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.

This is a really tricky time, my Puppies and Kittens. It is a lot. And what I want to talk about this week on my astrology Hot Take is the Moon. We are all in our feelings, right now. The global pandemic, the shelter-in-place, the collective fear that we are experiencing around our health, our economic security, our sense of ability to protect ourselves and provide for ourselves, all of these things—they’re really tender; they’re really emotional. And, unfortunately, what’s happening as so many of us are forced to stay at home is that we have less distractions and less activity and that forces us to fall back into our emotions. And in astrology, the Moon is the planet related to emotion. 

So let’s break it down a little bit. In order to determine your Moon sign, you do need to know your time of birth. And the reason for this is because the Moon moves really quickly through the zodiacal degrees. So if you were born in the morning versus the end of the day, the Moon may be in a different sign. And, so, unfortunately, if you don’t have to the minute, it’s generally okay, but you need to pretty much know when you were born in order to know your Moon sign, otherwise you might have it wrong. So that’s a starting point, okay. 

The thing about the Moon in your birth chart is it describes a lot of things. It describes your inner most psychology. It’s your feelings. It’s your needs. It’s how you express love and care and intimacy and closeness, and how you experience it. It’s also related to the past. So the past in general, but, in particular, your childhood, your early developmental experiences. 

So the Moon is not related to your heredity per se, although, certainly, there are aspects in your birth chart that can occur to the Moon that will tell us about your heredity, or sometimes where your Moon is placed will give us that kind of data. And when I say where the Moon is placed, I mean what house it’s placed in more than the sign. But to stay focused on you and your felt experience is a really important Lunar practice. 

The Moon is all about eb and flow. It’s about feeling and reeling and feeling, right. And, so, where we have the Moon, regardless of where your Moon sign, house, or placement, whatever is, we have the need to learn how to stay with the feelings—stay with the feelings and the reactions so that we can respond in a healthy and sustainable way. 

What I have just described is something I talk about on the show a lot, and let me give it a title—it’s called emotional maturity, and it’s really hard to achieve, and it’s really hard to maintain. And the reason why it’s hard is because so much of our lives, certainly within capitalism, or if you’re running a family, it doesn’t leave a lot of room or validate a lot of priority for doing the work of cultivating emotional presence, which is the foundation upon which we can build our emotional maturity. 

And from where I’m sitting, emotional maturity and spiritual integrity are closely linked. Because how can one be spiritually responsible and present when one can’t determine the difference between your emotions and your instincts? Because they’re different. They’re actually different things. 

In astrology, we can look to Neptune for our intuition. Jupiter and Uranus are both related to insights. Pluto is psychic knowledge. But the Moon is your feelings. It’s your emotions. And, so, while it is influenced by sense impressions, and it is related to sense impressions, it is primarily about your feels and your heart—not your cardiovascular system, but your hearty heart, and it is related to your childhood. 

So let’s take a moment to sit with that. Because when we look at your emotional reaction or your emotional response to someone looking at you sideways or someone giving you a compliment or someone saying, “Let’s get serious and take it to the next level,” or someone saying, “Mmm, I’m not ready to be serious and take it to the next level,” whatever it is, when we look at those things, what you and I both know is that we are not just responding emotionally to the content of that one interaction. What we’re doing as humans is we are in some way responding to everything that came before it—every experience you’ve had that told you you were loveable and special or not loveable and not special gets triggered when the Moon gets engaged. 

The Moon in astrology is the most reactive of the planets. It is the most reactive because it is the most subjective. Feelings are not facts, and when people hear that sometimes when they’re very Lunar, they get offended. But I want to be really clear, feelings are equally important to facts, but they are just completely different things. Your feelings are valid, but it is the job for each of us who has a Moon, aka each living human, to be able to determine is what I’m feeling an honest and present response to what is happening, or is it a response to what is happening plus a reaction to all these others things that I fear and hope and that have happened in the past? And it’s hard for it to not be the latter, right. 

We want to bring self-awareness to our Moon. And an important way of doing that is understanding it really foundationally in your birth chart. And, so, if you’re new to astrology, the way to start is figure out your Moon sign. You have the Moon is what sign, right. Because, let’s say, you have a Moon in Sagittarius. Moon in Sagittarius is supposed to be very dynamic and responsive and adventurous and excitable. But you stick that Moon in the eighth house, which is a water house and much more secretive and intense and brooding, and you’re going to see it functioning really differently than if it’s stuck in, let’s say, the fifth house, which is the house of play and dynamism and creativity. 

In other words, the Moon sign that you have describes so much of your emotional nature. But the context of how you experience your own nature, again, is foundational to how you express and share of your emotional nature. So many of us feel super vulnerable, but we don’t want anyone to know we’re vulnerable, so we take all these pains to put like shoots and ladders and smoke and mirrors in front of our emotions, so people can’t see them. 

And, so, there’s our nature, and then there’s what we do with our nature. And they’re very different things, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. And this is why relationship astrology is so useful to so many people and so useful for human development because it gives you a bit more context to not just your inherent nature and not just your childhood or developmental experiences, but also why you do the weird shit you do in reaction to your nature, your feelings, and your needs. 

So you want to look at the Moon sign. You want to look at the house placement, and then—and you’ve got to do it in this order, my friends—you can look at aspects from other planets to your Moon, and that describes so much of how your emotional nature functions. Now, this is really, really important because when we have hard aspects, hard natal aspects to our Moon in the birth chart, what happens is we get more subjective and more reactive. 

We are scanning for experiences that validate or affirm our negative self-image, our negative expectations, or conversely, our grandiose and overinflated expectations and self-image. And the thing that’s really valuable about knowing this stuff is if you know it, you can work with it, you can be intentional, you can get clearer about what you need to do to manage yourself and what you need to ask for in relationship to others. And I’m not just talking about love relationships. I’m talking about all relationships—business partnerships, collaborations, roommates, talking to your mom, talking to your bestie and your frenemy, and all of that stuff. 

Where we find the Moon in the birth chart, we see our tolerance, or lack thereof, of experiencing our emotions. That feeling of being safe or wanted or not being safe and wanted is directly related to the Moon in the birth chart. Saturn and Pluto will both have roles to play with that—Venus can, but the Moon is your feels, my friends. ’Tis your feels. 

When we are looking at your emotional health and wellness, we’re always looking to your Moon. The Moon is not your mental health. And there’s a way in our culture we often all talk about emotional mental health—we kind of put a little slash, dash between the two as though they are one thing. They’re not one thing. They’re very different things. Prioritizing emotional process is really different than prioritizing psychological process. 

The Moon is your emotions, and Mercury is your mind. And what we do in our culture frequently, and we do it for whatever cultural reasons, but we also do it as a way to manage our feelings, is we try to make sense—Mercury—of our feelings—the Moon. And sometimes it really works. Sometimes using Mercury to help and serve our Moon really supports us. However, it needs to only be a phase of development because we cannot use our Mercury to overcome our Moon. 

Our Moon must be integrated and honored and experienced and expressed. So what that translates to in practical terms is when you seek to explain away your emotions, you’ve lost the thread. When you tell yourself or others that if only you understood, then you could accept. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not, honestly. Whenever people tell me that, and trust, it’s one of the most common things that people tell me—I could have closure if only I understood. I could accept it if only I understood. I need details. I need to figure this out. I need to understand it. 

What I want to tell you is I’m always hearing people say, “I’ll accept my Moon if my Mercury gets satiated. I want to fix my Moon through my Mercury,” and the truth is acceptance is the Moon. It’s the heart. It’s the feels. It’s not just cognitive. There is a mental component to acceptance; however, it takes emotion. How we feel is foundational to what we’re willing to believe, what we’re willing to accept. It’s foundational to, essentially, coloring our thoughts and our ideas. 

The value of investigating and cultivating presence with your Moon is so huge. The more awareness that you bring to your style and desire for emotional connection, the more awareness that you can bring to your own wants and needs and feelings, the better able you’ll be to care for yourself, have healthy boundaries, connect to others, and make sure that those connections are intimate, sustainable, and healthy.

National Bail Out is a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers, and activists building a community-based movement to end systems of pre-trial detention and, ultimately, mass criminalization. Free Black Mamas is an annual campaign where they coordinate and lead tactical bail outs to free as many Black mamas and caregivers as they can, so that they can spend Mother’s Day with their families and communities. 

This year NBO is shifting their strategy to meet the needs of their people during COVID-19 crisis. They know that people in cages, especially those who are elderly, immunocompromised, trans, pregnant, and drug users have a heightened risk for either getting COVID-19 or experiencing greater complications if they do contract the virus. With that, they’re moving to begin bailing out Black mamas and caregivers in the upcoming weeks to help ensure that they are alive and well to see Mama’s Day. To support organizers around the country in bringing our people home, visit nationalbailout.org. That’s nationalbailout.org. Give what you can. We are all we need.

One of the most common things I hear from people on social media is this question: “Oh, my God, the Moon’s in Gemini today. I have Moon in Gemini. What’s that mean for me?” Here’s the thing, my friends and loves, the Moon moves through all 30 degrees of each of the 12 zodiacal signs, aka it moves through all the zodiacal degrees of all the zodiacal signs in a month—in a month. In every single month we have one New Moon, which is when the Sun and Moon are conjoined, aka sitting on top of each other exactly, and we have a Full Moon, and that’s when the Sun and Moon are perfectly opposite to the degree. 

This represents the opening—the New Moon—and the closure—the Full Moon—of an emotional cycle. It’s always an approximately 29-day cycle. That’s the Moon for you. And, so, this is where tracking the Moon is really valuable for cultivating more emotional self-awareness. The reason why this is is because you can, within three months of paying attention to what zodiacal sign the Moon is in, start to understand your own patterns. 

When the Moon’s in an air sign, do you have a hard time focusing? When the Moon’s in an earth sign, do you find yourself actually remembering to follow up with people and connect to people that you actually care about? Are those the days you take care of business—emotional business? This kind of self-awareness can only support you in maximizing your goals, your ambitions, and your fucking energy—and, girl, you know I want you to focus on your energy because it’s precious. 

Now, in general, the Full Moon and the New Moon are something that people really get excited about. It’s a witchy favorite—respect. There’s a lot of really great reasons for it. One really great reason is simply because it’s—you can see it. It’s right up there in the sky. It’s one of those things that’s easier to accept about astrology because you can literally see it. 

The other thing is that it is really useful and wise—as many witchy friends know—to have a couple monthly check ins with what you’re doing and the energy with which you’re doing it. Every New Moon is an opportunity to recommit to your emotional investments, to check back in with whether or not you are present emotionally. 

Full Moons are a time to release what is no longer serving you, to let go of whatever junk you started to carry round in your pockets throughout the month. It’s also a really good time to shed the world and make more room for yourself, to better connect to your emotions. And the reason why Full Moons bring up really intense and overwhelming feelings in so many people is because the Full Moon is meant to confront you with how you actually feel. And, so, if what you’ve done throughout the course of the month is repress and distract, then what happens on the Full Moon is you’re overwhelmed by this backlog of emotion. 

So learning to work with the Moon, simply put, means learning to sit with your feelings without trying to create a story or even a plan around them. Like I said, it’s very difficult for most of us to do that. We want to turn it into a story. We want to turn it into an idea that we’re really smart and that’s why we understand. 

And, so, I want to give you some really simple Lunar homework that you can do anytime of the month, my loves. When it comes to engaging with other people’s Moons, my advice to you is to simply be there, to be receptive. Now, I’m not saying you need to take everything in that belongs to other people—that’s not an act of healthy self-preservation or boundaries. But what I am saying is when someone is going through something emotional, and what we do is we rush to give advice or to create fixes or to edit or moderate how they’re feeling or what they’re sharing, then we’re not really present. 

It’s a really good habit to say do you want me to listen, or do you want feedback? Because sometimes when we’re in a state of emotion what we need from our friends or loved ones is for them to just be like, “Shit. I hear that. And you’re going through that, and I see it, and I’m present for that.” Maybe you don’t have to say it in such hippy terms but say something like that. It’s really valuable to simply be present for others. 

And as you model this, you can ask people to do the same—to simply listen to you because you really just are like, “I’m in my feels, and it’s overwhelming, and this is where I am. I want to just share it with you. I want somebody to be a witness and a participant in that way.” We don’t always need to be actionable with our feelings. Asking others is there anything you need is a great kindness because it does two things. One is it communicates presence and availability. But the other thing is it does make your loved ones somewhat responsible for saying what they need. 

Now, let me flip that and say to you in efforts to have a healthy and balanced relationship to your Moon, being able to articulate what you need is a really big part of it because it’s not asking other people to do guess work in expressing love for you. Being able and willing to share with others what feels like love to you and ask for what you need is ultimately letting them know you. And that is the only way that you have a chance of being loved for you, accepted for you. 

And that’s one of the many essential components to having a healthy and happy heart life, love life, right. And I talk about love life not just in the context of sexual and romantic love. There are so many kinds of love, and we need all of it, right now. In order for intimacy to occur, we must be able to share our feelings, and we must let others do the same. 

And, depending on where you’re at in your own development or in your life, that might need to really start with you. Just practice listening to your feelings, being in your feelings. You may be able to do it with yourself and for yourself but not know how to ask that of others. You may know how to ask that of others but not know how to offer it to them. Wherever you’re at is where you need to start from, that’s all. Judgement free zone over here, friends. Judgment free zone. 

The Moon moves quickly, and the beautiful thing of that is we are consistently in process of emotionally growing and changing and adjusting and reflecting. It’s a beautiful thing, even when it is an authentic pain in your ass or the asses of many others, okay. It’s okay to feel messy and complicated. It’s okay to have tons of feelings. What you want to do is make sure you’re taking responsibility for your needs in response to that, so that the way you relate to yourself and the way you show up with others, what you offer and what you require from them is healthy and sustainable and clear. 

And for many of us, that’s the work of our life. It’s not something we’re going to figure out by the time we’re 37, right. And for others, it’s a lot more organic. We all have all of the planets in our chart. And whether your Moon is touchier or less touchy is not a signal of you being good or bad or better or worse. It’s just your birth chart, and your birth chart is you. And you are good enough as you are. I accept you. I embrace you. It’s your turn now. You accept you. You embrace you. Okay. Okay. 

Now, I got one last thing to say about the Moon before we end this little episode. Your feelings do not entitle you to stop everything and make other people deal. Because you are having strong feelings does not mean you are entitled to take up more space or to force other people to think, feel, or do anything. You are entitled to all of your feelings; however, you are not entitled to all actions and demands in reaction to your feelings. 

My friends, having strong feelings does not mean you get to stop a conversation and stop listening to the other person and stop showing up for the other person. We are all in a state of emotional overwhelm, or most of us are, right now. And we are all likely to act out against ourselves and others in the style and nature of our Moon. We are also capable of growing and maturing and sharing and expanding because we’re all getting triggered together. This is a really unique and valuable opportunity to get in there, get present with your Moon and share it with others—see what happens. 

My loves, thank you for joining me for another episode of Ghost of a Podcast. As always, subscribe, star it, give me reviews, whatever it is that you can do from wherever you listen to the podcast. If you haven’t already, pick up my book, Astrology For Real Relationships because I really break down the Moon in there in the context of friends, lovers, and long term relationships, so you know you need it. Be kind to yourself and others and be safe this week. Bye.