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. This week’s question comes from Dealing With Grief, and she says, “I love the clear and compassionate advice you give to your listeners. The questions usually come from younger people, and I see you as a wonderful mentor. But I am not young. I am a 72-year-old mother, grandmother, and retired English teacher. I am also a widow. My beloved husband died over five years ago after many years of fighting cancer. I have friends, family, and a fulfilling life in many ways. It’s not surprising that I still feel grief at losing him and probably will for the rest of my life. But while he was ill and after his death, something went numb inside of me. After five years, it’s still hard for me to feel deep joy and the delight I used to feel in things and people. During COVID, my two cats and I have spent a lot of time alone, and this has intensified my grief. Are there transits in my chart that might be making these feelings more intense? What strengths in my natal chart can I call upon to help me find my joy again? Thank you for your joy. You often make me laugh.”

There’s so much to unpack here, but I want to first say I am so sorry for your loss. Losing a life partner is devastating. It’s a really singular pain. And being by someone’s side and loving them through a chronic and debilitating illness is also really, really painful. The kind of pain that it sparks, in particular the pain of bereavement, of grief, it’s a really isolating form of pain. It’s so personal. It has so many tentacles. There are so many ways that it spreads out and down and across. It just doesn’t even care about the laws of physics. It just grows in every direction, and it touches everything for a lot of people.

What makes it even more isolating is that either the people around us who love us don't have the capacity to be present for our grief, or we don't have the capacity for our own grief. Generally, it’s a little bit of both. Maybe a little bit more of one or the other, but a little bit of both. And I want to acknowledge that this thing you say in your question is very true. Grief doesn’t go away in five years. When you lose somebody very close to you, somebody that you love, in particular a life partner, it just changes you. Major life experiences inevitably change us, and grief is one of them. Does that mean it steals your joy permanently? No, it doesn’t. I mean, for some people it can, but it absolutely doesn’t. But what it does mean is that we are called upon to experience difficult and often debilitating emotions and to deepen our capacity for patience and empathy and love and pain.

I am a firm believer that grief is simply the shit side of love, that our capacity for love is as deep and wide and bright and beautiful as our capacity for grief is deep and dark and powerful and beautiful. It’s all the things. But grief is something that does spark a lot of isolated feelings. And so to be at a stage of your own grief where you’re likely not just dealing with the loss of your partner but also probably the pain of seeing him struggle and fight against cancer, to then mosey into 2020/2021 where there’s so much isolation and COVID has made things infinitely harder on everyone, so everyone has a mitigated capacity for showing up for deep and difficult things for others—right? It’s a terrible recipe for greater suffering and loneliness.

And it’s not just you. Loneliness, I think, is pandemic in the US anyways, before COVID. But certainly, as a response to the forced isolation that all of us have gone through in response to the pandemic, that makes it worse. And you didn’t mention how internet savvy you are, but for a lot of people who are of the generations that were not raised with the internet, in other words people who were born in the 1970s or older, the internet is not the same thing as for people who were born in the 1980s or who are younger than that.

And so the kind of way that our culture has pivoted around this pandemic, or in response to this pandemic, has been very much online. And if that’s not something that you’re super confident with or if you don't have a lot of people who are comfortable with that and you’re not spending a lot of time online to connect with people, not just to consume content, then this can be extra hard. And so I want to just acknowledge that before we get into any kind of astrology of it because being isolated, feeling alienated, being physically or emotionally/socially alone—we don't need to look just to astrology or your personal birth chart to understand why those feelings are intensified. We are still in the pandemic, and 2020 was very isolating. And depending on how you’re responding to 2021, it may still be very isolating.

But then, of course, we can look to your birth chart to talk about the few parts of your question that you asked that are super important. So let’s start off with your birth information. You were born November 30th, 1948, at 6:40 p.m. in Roseburg, Oregon. I want to start off by acknowledging you have a beautiful stellium in Sagittarius. You've got Chiron, Mercury, Sun, Moon, all in Sagittarius. You’re a New Moon baby. You are somebody who has an amazing capacity for joy and optimism and resiliency. You see the potential. New Moon babies often do. You see the potential in things, or at least you’re motivated to look for them.

Now, that said, you do have Saturn in Virgo, and it forms a square natally to your Chiron, Mercury, and Solar placements, right? So that absolutely indicates that you not only have experienced your share of difficulties and hardships in life, but also that you have a pragmatic streak. You have a way in which you relate to joy and resiliency through hard work and effort. And, on top of that, you've got a sixth house stellium. Let me explain. Those Sagittarius placements I mentioned are intercepted your sixth house, and you've got Mars and Jupiter very tightly conjoined in your sixth house.

Now, I will reiterate for anyone who is new to the podcast I use a Campanus house system, which is not the most common house system to use in astrology, but it often yields interceptions. And I’ve talked a bunch in previous episodes about interceptions and explained what they are. Very briefly, I will reiterate that when you have a full 30 degrees of a zodiac sign in a house, but that zodiac sign is not either on the entry house cusp or the exiting house cusp, you've got an intercept sign.

What this indicates, very specifically your intercept Sagittarius stellium, is that at this stage of your life and for many years now, what has been really essential to your resiliency, to your wellness and your joy, is having a lifestyle day in, day out, that is expansive, that you find interesting, that allows you to grow and to learn. Really important for you. Now, I imagine that everything you've gone through in recent years, from your husband’s illness to his passing and then to COVID, that these things have been taken from you. And then, on top of it, time has passed. And as we age, what works for us, what we need for joy and for our mundane regular daily life, it needs to change too.

And so I want to acknowledge all of these things, to just—like let’s lay a foundation for your nature. You are willing to do the work. You are willing to do what needs to be done so that you can have a joyous life, so that you can have a sense of resiliency. And that is a beautiful thing. Your capacity for joy and your capacity for resiliency is really big. I love to see that. And within that, I want to really acknowledge that when you say you've lost touch with your capacity to feel deep joy and to feel delight, I just want to hold space for—that’s a huge loss for you. I mean, it would be a huge loss for anyone, but it is a massive part of your birth chart. It is a massive part of your nature.

And let me talk about why that would be, why that would come to pass. When we go through profound trauma, in particular trauma that we have to bear alone psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, it is a lot. It is really hard to experience. When we can’t or won’t experience those feelings of pain and grief—and, to be fair, so many of us are given the messages by people who love us, even, not just from society, that when you suffer a loss, you should feel sad and bad for several months and then move on.

I’ve worked with the bereaved for many, many years, and I have never seen anyone get over a death in a couple of months. That’s just not how it works. It changes you. Just like when someone loves you it changes you, when you lose that love it changes you. And it’s a painful change, but it is healthy and normal to feel a lot of painful feelings many years after someone passes. But here’s the rub. If you can’t or won’t process or experience the pain, what you also lose access to is joy and delight because, unfortunately, they exist in the same parts of our hearts.

If we speak about this astrologically, the Moon is where we look to understand your feelings, your memories, how you experience love, how you experience grief, how you care for others, how you care for yourself. It’s how we digest things. In fact, it’s literally your gut. The Moon governs your gut. When we say to our Moons, “That’s too much pain; I can’t tolerate this much pain. I’m too sad. I don't want to be sad. I’m not supposed to feel the way I feel. I cannot continue to feel the way I feel,” and we find a way to effectively turn it off or turn it down—which all of us do in life. I mean, that’s a human thing. No shame, no foul. This is part of being human.

But when we do this, we turn the Moon off or down. And the Moon also is where we pull from for joy and closeness, for nourishment and love. And so the numbness that you’re describing, unfortunately, is very normal. It doesn’t make it good. It’s just normal. My advice for coping with it is going to sound pretty counterintuitive. It’s to create space in your life, whether it’s through a group like a group of friends or a support group, or it’s alone with a meditation app or chilling with your cats—because cats are the damn best—but to create some space and time in your day every day if you can tolerate it, and if you can’t, do it once a week, whatever you can tolerate, to call up, be present with, and nurture your grief for your husband, but not just your grief for your husband—your grief for the life that you had and the life that you wanted, that you thought you were going to have at this stage in your life.

I know this sounds counterintuitive to cultivating greater joy and delight in your life, but your joy and delight are locked in the same room as your grief and your sadness. And so, if we want to shake out the numbness, it’s got to be through embracing it all. Now, I’m not encouraging you to just bring up those feelings and then drop them. Again, I encourage you to find some resource that is a container. And for you, I actually think support groups or a group of friends might be your favorite and best place to go. But there are also many tools out there. One that I personally tend to love is a therapist, somebody who specifically deals with and specializes in bereavement, because the point isn’t to stop feeling grief. That’s not a really realistic goal. The point is to be able to tolerate your grief so that you understand that it is a part of your love, and it is a part of you.

In allowing for that to be, your capacity to feel other feelings, the ones you really want to feel, get stronger too. Not right away. It’s not a magic trick, obviously, but it will happen over time. I wish there was a magic bullet for grief, but there really isn’t. And I say this even as a medium who has the capacity and skill to communicate with the dead. When I lose someone, it’s still grief because it’s not just about the loss of that person. It’s about the loss of that person in your life and a loss of the life that you believed you would have with that person. And that—it’s just really personal and really deep. So I encourage you to be really patient with yourself about this.

Now, to the more astrological part of your question, yes, there are transits that have made these feelings more intense in 2021. The first thing that I’ll name is that in 2020, you were going through a Uranus opposition to Venus. And starting at the end of January of 2021, Saturn started to square your Venus. So these two transits are really different from each other but really important for me to name because they overlapped, and it’s just been a continuous strain on your Venus.

So what does it mean? Uranus opposition to Venus is a time where, typically, your social life really changes. Your relationships, your intimate relationships, meaningfully change. And it tends to be a really exciting time where it can be very upsetting, but it often tends to be very busy, and it tends to incline us to crave busyness, new social experiences. And so what you experienced in 2020 was one part of the transit, a really big part of the transit, which was sudden loss out of left field—right?—because you were isolated. You couldn’t hang out with people. But it didn’t give you the new stimulation that the transit typically gives, and it didn’t give it to you because of goddamn COVID. See?

And so that happened. And, of course, there was a little overlap, and then Saturn. Saturn in January of 2020, at the end of it, came for your Venus. Now, Saturn square to Venus is straight-up depressing. It makes us feel isolated and alienated and a sense of scarcity. This transit tends to kick up loneliness and depressiveness and a feeling of loss. When we look at the fact that you were going through such radical changes socially—because with all that Sagittarius in your chart, I imagine you were very social before COVID hit. What Saturn is doing to you now—and the transit will be over in November of 2021, so this year, but still a few more months left. What it’s done is it’s put you in this position where you’re really feeling the consequences of the last year, year and a half plus. Right? You’re feeling the weight of it. And it’s Saturn, so it’s very difficult. It’s hard. And Saturn governs depression, so it’s depressing.

But there’s a bigger picture at play here, which is Saturn tends to force us to sit down, to sit down and parse through our experiences and our feelings. It wants us to prune. It wants us to reorganize what isn’t working. And because it’s hitting your Venus, we’re talking about your relationships. Now, in your birth chart, you've got Venus in the fifth house. So this may have to do with your relationships to your children and your grandchildren, and it may have to do with your just—your social relationships. It could be all or either or both. But it’s not likely to be easy, and it’s not likely to feel abundance.

And so it forces you to deal with how you care for yourself, what your values truly are, because when we’re going through Saturn transits, we don't have as much energy as we do in other periods. And Saturn can present through physical vitality, psychological vitality, or both, right? It can do either or both. But ultimately, because Saturn and Venus are both concerned with values and ethics, it’s important to look at the ways in which you have been living your life, the ways in which you have been relating to yourself and to the people you’re close to, and ask yourself, is it sustainable? Is it working for you?

So you've been going through a rough time. Have you told your close people? Have you asked for support? I see you’re—while you are gregarious and warm and you can absolutely be very social, you’re not always the greatest at asking for support. You’re not always the greatest at saying, “Hey, I got this really unpleasant or difficult thing happening. Can you show up with me?” And I said “with me” on purpose. I see you might not want to ask people to show up for you, but I bet they like to show up with you, to just be a part of your process, to share in it with you. But this is a tricky thing. We must be brave enough to ask for support and love. And when you’re feeling a deficit, it is actually harder to do that, not easier, even though that’s when you need it the most.

So these transits to Venus are difficult, and they feel heavy and bad. But the good news is they do not last forever, and they serve a purpose. So, if you can kind of accept “This is a season where I am being called to tap into my feelings that are hard to bear and to feel them and to find new ways of organizing my insides, but also my daily habits, to be more supportive to the life I’m living at this moment and the feelings I’m having at this moment”—if you can do that, things will absolutely get better, not just now, but for when the next time Saturn and Venus meet in about seven years.

Now, the good news is Jupiter is coming for you. Jupiter is going to hit your Midheaven early in 2022. It’s not going to last a long time, but when Jupiter hits the highest point in your chart, it expands your perspective, and it’s a time where you can organize your life, like the big picture of your life, in a way that promotes greater joy and growth and resiliency. It brings in more abundance. Okay? This is a great fucking transit that is coming for you. And it may be a bummer that you’re hearing me say, “Oh, it’ll happen early in 2022,” but to me as an astrologer—and forgive me; I know it’s easy for me to say—but it’s perfect timing because the difficult transit you’re going through is happening for a reason. It needs you to show up and care for yourself, to parent yourself through this in a compassionate and firm way.

If you do this, you will be different. And those differences you can integrate in that space between November and January and use that information to move yourself forward in 2022. That’s the good news here, and it is really good news. Even though it’s not immediate, it is forthcoming.

Now, my dear, I’m so grateful that you wrote in, and I hope this reading was helpful for you and that you find your joy again, even if it is different than when you met it last.

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Darlings, let’s get astrological, shall we? We’re going to talk all about this week’s horoscope, which, as you probably know, kicks off with a New Moon in Leo. Spicy, you know. Fiery. Let’s get into that soon. But before we do, I want to acknowledge so much of the world is facing a new wave of COVID. And so much of the world thought, “Oh shit. I thought we were past this.” And so much of the world is opening back up or has already opened back up. It’s really discombobulating. It can make a person have whiplash. It’s really stressful and uncertain. Whether or not that’s something you are thinking about all the time, lots and lots of people around the world are thinking it for sure. And so it’s creating its own morphic field of stress and confusion and anxiety and irritation, right?

So, if you’re feeling extra stressed, cut yourself some slack. And also, regardless of your vaccination status, I hope you are masking and taking care of yourself and your community. And that’s pretty much that. We’re still in the shit. We’re still in the shit. I expect we will remain in le shit for quite some time. The astrology of 2021, as I’ve been saying all year long, is just—it’s just going to give us uncertainty, and it’s going to give us shaky grounds. I live in California. We have earthquakes. I’m a little used to it. I don't like it, but I’m a little used to it. You may or may not be.

So, for whatever it’s worth, it’s where we’re at. I’m not encouraging you to hold your breath and wait for the year to end, but I am encouraging you to focus on adaptability and flexibility to the best of your ability and, when you cannot, to be inquisitive about why not? Is there a good reason? Because a lot of times, when we can’t hang with shit, when things don’t really work for us, when we’re reaching our own internal limits for some reason, more often than not, there is a reason for it. There’s actually a self-protective, survival-oriented reason for it. If you've got the bandwidth and the vibe to do so, it’s not a bad thing to actually investigate. What am I getting out of this? Why is this happening? Is this actually serving me in some meaningful way?

These kinds of questions really can make life a lot easier to live in the long run. They’re super annoying in the short run but really good for you in the long run. And this Capricorn astrologer is all about the long run.

And with that, my friends, let’s jump into the New Moon. We are looking at the 8th through the 14th of August. On the 8th of August, we have a New Moon in Leo, and New Moons occur every month, at least once a month. Usually only once a month, but they occur every month, and they happen when the Sun and Moon are at the exact same degree of the exact same sign. When New Moons occur, it’s generally a great time for opening up and calling in for seeding or starting things. Right? When we’re dealing with a New Moon in Leo, the potential for creativity, joyfulness, and playfulness is really strong. But those are all really fun, exciting things to talk about with Leo. We talk about Leo. Leo is extra—okay. Fine. Yes. Agreed, agreed, agreed.

But that’s not all. Leo is a very strong zodiac sign. It is a strong zodiac sign. It’s fixed and it’s fire, and it’s associated with regalness, which—if you hang out with a Leo, they may remind you of this frequently over the course of your life. But I’m not just thinking about hierarchies and monarchies when I’m talking about royalty. What I’m talking about is the capacity to lead with heart and the head held high. Leo is a sign associated with courage and the fortitude necessary to carry things through, to weather some damn storms. So while, yes, Leo is associated with fun and creativity and all these great things, it is also strength, strength of character. And let’s not undersell a Leo. Strength of character, it’s hard to come by. It’s not like every person who has a Sun in Leo has this, but it is one of the great potentials of the zodiac sign Leo.

And so here are we. We are here, my friends, at the Sun/Moon/Mercury conjunction. So Mercury is a little bit wide away from the Sun and Moon, but they’re all sitting pretty tight and tidy in Leo. And the potential for clarifying where your energy needs to go, where the cause for courage and fortitude is, and gathering up the energy for exactly that, curiosity, fortitude, bravery, passion, basically a lot of energy, just a lot of good, fiery energy—this New Moon is great for all of that.

But here’s the rub, because of course there’s a fucking rub. It’s the 2020s. That’s what we do, apparently, so far. I know it’s only one year in, but okay. So we’ve got the Sun and Moon at 16 degrees Leo. Mercury is at 23, 39. So we’re going to call it almost 24 degrees of Leo, making it a wide conjunction to the New Moon. Uranus is at 14 degrees of Taurus, 14, 44. So we round it up to a 15 degrees of Taurus. And that’s quite tight to the New Moon.

So we’ve got this really strong Uranus square. We’ve also got Saturn at almost 10 degrees of Aquarius, forming an opposition to the New Moon and also square to Uranus, making this chart hold a T-square between the Sun and Moon, opposite Saturn, all square to Uranus.

Okay. Let’s get into this. Uranus square the New Moon is going to create a frenetic energy. It’s just that’s what it does. Uranus is unpredictable. That’s its whole entire job. It’s curveballs. When Uranus messes with the Sun and Moon, it can really rattle you. It can make you feel like you don't quite know who you are or how to orient yourself in a situation or a moment that you find yourself in. When we have a Uranus square to a New Moon, we can expect things to be uncertain. This is not a great time to try to manifest stability. Even though Saturn is involved in this T-square, this is not a time for stability.

For all you Earth dominant people out there, I don't want you to fret. That doesn’t mean that things are falling apart. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad. In order for a seed to grow into a plant, it needs to break through the earth. That’s what it needs to do. That is an unstable period of growth and development. In order to grow, in order to have change, in order to fortify our foundations, we need instability at times. Instability is the energy of creativity and innovation. It’s not just the energy of chaos and things falling apart.

So this period, this New Moon and the period that it governs, is an opportunity for us to embrace the instability or upsets that we’re experiencing, whether it’s internal or externally in our lives, and to see, where are there opportunities for growth? Where are there opportunities for innovation, seeing things differently, and trying new things out? Because of Saturn’s presence here, you may be confronted with a feeling of scarcity, something being taken away from you. Now, on a social level, we’re certainly going to be seeing that. We’re already seeing that, this feeling of “I was just getting into all my freedoms, and now they’re being taken from me.”

If we fall into the negative traits of Leo, which is egoism, if we fall into the negative pitfalls of fixed signs, which is stubbornness to the point of it inhibiting your growth and wellness, then you can kind of envision how this is going to go personally or socially. If we are able to embrace the positive potential of these energies, our capacity for being brave in the face of change and in the face of unexpected or maybe even unwanted change, that capacity for bravery and for clarity of vision and for follow-through and stick-with-it-ness, if that’s even a word or term, can create inroads of strength and resiliency that have meaningful impact over the course of time.

Now, again, we can apply this to social conditions, political conditions, et cetera. We can apply this to your personal life, your social life, or your innermost psychology. It kind of works on all the damn levels. It works on all the levels. So, whether you’re a New Moon manifestation person or you just like to notate and kind of check in with yourself around the New Moon, this is a good time for a reset. It’s not a reset towards stability. It’s a recalibration. And, again, you might need to be brave. That sounds cute. It sounds good, bravery. Right? Until you really think it through, because the only reason you need to be brave is because you’re scared or because you’re facing a hardship. That’s when we need bravery.

Now, one more word about this particular configuration in this New Moon Chart. Because of the Saturn/Uranus square being central to this T-square, this transit is psychologically jarring and psychologically testing, which means that this would be a bad time to forget about your self-care tools. This would be a bad time to stop resourcing yourself. And when I say resourcing yourself, I mean listen. I know that even if this is your first time listening to this podcast, you've got tools. You've got resources. You've got trusted ones, and then you've got randomized ones on YouTube and TikTok and all the places of the internet, right? Don’t forget to use resources. If you pick up a tool and it doesn’t work the way you thought it would work, put it down and pick up a different tool.

I want to encourage you to take care of yourself, to not berate yourself for having a hard time if you’re having a hard time, but instead to do what you can to support yourself through wherever you are because this moment is your starting place. Whatever you’re feeling, that’s where you’re starting from. You can judge it. You can be a dick if you want. But to what end, I ask you? Eventually, you’re going to have to come around to figuring out how to accept where you’re starting from and start from there. So let’s just fast-track the thing, if you will.

Now, there’s a few more things I want to say about this New Moon chart. In this chart, we have a Venus/Neptune opposition and a Mercury/Jupiter opposition. Now, there’s a lot to say about these two transits, and I will really unpack them in a moment because they are exact on the 9th and the 10th respectively. But broadly speaking, when looking at this particular New Moon chart, the indication here is that a lot of this is going to be interpersonal. It’s about relationships. So it may be a relationship in your personal life. It may be the relationship that you have with yourself. But it may also be a relationship between management and people on the ground at work. It may be the relationship between the government and its peoples.

This is a very relational chart. The potential for fireworks and assumptions is incredibly strong because of these few transits, but also, it’s a New Moon in Leo. What do we expect? I want to encourage you to do your part, which is to listen to what people are saying and listen to what they’re not saying. Think before you speak. Try to avoid gossip and generalizations because not only are they not going to bring you to the truth, necessarily, but they can do a fair amount of harm.

All right. Okay. So that brings me, then, to the 9th of August. Now, on the 9th of August, we have an exact Venus opposition to Neptune. Now, this transit—oh, this damn transit. This transit is happening between Venus in Virgo and Neptune in Pisces. It’s a tricky one. It’s a tricky one. Venus and Neptune are both really romantic, right? Venus is very relational. It’s all about diplomacy. And Neptune has a devotional style of liking and loving. When these two planets are opposite to each other, it can incline us to be idealistic and romantic or anxious and dissociative.  It really just depends on your nature and where this transit lands in your own birth chart.

Venus opposition to Neptune can certainly trigger any kind of body dysphoria that you have or make you feel anxious about the way you look. Honestly, if it’s hitting something really strong in your chart, you may have water retention or weird allergic reactions, mild allergic reactions on this day. Nothing too serious. It can also be a day where you literally just stare at your phone and waste your time or stare in the mirror and waste your time, and there’s nothing wrong with that if your life can hold it, right?

But it can kind of find us a bit dissociative. Generally, there’s a lot of ways that Neptune governs dissociation or checking out, and a really common one is scrolling mindlessly. Another common one is playing video games. It depends on, probably, your age and what you enjoy doing.

That’s the chill stuff. This transit can make us feel anxious. It can make you feel anxious because you start worrying about your relationships, whether or not people like you, whether or not they feel the same way as you, what your role is. Did you ask for too much? Were you too much? Venus opposite Neptune is really a clash of a diplomatic planet that just wants to feel secure—which is Venus—and then another planet, Neptune, which is so open and so devotional and idealistic that anything negative feels bad. The way that Neptune tends to stress is through the experience of panic and anxiety. So this is not ideal. You know what I’m saying?  It’s not ideal.

And so you might find that you’re feeling really anxious. You might find that you feel really off or you act weird with people. If that happens, don’t worry. This transit doesn’t last forever. But a good pro-tip is to center and ground yourself, if you can, to the best of your ability, especially around other people. If you find yourself catching feelings for someone or just feeling really differently for someone that’s been in your life than you've ever felt before, wait a couple/few days to see if it passes or not because this transit can incline us to feeling so ass-over-teakettle about someone. And it’s not necessarily based in reality. If you’re feeling anxious, nurture yourself.

Here's another little pro-tip. When we’re going through transits to Neptune, it’s a bad time to fast or to starve ourselves. And I mean that, yes, around food, but in general. What we need under the influence of Neptune is nourishment, nurture. We don't need any kind of withholding. That’s not what Neptune energy wants. And it’s worth naming because a lot of times, when people are under the influence of Neptune, there is this inclination to take things away. And what we actually need is not necessarily more things, but we need nourishing things. We need fortifying things.

This is not a great time for processing. Okay? It’s not a great time for processing with people because things aren’t super clear. It’s not a great time for big purchases because you may be misunderstanding what you’re about to buy. So, if you can put off a big purchase, I would. If you’re spontaneously feeling like you have to have that shirt or that thing, wait a couple days. Just wait a couple days. Put it in your cart and move on with your life. Come on back. Okay?

So it’s an anxiety-producing, romantic transit that is ultimately happening for a reason. It’s happening so that you develop boundaries. Those boundaries need to be around whatever it is that gets triggered. Right? We all know that boundaries are hard, and they’re a process. But when we go through transits between any kind of personal planet and Neptune, we want to look for the theme of boundaries. And it’s never hard to find because, generally, the thing that’s stressing you out is the place where you need better boundaries.

And I know I’ve mentioned this before, but on Patreon, on the kittens level, I am dropping a series of videos where I’m answering my Patreon’s questions about boundaries. And sometimes they get pretty woo-woo.  Sometimes they get real practical. You know me. I like to shake it up, and that I do.

Okay. That brings us to the next transit that I’m going to tell you about for this week. It is happening on the 10th of August, and it is a Mercury opposition to Jupiter. Another opposition we have here, right? We start our week off with the conjunction of the New Moon, and now we’re looking at these two oppositions. And, as I love to remind you, oppositions are often experienced in relationship. Right? They’re projected out.

It just so happens that this transit is happening at just about the same degree as the Mars opposition to Jupiter that I talked about really in depth, and it happened on the 29th of July. And so whatever it is that came up for you around or on that day as a result of that transit may get triggered for you. So that’s fun, or not.

A lot was going on with COVID, and that’s something I talked about in that episode. And, again, we may see some sort of super spreader mishigas. And, again, mask up. Vaccinated, not vaccinated, please mask up.

Okay. So Mercury. Mercury we know. It’s your friendships.  It’s how you listen. It’s what you say. It’s what you write. It’s DMs and emails and messages. It’s reading and writing. It’s all that kind of good stuff. Jupiter is big ideas. It’s journalism and propaganda. It’s the news. It’s also stories and vision, and it’s global. Jupiter gets around.

So, when these two planets are opposite each other, a couple different things are likely to happen. One is there may be news or something that is spread quickly that may or may not be accurate or true. And that’s part of why we want to pay attention to COVID stuff and be really smart on and around this date.

This is a transit that can have people saying shit before they think. It could have people gossiping or talking shit. It’s unkind. It’s not wise. Don’t do it if you can avoid it. You certainly don't want others doing it about you. This transit, the most common thing that happens is that people speak before they think, and then you talk shit or you talk out the side of your mouth. And it doesn’t do anyone a whole lot of good. You may find yourself really irritated. You might find yourself impatient. You might find yourself fantasizing about traveling to another country and really just going deep in your investigation.

On the other hand, if you are truly open, if you are willing to listen and to learn, this can be an expansive transit where you actually figure something out because you learned it, because you listened, because you did some research and you opened yourself up to another perspective.

Mercury is not just about talking. It’s not just about our friendships and what we do. It’s also about how we listen. Have you been listening to people? You may figure something out because you actually take the time to reflect on and sit with what others are saying. And that’s kind of cool, right?

So the positive potential of this transit is all about learning. Maybe you might be a teacher, and you might find a way to actually communicate something to someone else. But the risk with Jupiter is that you drag a horse to a lake and try to feed it water. I don't know if it’s a lake. Maybe it’s a river. Don’t try to force-feed horses water. That’s the saying. And it comes out brown, Jupiter transits. I’ll just tell you that.

If people don't want to hear what you have to say, you've got a call to make. Do you want to push people away by continuing to say it anyways? That might be appropriate. But if you really want someone to hear you, then you've got to take the time and the energy to listen to them. That’s a rule, and it’s not a rule that a lot of us pay a lot of attention to because life. Internet and life, right? But this transit can be a time for changing that if it needs changing.

Now, not super likely that it’ll change because we’re not quite at the anaretic degree of Aquarius and Leo, but we’re at 28 degrees. We’re at a thick sign. It might feel really tempting to just talk over people, not listen, only read things that confirm your biases. To that, I say do what you got to do. But if any of this seems like an opportunity you want to grasp, then the way to do that is to listen and to listen to people who you maybe don’t agree with or people who have information or perspectives that you don't have, and see what you can learn. I don't know. It’s super cool to learn. Is that a nerdy thing to say? I don't know that I care. But it is cool to learn, and this is a great time for learning.

Now, one last thing I’ll say about this transit is it can be really good for your mental health if all things kind of work out well. And the reason why is because you might start to have data about what is and isn’t working. Let me explain. Way back in March, March of 2021, on March 4th specifically—Pacific Time, anyways—Mercury and Jupiter met in Aquarius. They were conjunct. And whatever it was that you were focused on, whether it was in your personal life, your professional life, but certainly in your mental health, your habits, your thinking—whatever it was that was going on, we’re reaching the end of the cycle that initiated with that conjunction. Now we’re at the opposition, and then we will integrate up until the next conjunction between these two plants. Kind of fun, right?

So this can be a time where something really clicks and gets integrated and makes sense, and you can kind of move to a next level or a next phase of development, which, again, I think is super cool. So let’s use what we got. Things are a little up and down. Things can be a little bit all over the place these days. But we want to seize opportunities for growth, for soothing, for healing, for engagement where we can get them. And there’s quite a few opportunities this week, so you can just giddy-up on that.

My loves, that is your horoscope. That’s what’s going on this week. The last half of this week is a time for integration of all of these transits. There’s nothing extra happening, which is kind of cool. We can use a little bit of space to let all this stuff play out and for us to gather ourselves in.

Now, I’m just going to repeat the transits of the week. On the 8th, we have a New Moon in Leo. The Sun and Moon are at 16 degrees of Leo, and that’s exact at 6:50 a.m., Pacific. On the 9th, we have a Venus opposition to Neptune. On the 10th, Mercury forms an opposition to Jupiter. And on the 11th, Venus is trine to Pluto.

I want to remind you that the deadline for the application to join Arena Academy for their five-day training designed to help you take your skills to the next level and help you find a job in politics is on August 15th. You can learn more about Arena Academy and apply to their training at arena.run/academy. This link will be in show notes, so you should check them out there.

I also want to remind you Astrology for Days is my delightful tool that you can subscribe to to track your transits and take notes. It is really the tool I’ve always wanted. My hope is that you are learning astrology. I mean, not everybody. Not everyone’s that into it. But if you’re learning astrology, it is great to take notes, to have a localized place where you are tracking your perceptions of what’s happening, your experience of the transits, something that you can refer back to so that you can really integrate what you’re learning. That’s the way, and that’s why Astrology For Days is my BFF. Maybe she will be yours. Maybe she will be yours. If you want to subscribe or learn more, the link to that is also in show notes.

Okay. I hope you’re taking real good care of yourself, whatever that looks like today. Whatever that looks like today. And I will talk to you next week. Buh-bye.