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

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week I have a question from Mandy. And Mandy says lots of really nice stuff about the podcast, so thank you, Mandy. And then she asks this, “I find myself battling compulsiveness constantly. I’ve struggled with an eating disorder for most of my adult life. I recently opened up my eyes to compulsiveness in my spending as well. And it feels like such a simple thing to combat—I should just control myself and have some willpower, but it’s really not that easy. I’m wondering if there’s something in my birth chart that influences this and if so, what do you suggest as some behaviors to combat it?”

So, Mandy, this is a really important question—oh, and I should say that she shares her birth information, which is July 20th, 1988, in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, Canada, 2:24 p.m. The thing that I should preface all of this with is, first of all, Mandy, you don’t share what kind of eating disorder you have. I do want to acknowledge that there are many different eating disorders, and while I think at core they do come from some place quite similar, it is important to acknowledge that I don’t have enough information to thoroughly vet this question. 

And of course, if you’re listening to this and you have an eating disorder, or you are concerned that you or someone you love has an eating disorder, hopefully this will help you. And also, I am not a doctor. This is a podcast. Use your common sense. If there is information in this that is useful to you and appliable to you, excellent—pair that with more information and more research. 

I really do believe that we are meant to take responsibility for the wellness of our bodies and our minds and our hearts, but we’re also not meant to do it alone. Very few of us are experts at it, so consult with multiple people who you trust and do the best you can for your body. And if you’re concerned about somebody else, do the best you can by them. 

So that said, when I look at eating disorders, really what I’m looking at is addiction. There is this idea that we have in society that if you’re skinny, you’re healthy, and if you’re fat, you’re not. And that is some bullshit. That is not true. Now, there’s ways of being skinny that are deeply and profoundly life threatening and unhealthy. There are ways of being fat that are unhealthy—absolutely. Extremes are not always the greatest thing in town. Also, you can be super average looking with your body weight and be struggling with a massive health condition. You can be fat or thick and be at your healthiest, happiest body. 

Being skinny or slender or slim does not equal being healthy. It does not equal anything other than you’re slender or skinny or slim. Now, a lot of people who struggle with eating disorders do so in part because they want to be skinny, but I think that’s in way just where it begins. When it gets to a place of a disorder, it is more in the realm of compulsion. It’s more in the realm of addiction. 

And, Mandy, I think within your question, you’re really self-aware enough to know that it is—you didn’t use the word addiction, but you used the word compulsion. You’re aware that this is coming from something that’s not an intentional goal. It’s not even like, “Oh, I just want to be this weight.” It’s coming out of a compulsiveness that seems out of control. From my view, whether we’re looking at substance abuse or we’re looking at an eating disorder, addiction and compulsion, it occurs because we want to feel something different than what we’re feeling. 

So when you go to restrict or to purge or whatever it is that is your compulsion, what you’re trying to do is feel differently than you feel in that moment. And maybe there’s some story that is loaded and locked for you that you’re like, “Okay. And then I’ll feel this way tomorrow,” or “I’ll have this life if I hit this weight.” But again, I don’t hear you really talking about weight. 

I have gotten many questions from people struggling with eating disorders, very few of them talk about weight. For most people it is really about compulsion, and it is about control. When we are dealing with that, what we’re really dealing with is a difficulty in being present and staying present because you start to feel feelings that feel awful. And then what do you want to do? You want to fix that; you want to feel something different. And this is where self-harming behaviors, restricting behaviors, purging behaviors come up. 

In terms of how to handle it, I will give you some real advice here. And of course, I am not the only or even the best resource for this, but I’m happy to share what I think is a good approach. The first step is to make the decision that you’re willing to try to be present with uncomfortable and unpleasant emotions and sensations. That’s kind of the baseline decision that needs to be made or a direction to be moving in. 

And the reason why is because the compulsion drives you, and it drives you to fix a feeling in an instant. And if you decide I have that urge, and I’m not going to act on it, and I’m not going to allow myself to obsess on whatever thoughts usually run through my head around this urge, but instead I’m going to breathe, and I’m going to feel my feelings as shitty and terrible as they are, I’m going to stay with my feelings, what you can do is even set a timer depending on how compulsive you feel. And that timer might be like 24 hours. It might be 72 hours, or it might be 7 minutes, depending on where you’re at and what you’re dealing with, right. But try to tolerate your emotions for longer than is comfortable—that’s the move. 

Because then you can keep on pushing out the needle—you can keep on pushing out how long you’re willing to sit with your feelings. 

Being grounded in the present moment is a wonderful soundbite. It’s a tweet that I want to like, but the reality is, for most people who are dealing with eating disorder issues or any kind of addiction or compulsiveness issues, staying grounded in the moment is being uncomfortable. It’s being in pain. It could be psychic pain or emotional pain—sometimes it’s physical pain, right. There’s a way that being grounded in the present means, in part, consenting to feeling shitty feelings that you really, really, really don’t want to feel and you don’t know how to cope with. 

And, so, this brings me to the next point. To be able to confront an eating disorder and to make progress with it, you do need vigorous honesty—you do need honesty. When we’re dealing with compulsiveness, we are inclined to lie. We lie to ourselves. We lie to the people around us. We protect our unhealthy behavior from scrutiny, attention, and any kind of pressure to change it. What we’re basically doing is protecting our own self-destructive impulses. 

One meaningful tool for combatting that is making the decision that you’re going to be honest. And that doesn’t mean you’re going to tell your insensitive friends something really sensitive. You want to choose your confidences wisely. But it is important to be honest with yourself, maybe through keeping a dear diary and to find people that you can make eye contact with and sit in a room with and be honest with. And I do point out, not just being honest in an email you sent to a podcaster or two friends you have that you’ve never met IRL. 

But I do think it’s really important when dealing with something like an addiction or a compulsive behavior to be in a physical space with another human and sit in the truth of whatever it is that you’re dealing with. It’s really hard to do, but it facilitates healing. It facilitates moving through it. You must have courage in order to be honest. You must be willing to stick with it. 

Nobody who’s dealing with any kind of eating disorder has an easy time of this—nobody. You don’t have to succeed. You don’t have to thrive at it. It doesn’t have to feel good or be easy, but you do have to be willing to stick with it, to make mistakes, to have shitty days or shitty weeks, and keep on trying. And again, part of that is don’t isolate. And, so, that might look like keeping your digital, social life activated, but also trying to leave the house and connecting with people because you need to go out with your body, with your body—your friend. Your body is your friend. 

The other thing that I think is really important with eating disorders is to be really rebellious against your compulsions. When you are harming yourself through not eating enough or gorging and then purging or whatever it is, you’re not prioritizing your wellness. You’re prioritizing your compulsion, your addiction to feeling a certain way or being in control in a particular way, so be rebellious against your compulsions. Stamp your damn foot. 

Because the one thing I’ll say about every person I’ve ever worked with who has an eating disorder, y’all are the strongest willed people I ever encountered. Because to decide to deny yourself food, to decide to really take that kind of control of not only what you eat, how you eat, when you eat, what you digest, how you digest, when you digest, but to hide it from people— because most people with eating disorders are hiding it from the people in their lives—it takes a massive amount of willpower. 

So in your question you mention, Mandy, you should have the willpower to not have this problem. It’s not your problem. Willpower is not your problem, and we’ll get into that in your chart in a moment. You have an amazing amount of willpower, but your clarity of intent is what’s not super strong. You don’t have a commitment to being healthy in the face of feeling awful. What happens when you feel awful is you indulge the compulsion that is kind of like a Band Aid on a bullet wound. 

That said, I will go into your chart here. So let’s start, Mandy, with your Saturn/Uranus conjunction. You have a Saturn/Uranus conjunction in the sign of Sagittarius. The sign’s not that interesting to me; it’s the conjunction that is. Because what this conjunction indicates is that you have a really hard time with proportion, pacing, and balance. Saturn says restrict, restrict, restrict, and then Uranus says, “I feel trapped. I should do whatever I want, and I should do it all now.” And, so, when these two planets are sitting on top of each other in a person’s birth chart, it’s really hard to know what is too much and what is not enough. It’s really hard to sit with choices because you can always perceive that it should have been more stable or less stable, more—just more or less. 

This is actually an incredibly important component to your compulsiveness. And I should say that this conjunction does exist in your second house, which is the house of your personal finances. So hearing that you have compulsive spending is not terribly shocking to me. I should say aesthetics and the way you look, your style, the way you present your body and your personal finances, the stuff you own, the stuff you buy, it’s all Venus. That’s all Venus. So I’m going to get to Venus in moment, but those things are all Venus; they’re second house things. So you want to be able to look to those parts of the birth chart to have a better understanding of your relationship to those things. 

It’s interesting that those two things are really connected. Those are huge topics, but they’re very connected through the lens of astrology because they’re about our ownership of the way things look—not the way they are, but they way things look. 

You also have a Pluto square to Mercury, which means that you have very compulsive thinking. You get caught in an idea and, man, a very compulsive nature you have. And that’s not meant to change, right. You are always going to have a Pluto square to Mercury in your birth chart, and that’s not bad news. 

Because you have such a strong mind, you have deep and penetrating thoughts; you are intelligent, but you’re also private, and you can kind of like internalize things. Because of that, it is very likely that you have a hard time telling people what you really think when you’re upset until you’re raw pissed. And, so, there’s a way that instead of expressing yourself, you may find yourself repressing yourself until you do something compulsive, explosive, whatever. 

This is a form of self-harm that is actually pretty consistent with addiction because it is an addiction to make everything your problem until all of a sudden you feel justified to make it somebody’s else’s problem. And then that makes you feel bad too. 

I want to come back to this advice of honesty. I really think it’s important for you, Mandy, to write things down, to really go long and hard on the idea of a dear diary. If you have access to a mental health practitioner, I would encourage you to get one. And you can go woo like somebody who does stuff like I do, or you can go a conventional talk therapist. However, the point should be that you do the talking, and you don’t find somebody who’s technically like me where I do all the talking, okay. 

Because it’s really important that you find the courage to name your truth, even if it’s ugly or messy, even if it’s vindictive and terrible, say it so you can let it go. Because if you don’t say it, you can’t let it go. If you don’t find a way of expressing yourself, how do you move on from the thoughts? And this is not specific to eating or spending. It’s specific to you, and the eating and spending are just really accessible ways of self-harming, and they’re really accessible ways of distracting yourself from the relentless nature of your own thoughts and feelings. 

And that brings me to your Venus. You have something in your birth chart called—you have Venus in the eighth house, and it is square to the North Node. There’s a lot of things I would say about this. One is I wonder if you pay attention to your cycles, your hormonal cycles. Everybody has hormonal cycles, and the indication in your birth chart is that you’re likely to be very sensitive to yours. So I would encourage you to pay attention to how the lunar cycle, 28 days, how your hormonal cycles go, month to month. Pay attention to it for the next couple few months. See if you get more triggered at different times around your eating disorder behaviors. 

Now, having Venus square to the North Node means a lot of things, and one of them is that you struggle with being seen. You struggle with your comfort around being seen. You struggle with how people see you. Because you have Venus in the eighth, because it is square to North Node and Pieces in the fifth, there’s a real risk here that you’ll want to kind of disappear, that you’ll want to be unobtrusive and not take up too much space. A great way to do that is to starve yourself out or to purge. 

The thing that is really important here is that you struggle with your sense of worthiness for love. The bottom line is learning to love yourself is an action. Loving yourself is an action, or it’s a series of actions. And then also being here for the journey of it, being here for the process of it, being here for the messy high/low relationship of it is a huge part of what you’ve come here on a soul level to do. To learn how to love yourself in your body and to eventually allow others to love you back. 

I think that it is really hard to let other people love you when you’re hiding things from them, and most people with eating disorders do hide them—not all, but most. When I look at your Venus, this is a time in your life, 2019/2020, where you are going to make great progress in healing this, or you’re likely to kind of go in the other direction. I am so happy that you wrote me this question because this is the time to start to repair your relationship to yourself. It’s your time to find spiritual motivation for treating your body like the vehicle it is. You got to take good care of it so that it can bring you to where you need to go in this life. 

The thing that’s happening right now is you’re going through a Neptune square to Venus, and one of the many things that it teaches—it’s a two year period—one of the many things that it teaches is healthy boundaries. And it teaches healthy boundaries often by you having crappy boundaries with yourself. 

Dating, having love is a beautiful thing, but I don’t want to encourage you to seek love outside of yourself right now. I’m not saying don’t date. But I’m saying this is a time for you to find love with yourself, for yourself, whether or not someone else is looking, whether or not someone else wants to date you. Date your own damn self, girl. 

This is not an easy time, and it has not been an easy time. You’ve been going through so much in 2018 and so far in 2019. It’s not a bad time for you, but this is a time of great upsets. You have a number of transits occurring. You have Uranus opposite the Ascendent. You have Uranus squaring your Sun, Saturn opposing your Mercury—it just left conjoining your Neptune. It’s a lot. And the upshot of it all—oh, and I should also say while I’m making a list, Saturn squaring your Moon. All of these things have happened over the last year and a bit. 

The upshot of it all is you have been going through an unstable and upsetting period, which generally does trigger people’s compulsions and addictions and eating disorders. The fact that you’re seeing it activated and wanting to bring healing to it is wonderful—doesn’t feel great, but it’s wonderful. There is energy in supporting you in getting the work done. The problem is the only way to it is through it. There’s no way around feeling uncomfortable feelings; there just isn’t. 

When I was preparing to answer this question, I came across something that somebody wrote, and she said that whenever she wanted to purge—she had an eating disorder, and whenever she wanted to purge, she would get ice—ice cubes and hold them in her hand and ask herself how long she could hold the ice cubes. For her, the ice helped keep her calm and distracted. 

I like this. I don’t know if it’s exactly my advice of something to do, but I like this because there’s no self-harm involved. It is visceral. It is something that engaged her body, and it also tested her willpower. Because the truth is you have amazing willpower. This Pluto and Saturn/Uranus in your chart—all of these outer planets indicate the same thing: you have really immense willpower. You also have a very strong Mars in Aries. You got great willpower. It’s about deciding where you’re going to put it. It’s about being willing and able to deal with your emotions. 

Because you have the Moon in the twelfth house in the sign of Libra, you are likely to really struggle with your feelings, to feel bad when you have a negative thought or emotion and to feel like you’re not meant to take up too much space. It’s hard to identify what you’re feeling until you’re overwhelmed by what you’re feeling—this sucks. I am sorry, slash, it can be such a powerful resource because, basically, what your Moon wants you to do is to find a way to be in relationship to yourself by creating space and time in your life to truly check in with yourself—not to control yourself, but to check in. 

But if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to first check in with all the ways you’ve abandoned yourself and punished yourself and all the harm you’ve caused yourself and perhaps all the harm you’ve been trying to evade because maybe somebody else caused you harm, and you just haven’t been able to process those feelings. 

None of this is about blaming. None of this is even about excusing. It’s about contextualizing and understanding that you are a person who’s deeply capable of bringing peace to others, and it is your job to bring it to yourself as well. It is your job to make sure that you are honoring your relationship to yourself, including your body. And when you fail to do that, when you’re not great at it, that you are kind to yourself for your misstep and you just try again. Mandy, my love, and all of you listening, I hope this has been helpful. I will look forward to talking to you next week.

If you or someone you care about is struggling with an eating disorder, I have included in the liner notes of this episode a bunch of resources for you to comb through. If you’re dealing with suicidal or self-harming thoughts, there’s some resources there for you as well. This is by no means an exhaustive list but a great place to start.

Hello, puppies and kittens. Welcome back to the astrology corner of Ghost of a Podcast. So this week we’re going to look at February 24th through March the 2nd, 2019. 

One of the things that’s happening this week is that we are in the shadow period of Mercury Retrograde. Now, when Mercury goes Retrograde it tends to be big news. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it's super clickable because everybody feels it, and everybody can be really aware of it because it’s annoying. 

Mercury Retrograde, there are a lot of really deep and valuable components to it, but on the most surface level, it gives us missed appointments, misunderstandings, confusion, stuff like that. This month it’s happening March the 5th through the 28th, so it’s not too long. And it’s in the sign of Pieces the whole time. 

And I think what’s really important for me to say as we’re in this kind of shadow moment—and I’ll get into it more in next week’s podcast—is that it’s still the start of 2019, and Retrogrades are generally a time to review. And Mercury is your mind. It’s your analyzer. It’s your attitudes. It’s your ideas. It’s your friendships. This is a great time to actually take a pause at some point during this Mercury Retrograde season and really reflect on 2018. 

Everything is happening so quickly these days. It’s incredibly easy to feel like, “Well, it happened 48 hours ago,” or “That was like a week ago. Oh, my God. Who cares?” And the truth of the matter is when we lose track of mindfulness, when we lose track of presence, we kind of lose track of our own development and what matters. 

And, so, I want to urge you this Mercury Retrograde season, aka this March, to really reflect on last year—what you went through, where you succeeded, where you failed, where you faltered, where you grew, and take a moment to really appreciate it—appreciate how far you’ve come. You’re still here. You’re still here. In that, there may be revelations, there may simply just be kind of like a getting present. It’s all worthwhile. 

The thing I’ll say about Mercury is that it is—it’s your mind. It’s not your feelings. It’s not your body. It’s not even your actions. It’s your mind. And, so, I want to just really challenge you to be present for the difference between your mind and all the other things. Because in this increasingly Mercurial world, we tend to kind of smoosh them together—this is what I think, and therefore, that is what I feel. Sometimes what you think and what you feel are in alignment—often they’re not. That’s just not how life tends to be, especially life that is so busy and where we have all these like little pocket computers yelling at us all the time. 

I’ll get more into homework for Mercury Retrograde in next week’s podcast, but this is a little teaser, a little something to get you right with yourself and to get present, really get present and own your progress, own your mistakes. It’s the best way to grow. It’s the best way to really be an embodied, present human. And it’s really surprisingly hard to do. It’s really simple, but it’s difficult to remember to do, and it’s difficult to prioritize. 

On the 27th, we will have an exact sextile between the Sun and Mars. And this is a really energizing transit, I’m happy to say. The Sun and Mars are the will and ego, respectively. And, so, when we have these two planets having a lovely conversation between them, this can simply be a time where you feel a little bit more resilient or you feel motivated, where you all of a sudden gain the energy needed to get a thing done. 

As I always say about sextiles, if you don’t leverage the energy, eh, you’re maybe not going to notice it that much. But if you do something about it, and that something can be really small. Honestly, that something could be like, okay, I have enough energy to actually organize when I’m going to take a break, if you’ve been pushing yourself too hard. Getting things done is not just about industry, although, of course, sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s about regaining balance, prioritizing things that actually matter to you instead of things that you think should matter to you or that matter to other people. This is a really lovely transit, and you will be feeling its effects on the 26th, 27th, and 28th. And it is exact on the 27th. 

On the first of March, we have Venus moving into Aquarius, and it is forming a square to Uranus. That’s the day it is exact. With this transit of Venus in Aquarius, we just have a bit of a lighting of Venetian energies, which is lovely because it’s been in Capricorn which can be kind of heavy, and it can be certainly about the barter involved in connecting with others. It’s like what I do for you and what you do for you—that kind of vibe. 

And, so, Venus moving into Aquarius is creative. It’s dynamic. It’s a transit that can be really exciting in terms of you looking around you and having new creative, artistic, aesthetic innovations, figuring things out, just having new ideas. It’s exciting in that regard. And it’s also great for meeting people because it tends to create more of an open energy. 

Aquarius is an air sign. Novices with astrology, they see the symbol, and they mistake it for water—it’s meant to be electricity. It is an air sign, and when we have air it’s easier to like schmooze. So I say unto you, my friends, go forth and schmooze. And in particular, around the first is a good time to do it because Venus forming a square to Uranus is a really exciting transit in that it gives you the opportunity to connect with people differently than you usually do and to connect with different kinds of people than you usually do. 

It’s a crappy transit if you’re trying to say I love you for the first time or make some sort of commitment for the first time with somebody. This is an upsetting form of energy. Venus wants security and connection, and Uranus wants freedom and spontaneity. And, so, when they form a disruptive angle, like a square, what happens is kind of unpredictable; it can be a little upsetting. 

But as I like to say, growth is upsetting, so it’s not a bad thing; what it is in an opportunity. And that opportunity may be for you to learn how you act in a situation. It may be an opportunity to learn what the limitation of a connection is or your resiliency is, or it could be an opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and experience yourself and others in a new way. 

If you’re an artist, if you have a deep spiritual life, and your spiritual life is a big part of your life, this could play out more on a spiritual level or on an artistic level where you try something new and are really excited by the results. They may not be long term usable results, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not really valuable for your process. 

And that is actually—watch me take a little tangent here—that is actually a really important thing that I feel called to say about relationships. Which is when things don’t work out, when you go on a few dates with somebody and nothing much happens, or you go forward and you date with somebody learn term, and you’re in a relationship for x amount of months or years, and it doesn’t work, a lot of times what people do is they say, “Well, that was a failure. That was a failed relationship.” I want to tell you, my friends, it is only a failure if you don’t learn from it—really. 

It often turns out, you can look back and be like, “Oh, I could have left that relationship a year before I did,” or “I could have learnt that lesson six months before I did,” or what have you. Often we find ourselves in situations where we keep on trying because we think that trying is what we’re supposed to do, or we ignore our own experience, or we act like jerks, even though we don’t really mean to, and then we keep on trying to not act like a jerk and making it worse. There’s all kinds of ways that things go down. 

But we are not meant to have every romantic experience lead to a permeant commitment—that’s not realistic. It’s not realistic. What we are meant is for those experiences to deepen our relationship to ourselves, deepen our relationship to what it is that we have to offer and what it is that we want from others, what we’re willing to consent to and how. Every relationship we have is an opportunity to further clarify that—sometimes by not getting what you want and sometimes by getting what you want. 

You may date somebody who is truly terrible match for you sexually but is totally tender, and you have a great time hanging out and being sweet to each other. Maybe that relationship doesn’t work long term. But now you know what it feels like to have a really tender dynamic and the value of it to you, so you can bring that forward to your next relationship. 

I think when we shit on our own experiences, and we kind of minimize things into it’s only a success if it leads to this specific outcome, not only are we minimizing ourselves and the people that have shared our lives with us, but we’re also missing out on the chance to actually grow from those experiences. I know it’s too easy to say life is a journey; you should just be part of the journey, but actually, life is a journey; you should just be here for the journey. 

And of course, we have goals, and we have things that we want to come of this journey. If you get too fixated on the goal, then, basically, what you’re doing is you’re fixating on what you don’t have instead of staying present for and valuing what you do have. This is just a practice—what I’m referring to is a practice. It’s trying to bring your attention back to where you are, what you can learn and how you can own your experiences instead of minimize them. In doing so, you become a more whole person and whole people tend to have more whole relationships. 

Now, I say that, and I don’t want you to hear that is if you don’t have a relationship or if you’re in a shitty relationship, that means you’re not a whole person. No, no, no—not at all. And lots of people who have all kinds of damage are in relationships. It's not a—life is not a reward system. 

So if you can be a little bit more expansive in how you hold your failures, the things that don’t work out the way you wanted them to, then you can be more expansive in how you hold your successes, then you get to see your successes on a spectrum that is not a straight line but more of a winding path. Part of your successes encompasses your failures. They are all connected. It’s all connected. Guys, it’s all connected. 

All right. Rant over. I super freaking love you. Thank you for joining me on another week of this podcast. As always, if you would like me to answer a question for you, for the podcast, please do email me. I have a contact form on the Ghost of a Podcast page on my website, and you can send me a voice memo or a question, and I would be honored to answer it. 

If you like what you’re hearing, please do subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends, make a comment, make a little star. I don’t know, do the things I always ask you to do. If you want to become a supporter on Patreon, you can do that by going to Patreon. 

The last episode of Stargazing, the show that I co-hosted with Mecca Woods for TLC, airs on Monday the 25th of February. It’s a digital show. Episodes are about 10 minutes. You can go and watch it on Facebook Watch. You don’t have to have a Facebook account to watch it; you just go on there and look up Stargazing. You can also find it on my website or on YouTube under the TLC’s page. It’s quick. It’s cute. It’s astrology, and you get to watch me give more readings, which you know I love. 

All right, loves, another week, another episode. I will look forward to our next meeting. Bye.