy and transits that might be considered poor timing for starting. For example, some sort of Mars opposition or Square being particularly bad for starting taking testosterone. Is there a place to look to within your natal chart to get an idea for better or less ideal timing or a way to work with it? My theory on this has to do with Martian aggression sort of stirring the angsty pot of intensity that HRT brings.”

So Parker, this is a really amazing question, and my first response to it is, absolutely. If you are not a medical astrologer, you should not be doing medical astrology. And when we’re talking about hormones, anyone who has ever had a hormone fluctuation, whether you’re cis gender or trans, knows hormones will fuck you up. They will change your life. They will really make you feel radically different. They will make your body radically different. It’s not something to fuck around with. And I don’t mean this around being trans or taking T, I mean this as an astrologer. 

If you are not a medical astrologer, you should not be doing that kind of very serious medical astrology in general. So this is not a criticism of you, Parker, it’s just I cannot say this strongly enough. That’s one part of the answer. The other part of the answer, I would look at maybe transits to ones natal Mars. I would not look at transits from Mars for starting HRT. 

This is a really important thing because it is a journey. Taking HRTs is a journey. Taking Synthroid is a journey. Anything that’s going to mess with your hormones, it’s not just about when you start it. We can talk about something like with medical astrology, timing taking T for instance, based on the moment you decided, based on the moment you got the prescription, or the doctor said they would give it you, or based on the moment you started taking it. And different medical astrologers will do that in different ways. 

There are times that are worse for starting medications. There are absolutely times that are worse for getting surgeries or better for either of those things, but I would be negligent to give you a recipe for that because some of this has to do with your individual birth chart. 

Let me frame it this way. I discovered I had a health issue in my late teens or early twenties, and everywhere I looked they said take garlic pills; garlic pills will fix you. Yeah, they will. Garlic pills will solve all your problems. So I took a garlic pill. I was so sick, and it’s because I’m allergic to garlic. Hmm. So as a medical astrologer, I can look at my chart and say, oh it makes sense that I would have a garlic sensitivity or a mild allergy to garlic because for whatever reasons I can see in my birth chart. 

What I am trying to say here is what works for my body might not work for your body. What works for your body might not work for my body. You may have a system that burns through things really quickly. You may have a system that a little dab will do you or a system that is really like a damp, cold body type. The way that your body works, it is indicated in the birth chart, and you need to be a competent, skilled, and trained medical astrologer to see that. 

If you have any of these different kinds of body types, we’re going to look for different indicators for when would be a good time to start HRT or a bad time to start HRT, a good time to get a surgery, or a bad time to get a surgery. Now there’s certainly some universal things, but I’m just not the one who’s going to teach that outside of a comprehensive medical astrology conversation, which I’m hesitant to have because you have to have a certain baseline of astrology in order to be a medical astrologer and outside of teaching at astrology conferences, I have never been able to know whether or not people have that. 

So somebody else—Sandra asked, “Can you speak on how Queerness is not a product of trauma and gender euphoria or placements or transits.” So I have already spoken a bit to this, and I just want to reiterate it that Queerness is absolutely not a product of trauma. I thank God every God damned day that I’m Queer. OMG, I love to be Queer. Queerness is my favorite, and it’s not at all a product of trauma. It would be ridiculous to assume that straight people have not been traumatized—my God. So Queerness is not a product of trauma. And in terms of speaking to gender euphoria, I don’t fuck with euphoria. I fuck with tragedy. But that’s not because I’m gay; it’s because I’m a fucking triple Capricorn. Cha cha! 

So, my loves, this has been a big, old, gay extravaganza—very Queer, very gay, very Queer, very gay. I hope that it has been really educational and uplifting for you, whether you’re Queer or straight, whether you’re trans or cis. Because Queer astrology and Queer theory and Queer living, it uplifts everyone, just like feminism uplifts everyone of every gender and every sexuality. I stand by it—that I do.

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This week we’ve got a really focused horoscope. And I say it’s focused because it’s focused on Mars. There is three transits I’m going to unpack for you, and they are all from Mars. So before we get into the horoscope itself, which will cover June 27th through July 3rd of 2021, I want to unpack Mars a little bit more. And I have dropped an Astrology Hot Take about Mars, and I do have an episode of the podcast called, “Anger and Forgiveness,” episode 177, and that absolutely touches on Mars because whenever you think, feel, read, or encounter anger, you are encountering Mars. So let me unpack it with you. 

Mars is the planet whose glyph looks like the conventional symbol for man because it holds a lot of qualities that are heterotopically associated with maleness: assertion, aggression, ambition, power. It literally governs our muscles. Mars is how we move ourselves through the world. It is fornicating. It is fighting. So Mars is doing sex, you know what I mean. It’s taking a stand or standing up against or standing up for. Mars is about assertion and passion and defensiveness and irritability. Mars is literally your car—like, Mars in your birth chart shows you your car and your luck with cars. It’s how you barrel through the world. Mars is all manner of fighting, so it’s like the argument with someone, you know, the disagreement that you have with someone, and it’s also like punch, punch, bang, bang, knives and guns and such and thus. Mars, you know. 

But when we dig a little deeper, it’s hard to really talk about Mars and how we experience Mars as human people without talking about defensiveness and ego and courage and conviction. When we are reacting to someone else’s anger and aggression, we often feel really defensive. That defensiveness is generally a sign that we don’t quite know how to respond, we don’t quite know if we have the right to respond, and we don’t feel confident about our position. Defensiveness is generally a symptom that you don’t feel that you have the right or capacity to hold whatever position you need to hold, to bend in whatever ways you may need to bend. 

Everybody experiences defensiveness. I mean, that’s just part of being a human, and one of the more common ways that Mars functions in the birth chart. It doesn’t have to be, but in order to cope with one’s defensiveness we need to be able and willing to sit with it. And it’s really hard. Because somebody may be coming at you with a bunch of bullshit, right, and you have a defensive reaction because of course you would—they’re coming at you with bullshit. 

So you can establish, okay, this person is coming at me with aggression. This person is coming at me with things I strongly disagree with, and that is why I’m feeling defensive. But what I would encourage you to do when you can, if you can, is to sit with that. Okay, so maybe the other person is inherently wrong, or the way they’ve approached things is inherently wrong—that’s totally possible, maybe even likely. 

Sometimes when people do that, you’re like, “Oh, this is—I reject this. This isn’t right. No.” And sometimes you feel defensive. What’s the difference? The difference is around your own ego, your own sense of self, and self-possession. When you believe that you have a right to disagree with someone, it’s less likely that you’ll feel defensive when they come at you. When you have confidence in your capacity to care for yourself in a way that is necessary, especially in the context of passionate or conflictual dynamics, then you’re less likely to be defensive. 

And that is why for a lot of people it’s easier to stand up for our friends and loved ones than for ourselves. Because for our friends and loved ones we may have a lot of the feelings that are in the defensives bucket, but because it’s not personal to us and it doesn’t touch in on our insecurities and fears, we can kind of be more forceful and not have to sort through our own defensive feelings because we’re defending someone else. 

It is important to be willing and able to sit with and look at that because a lot of times when somebody is coming at you with some bullshit, you will feel defensive—not because what they’re doing is right, but because it touches in on something in yourself that you’re restful with, that you’re not at peace with. 

And so, this is where the concept of the unconscious teacher is a good one for me to share with you. I don’t remember where I learnt this, but there are some people who come into your life and they teach you something, like oh, I don’t know, a teacher, a therapist, a bestie. People come into your life, and they teach you something about life or about yourself, and they do it in a kind way and an empathetic way and in a consensual way. 

And then there’s other people who come into your life, and they burn down your house, and they eat all the food out of your fridge—not in that order—and they fuck your shit up, and you learn a lot. And those people are unconscious teachers. We don’t want to give them the credit for teaching us things because they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their damn hearts. 

However, we don’t also what to throw away the lessons, and we don’t want to throw away our own capacity for humility around wow, I had something to learn from this. This wasn’t just torture; it was also I learnt some things about myself, the world. I developed some things from this difficult experience. 

And when we have meaning through suffering, it becomes much easier to bear that suffering. When we are able to find our agency—like, this is something that makes sense in my life. I wish I didn’t have to learn it this way. I don’t want to give the person who triggered this shit any kind of credit here, but I can see that this was a way that I needed better boundaries, or I let this person into my life because of low self-esteem or whatever the fuck it is. To be able to recognize those things and own okay, I learnt something here. There was value for me here. I hope to never learn it this way again. I don’t want to give the asshole any credit, but here we are, right. When we can do that, life gets easier. It gets a lot easier, especially as you age because the older you get, most of us get more entrenched in our narratives about ourselves and the world around us. We become more entrenched in our defenses. And so, if you’re willing to see what served me in this? Like, on some level, if I consented to participating in this situation or with this person—which is, of course, not always the case—but if on some level we do consent to participate, what are we getting out of it? 

And that doesn’t take away from maybe you were victim to something, maybe the other person was completely wrong, and you literally did the best you could possibly do. It’s still valuable to see on some level there is some part of us that is running an agenda, that is not our conscious agenda; this is just part of being a human. So what are we getting out of our shitty experiences? What are we getting out of the way we participate in the patterns in our lives? 

Now, this stuff I’m talking about absolutely extends and expands beyond Mars. However, in order to deal with these things we must look to Mars in our individual birth charts, we must look to our Martian transits because Mars governs courage, and courage is very much—and this is something I’ve probably said on the podcast a fair amount—but the word courage comes from French—coeur: to take heart, and when we think of courage and bravery as an act of taking heart, not of not being vulnerable, not of not being scared, but gathering up our heart and acting forcefully and passionately from that place of fullness of heart, Mars starts to make a new and more powerful kind of sense. 

We want to move beyond gender binary concepts of Mars. Mars is not men. We can label it male energy. We can label yang energy. But let’s instead of labelling it, as easy and nice and tidy as that may be, let’s look at the complexity of it. The more able and willing we are to take heart and to mobilize from that place, the healthier our Mars is. And as I talked about in the Mars Hot Take episode, if you haven’t already heard it, whether we’re fucking or we’re fighting, whether we’re planning a path in our lives, or whether we’re mobilizing on our goals, or we are taking a hike, when we do it from an embodied place where our heart and our body, we are aligned with that—whether it’s our minds or our spirits, we are aligned with our heart and our body, the function of Mars gets healthier. Our life gets better. And that doesn’t mean you always feels better, but objectively, substantively, and over the course of time life gets better. 

Now, another thing I want to acknowledge is that Mars is a planet that governs the meat suit. I mean, it governs the meat of the meat suit, if you know what I mean. So when we’re talking about our bodies and the resiliency and strength of our bodies, when we’re talking about exercise and running, we’re talking about Mars. And it is important for me to acknowledge that because of the role of stress, which, of course, defensiveness and ego shit and anger and fighting and all this kind of stuff, they really create a lot of stress in our bodies. And stress is a challenge to the meat suit. 

So if you’re in your twenties, and you’re super stressed, you might feel it in your body—you might have a headache or a tummy ache or you might just not be able to stop crying. You might get really hot, really cold, whatevs. But over the course of time, once you cross over into your forties and in the many years of your life that exist after your forties—so your forties, your fifties, your sixties, your seventies, your eighties, your nineties, right, these are all years that you will be alive if nothing gets in the way; they are all meaningful and important years—the impact of stress upon your sweet, sweet meat suit is something that doctors and scientists can wax poetic about. We know this. We know that stress has an impact on our bodies. 

And so, after 2020—remember 2020? Fucking 2020. After 2020, we had six months of a Mars Retrograde, Mars in Aries Retrograde. I talked about it ad nauseum. If you want a refresher, go back to old episodes. So after that period where Mars was really fucking with the outer planets in Capricorn—Saturn and Pluto and Jupiter in Capricorn—we all sustained a great deal of stress. Whether we’re talking about social and political realities, economic realities, whether we’re talking about COVID or anything else, it had an impact on our bodies. And our lives didn’t stop. Our transits didn’t falter, right. We all have been going through a great deal of stress. And so, a lot of times what happens with the body is we power through—such a Mars thing to do—we power through stresses, and then when we get to a certain place where we’re like okay, I don’t have to keep on pushing forward, things start to collapse. 

And so, before I unpack the transits of this week, I want to acknowledge that I have noticed how many people are really struggling with their physical health. And some of this may simply be—and I say simply; I don’t mean easily—but may simply be the long-term toll of living with extreme stress, living in fear, not having access to so many of the ways that you are accustomed to caring for yourself and managing your wellness or managing your ego, getting attention and engaging with other people, all these Mars things. 

And so, you may need to do less, not out of kind of necessity because of a pandemic—which is what a lot of people were doing in 2020—but do a little less as a way to catch up, as a way to nurture your body, and to nurture your ego. I am not of the mind that we shouldn’t have an ego; having an ego is part of being a human. I am not of the mind that we shouldn’t get angry. I fucking love anger. Anger is healthy. How can you be honest and not be angry? What it’s about is making sure that our ego is balanced, so that we can care and provide for ourselves and the world around us and other people without martyring ourselves. And also, so that our ego does not become so big and demanding that we believe we are more entitled than others or that we weaponize our entitlement. 

When we talk about Mars, it’s really important to check in with your body. So if you feel defensiveness in your body, it might be because you disagree with something, but you feel like you’re supposed to agree. It might be that you disagree with something, but you feel like there is like a kernel of truth that you don’t want to deal with right now, or you don’t want that kernel of truth to invalidate the ways in which you disagree with the rest of it. 

Embracing an and/also perspective, being willing to have things be nuanced and even paradoxical is really helpful and healthy when investigating and investing in truth, but also when investigating and investing in our own ego and its functions—the good, the bad, and the ugly, my loves. So ’twas a preamble. I regret nothing. Let’s get into your horoscope. 

We are looking at the week, as I said, of June 27th through July 3rd of 2021. We’re fucking halfway through this year. I can't even believe it’s moving so fast…and slow but fast. Okay, so the first transit of this week is a Mars opposition to Saturn. We are going to be feeling the Mars energies in all the transits I’m talking about here today—we’re going to be feeling them throughout the week. So the effects of the Mars opposition to Saturn, I would say, were activated with the Full Moon last week. And it’s because even though it was very wide, that transit, the Full Moon really stimulated a great deal of defensiveness. 

Mars opposition to Saturn is a defensive transit. Mars wants to go, and Saturn wants to slow down and gain control. Saturn can be very scarcity driven and rigid, and Mars is like, “I deserve more. I need more. Give me more. You’re in my way, fuck you, let’s fight.” And Saturn is just like, “I’ll just build a wall. I’ll build a fucking wall. Best of luck climbing my wall.” 

Saturn’s energy is very stoic, and Mars is fucking fire, and so when these two planets are in a benefic aspect, in other words, when they’re kind of winking at each other, when they’re making sweet love to each other, they are very powerful. We love to see these two planets together when they get along. When they don’t get along, they’re formidable opponents to each other. And this is where we must have healthy boundaries. 

And I’ve actually been dropping a ton of content about healthy boundaries on my Patreon if you are in the market for getting a little deeper into that. And I have a series I’m dropping there about boundaries, where I’m answering questions from my patrons and just going deep into some boundary shit. Because we are in a state here where we need to develop healthier boundaries first with ourselves and then with others. I know most of us like to do it first with others and then with ourselves, but that shit doesn’t work, as you could probably tell. 

But in this particular transit, if you do not have healthy boundaries with yourself, you are likely to feel super fucking defensive. I mean, even if you do have great boundaries with yourself, this transit kicks up defensiveness, and it calls for healthy boundaries. 

Now, Mars opposition to Saturn, it actually stimulates us or triggers us into having rigid boundaries or defensive boundaries because the lady doth protest too much. It is kind of like we just need the thing that feels bad to stop, and so we tend to, under this influence, aggressively or defensively, reactively, try to make a thing stop or make a thing move faster to push past that negative thing. 

If you have a willingness or the capacity to sit in your discomfort, to sit in your agitation without focusing on what other people said, what other people did, whatever, but instead just sitting with the feelings, you may make some progress that I can't even predict for you. This opposition is one that really calls into question the very nature of strength, the very nature of self-reliance, and if you can strive to move beyond great shows of strength, great assertions of self-reliance, and instead become reliant on yourself in a healthy way, not in a nobody cares about me, I’m always stuck alone kind of way—I mean, that’s fair. That might be your thing—but this transit gives us the opportunity to take a parental and form giving role towards ourselves around issues to do with Mars. So again, it could be your sexuality. It could be your relationship to anger or ego. 

And if you’re a person who really struggles with your ego: you are constantly saying or doing shit and then later regretting it and being like oh my God, that was too much, or you don’t know how to assert yourself, you don’t know how to stand up for yourself, you never let people know when you’re angry with them, or you only have a fear based relationship to anger, this is a really good moment—and by moment, I mean week plus—to explore those feelings. And a great way to explore them is to like literally when those feelings come up make the decision that you’re going to focus on getting really present in your body and feel them for 60 seconds. Put a timer on the clock, aka your phone—90 seconds if you can, 3 minutes if you can. Go to the bathroom at work—do what you got to do. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It’s sitting with the emotions without attaching narrative and without focusing on other people. 

Because we’re dealing with an opposition, we are likely to want to project out our feelings and our situation, like blame and responsibility for our situation, onto other people. And other people may be responsible, systems maybe responsible because we’re dealing with Saturn, right. So Saturn is related to systems. It’s a social planet. Those things are all true. And also, how you feel emotionally, how you orient yourself in response and reaction to your feelings, how you care for yourself, abandon yourself, hurt yourself, support yourself around those feelings, that’s all you. 

And so, this is an opportunity to focus on the you part—the part you can control. The part you can grow or contain, whatever the case may be. And in doing so, you may meaningfully adjust something that is not operating optimally. For many of us the way we deal with anger and irritability is by internalizing it, and for many of us it’s through exercise or doing something physical or getting pissed off or crying—dissolving into tears because we don’t know how to experience or express anger in a way that actually does justice to that anger, so there’s a way that we can kind of dissolve into tears. 

None of this is bad—I mean, hurting other people, manipulating people, harming yourself, yeah, not good. These things are not good. But what we want to do is unless there is harm being created, destigmatize however it is that you experience anger, and instead get curious about it and sit with it. Saturn and Mars are not the most curious planets of the zodiac—we look to other planets for curiosity—but they are both well suited to setting a goal and achieving it. 

So set the goal to sit with the feeling that you typically would move away from. Set the goal to not focus on what other people are saying or doing and that’s why it’s making you feel a certain kind of way and just focus on how you feel and how you’re orienting around those feelings. And this will all be incredibly difficult to do if you don’t do it through the meat suit. Tap into your body. Breathe into your body. Feel your body. Feel where your emotions are located in your body and stay there. Bring your attention and your energy and your care and your interest there. Mars is body based, and it has visceral expression, which is to say it expresses itself through the vehicle of your body. 

Now, on the 2nd, we have an exact trine between Mars and Chiron. This is really good news given that it's in a kind of shitty Mars sandwich—the filling’s not bad, you know. Mars trine to Chiron is not per se an easy transit—it doesn’t bring about ease, but it mobilizes and fortifies us to coping with trauma and to coping with things that are painful. 

Chiron, the wounded healer, is one of those planets that is not really chill. It’s not particularly easy or smooth. But when Mars forms a trine to it, it supports us in finding pathways that actually can help us to move through the Chironic [sp] content. In other words, it supports us in being able to be with our ego—again, the good, the bad, and the ugly—to be with our ego and to see pathways towards peace. So peace isn’t repression. Peace isn’t denial or evasion. Peace is acceptance, acceptance without attachment. That’s a little bit of peace for a bitch. So that’s Mars trine to Chiron. 

And this is a really well-placed transit because on the 3rd of July, we have a Mars square to Uranus. So this transit is exact on the 3rd, but we will be feeling it on the 1st along with that Mars opposition to Saturn, and we’ll be feeling it all the way into next week, probably until around the 8th. So it is in its exactitude however on the 3rd. But you can expect the feelings and dynamics that are activated by this transit to not just go away after the 3rd, just like that Mars opposition to Saturn is not going to go away until at least the end of this week. 

Mars square to Uranus, of course, is all keyed into the Saturn/Uranus square of 2021. So we know Saturn/Uranus square is frustrating. It’s a call to look at the infrastructure of our lives and of the world around us. So whether we’re looking at systems in society, systems at work, systems in your home or like your fucking closet and how you keep your clothes, like should you really be hanging your pants on hangers? I don’t know. Saturn square to Uranus wants to know—like is the system you’re using actually working for who you are and how you live? That’s the big story here, right. 

But when Mars forms a square to Uranus, while it’s also more widely opposing Saturn, that tension becomes very ego centric. It becomes very about me and what I need to do and how I need to take care of myself, and anything that gets in your way is going to feel fucking personal to you. 

Now, unfortunately, because of this whole mishigas, we may see a bunch of bullshit from people who struggle with toxic masculinity. And when I say they struggle with toxic masculinity, I am for sure being pretty generous. Some people actually struggle with toxic masculinity, and some people are toxically masculine, and we struggle with it while they seem to be oblivious and pretty cool with it, right. So there’s all kinds of people in the world because this is a big ass world. 

And also, fun fact: you may be a person who’s super toxically masculine for a decade and then work on yourself or have a life experience that triggers change and then no longer be that way. So we want to always keep in mind that there is room for change. I have heard people my whole life saying people don’t change. People don’t change. People don’t change. People can choose to not change. But that will eventually change them too. People can change. It’s a choice. It’s a choice. It’s a choice we have to make a bazillion times a day, but it’s still—it is within our hands. 

Okay, so Mars square Uranus, it is a defensive transit. Mars square to Uranus is literally explosive, and we may see, unfortunately, real conflicts on the streets in this week and a little bit thereafter. We may see people sick of restrictions or angry about something and feel that they have a right to fight about it. It can be like bark, bark, or it can be I’m going to take arms—punch, punch, bang, bang, right. 

So Mars square to Uranus is defensive. These are the most individualistic planets in the zodiac—Mars and Uranus. They are the most entitled planets in the zodiac arguably, and when they form a challenging aspect, like a square is, aka a 90-degree angle, what happens is they are kind of vying for power. They are vying for control. And so, Uranus is like, “I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want,” and Mars is like, “Yes, but I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want.” 

So on a really personal level, you may have dueling desires, like I really want to save money, and also, I don’t want to go to fucking work. You may find your partner, your best friend, your parent to be the most annoying person ever placed upon this green and grey Earth, and you might feel compelled to let them fucking know. You might not be able to stop yourself because these transits, Mars square to Uranus especially, but also Mars opposite Saturn, it tends to provoke knee jerk reactions—I’m so sorry, but it does. 

And so, here is where I remind you that you are entitled to feel anything you feel. You are perfectly entitled to the whole spectrum of emotions and feelings and reactions that you have. You are not entitled to respond in any way you want to. You are not entitled to act in any way you want to. 

Am I the kind of person who thinks if you don’t like abortions, you shouldn’t get one, but you also shouldn’t make it so that other people shouldn’t get one? Yeah, yeah, I am, and I apply that kind of thinking to everything. It is really important that during this transit we look at our relationship to tolerance. How do we really feel? Do you feel tolerant of others? Where are the lines for your tolerance? What are the lines that you hold around your tolerance for your own self? Whether you’re dealing with something in yourself that you’re having a hard time coming to terms with or you simply don’t know how to tolerate certain feelings, impulses, and thoughts, it is important that you sit with that to the best of your ability. 

Now, Mars square to Uranus literally makes it hard to sit. This is a really restless transit. It can make you feel incredibly agitated and nervy. Uranus is the planet we look to for the nervous system, and Mars is just poking hot coals at it. So if you have some sort of meditative practice that involves the body, dance or some movement based therapy, something that involves your body, works your body, and also has the intention or the effect of soothing your nervous system, whatever it looks like for you, this date specifically and this week plus generally are a good time to lean in on those things. 

This energy is erratic. So it’s not going to be a time for you to like—if you have to do something super disciplined, this is a fucking terrible time for that. If you have to do something disciplined this week, try to do it earlier in the week. Mars square to Uranus, it does stimulate erratic, nervy energy, and it kind of inclines us to want to break free from obligations. 

If you are obliged, if you are responsible to something that you authentically don’t want to do and maybe you’ve never wanted to do, this transit’s really going to be triggering for you. So, again, striving to identify what it is that you are getting out of the commitment or obligation that you’ve signed up for, even if it’s something super small, that will help you—it will help your energy, so that you don’t act out against yourself or others, so that you don’t stir the pot and then knock the whole pot over and then have a bigger mess than you originally had, which, honestly, is super likely to happen. 

So it’s not likely that you’ll do it necessarily, but it’s likely that someone will do it near, around, or at you if you don’t do it because that’s the nature of this energy. When someone else acts a fool it’s not an invitation for you to mirror or match their energy and also act foolish or unkind or whatever. 

If you can cultivate the strength to act in ways that are right by your own code of ethics, then you are meeting the highest potential of this transit. It takes confidence. It takes bravery. It doesn’t take being perfect. It doesn’t take being fearless. You don’t have to be fearless. Strive to do what is right even when it would be much easier to just not even think about it or to do what is wrong. 

Now, my loves, I’m going to run through the transits of this week again and also, of course, remind you if you haven’t already gotten Astrology for Days, just go to astrologyfordays.com. It’s a web-based app, so you don’t have to download anything. It’s accessible to users of Androids and iPhones, and you don’t have to buy it at the App Store. You just go and subscribe at astrologyfordays.com and then use it on every damn device that gets internet. And you can follow along with the transits with me and take notes about what I’m talking about or what your other favorite astrologers or astrology apps are talking about, and then notate what you think will come or what it triggers for you. And from that place, you not only can use this as a therapeutic tool but a way to learn astrology substantively. 

Okay, I digress, but just a little bit. On the 1st, Mars is forming an exact opposition to Saturn, and we’re going to feel it throughout the week. On the 2nd, we have an exact trine from Mars to Chiron, and on the 3rd, we have an exact square from Mars to Uranus. And we’re going to feel it about the 1st through the 8th of July. No big deal. 

As always, if you’ve gotten value from the podcast, please give it five stars wherever you listen to it and subscribe. Do your best when you’re feeling your worst. And remember this little titbit, my loves, you don’t need to process with people that you don’t trust. If someone has broken your trust or never earned your trust, you are free and clear to walk the fuck away. Not everything deserves your attention. Be judicious about where you give it this week. Bye.