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.

My darlings, welcome back to Ghost. This week's question is all about betrayal and love, and it goes like this: "Last month, I discovered that my partner of 18 months has been cheating on me emotionally and sexually with his ex, who is the mother of his child. I am heartbroken. I feel stupid and used, all the hard emotions. I don't know whether to cut ties and accept life alone or try to work it through with him, find a way to trust him again, and risk being betrayed again. I love him, and apart from this awful betrayal, our partnership is good. Either option is going to be challenging, and I can't avoid pain, but the two options will take me down very different roads. So which option is best for me? I feel like I have a lesson to learn here, and I'm very confused what it is." And the questioner was born on March 15th, 1983, at 3:35 p.m. in Manchester, U.K.

So there's a lot of pieces to your question, and of course, I'm going to unpack all of them. But, first and foremost, I'm so sorry. Heartbreak is the worst. Being cheated on is awful, and it's just really terrible that you're having to go through this pain. So I'm sorry for that. Now, I'll be honest. A lot of people over the years have been annoyed by my take on cheating, but I will share it with you anyways. Cheating is lying. And when people cheat, it is an act of weakness because what they are doing is, instead of being honest about what it is they feel, desire, want—whatever their limitations are, instead of expressing those things, they do what they want behind your back and hope they don't get caught.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to that. And to me, the biggest exception is some random thing happened—oops—it happened once, and then that person comes clean right away. Now, you don't say in your question that your partner said to you, "Hey, I've been cheating on you." You say, "I discovered it," and I'm kind of reading into it because you weren't terribly clear, but I do get the feeling that you discovered this and not because they told you, which means they had every intention of continuing to cheat, which is really about continuing to lie to you on a bunch of levels, and—maybe even worse—to continue to have a secret with someone else, to have something that's just between the two of them. And to me, this act of duplicity is really shitty. I won't say that it's unforgiveable, because one can forgive whatever the fuck they want to. But it's not a good sign; that's for damn sure.

Again, you didn't mention anything about whether or not he was having safe sex with his ex or whether or not you have safe sex with him. But this is a really big deal. It's a really big deal. Especially if you're fucking with a cis man, whether or not they're having safer sex is really important because it puts you at risk. It puts you physically at risk. And so that's not great. All that said, if he has a child with his ex and he wants to be or he feels called to be with the mother of his child, it gets a little trickier for you to stand in the way of that. Now, you're not standing in the way of anything. He's committed to you. He's with you. He's lying to you and cheating with her, and that's fucked up and awful.

And, also, there's a child involved. If there's a chance that the two of them can coparent in a healthy way and be together in a healthy way, I can't help but—for the sake of the child—think that's a good thing. Now, you say in your question that you've got two options. Whenever somebody says to me, "I've only got two options," I think, "Okay, so you're not seeing the situation clearly." And that is because, generally, we have more than two options. We may have two options that we're seriously considering. We may have two options that seem realistic. We may have two options that are immediately obvious to us. But we've always got more than two options, right?

And so, when you name your two options—you can stay and try to trust somebody who has proven to be lying and cheating with somebody that he has a child with, or you can be alone, according to your two options. But that's not really true. You don't know that you'll be alone or alone for long. And the framing of it kind of suggests that you are really hoping that you can make it work with him and that you don't have to break up with him. And I agree with you: either way, it's challenging. Either way, there's pain.

I am inclined, in a really simplistic way, to say when you discover that someone is cheating on you, when you find out not because they've told you and come clean but because you've somehow divined or figured out that they're cheating on you, there's kind of not any real reason to trust them because they've not given you any real reason to trust them. Okay? And that is just my broad take on this.

Now, when we get into your birth chart, my dear, the first thing I notice is that in your birth chart, you have a Venus/Pluto opposition. And this natal aspect is being currently triggered by Pluto itself. So the Venus/Pluto opposition can give you a tendency to get really fixated on people and have a really obsessive crush on people or fall in love in a way where you feel that they are the most important thing to you and that they're essentially a lifeline to you. This can be really dangerous.

Unfortunately, the Venus/Pluto opposition can incline you to feeling like relationships that are intense and compulsive are the only ones that are true love relationships, when that's really not true. The positive of this natal aspect is that it can mean that love relationships are a vehicle for transformation and healing. That is a beautiful thing, and that's something you started to get at in the way you framed your question. You know there's something you're supposed to be learning here, but you're confused at what it is.

Here's the thing. Learning how to trust someone who has broken your trust is not a good lesson to learn. Instead, giving people a chance who are actively taking material steps to earn and maintain your trust, that's a good lesson to learn, because you don't always trust the right people, and it can be hard for you to trust in general. So there's a great deal of value for you in cultivating trust in relationships, giving people a chance. However, that doesn't mean all people and all situations.

And, again, if you caught him and he hasn't done anything really material to win your trust—and not to win your favor. I'm not talking about presents. I'm not talking about tears. I'm not talking about promises. I'm talking about actions. If he hasn't said, "I'm going to show you all these texts that I shared with this person," "I'm going to explain what I was thinking," "I'm going to get into fucking therapy," or whatever it is—if he hasn't taken material steps to win and maintain your trust, then the option of sticking around to see if anything changes doesn't seem super wise to me.

And that brings us to your Pluto transit. You are currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime Pluto square to Venus, and this transit is intense. And it tends to bring us into relationships that are really powerful and intense, but they tend to be powerfully destructive or powerfully healing. And no matter how lovely your relationship is, I can see how devastating infidelity is to you. Anyone with a Venus/Pluto opposition or Venus/Pluto square in their birth chart tends to be really horrified at the idea of being cheated on or abandoned. And having somebody lie to you in lots of ways, and certainly in these big ways, it's kind of the worst thing someone can do to you.

Now, with this current transit of the Pluto square to Venus, it's very common to feel like there's a magic thread that connects you to the person you have feelings for and that you need that person in order to be okay, and that person is the answer to your problems. You got together with this guy right around when the transit started, I'm sorry to say. And that means this relationship is under the jurisdiction of a Pluto square to Venus. I'll be totally straight. I have never seen someone go through this transit and get cheated on and lied to and have that partnership be good for them. It doesn't mean it can't happen. It can happen. I certainly wouldn't count on it.

To add complexity to that, you're going through another once-in-a-lifetime transit. It's called Neptune square to the Sun, and this transit is really confusing and demoralizing. It makes you feel just kind of muddled and unsure of what's up and what's down. This transit ultimately requires that you cultivate healthier boundaries. No matter how good or how bad your boundaries are, it requires that you cultivate bigger, better boundaries.

Now, you're a Pisces, but you've got a Moon in Aries. You've got your Venus in Mars, also in Aries, and a Leo Rising. And so you can come across really tough and strong and assertive, and in some ways, you probably are those things. But you've got the Sun and Mercury in Pisces. And so, when it comes to boundaries, when it comes to centering self-care and self-preservation, yeah, that's not exactly your strong suit.

And so this situation that you're describing to me is trying to teach you something, but it's neither of those options as you've laid them out in your question. What these two transits, what this life experience, is trying to teach you is about your own value and what you're willing to do to center and embody that value. These transits are trying to get you to understand that how you let others treat you and how you treat others is a meaningful reflection of your relationship to yourself and that it is on you to preserve and maintain your own wellness and boundaries.

If you consent to staying with people, whether it's a boyfriend or a friend or whatever else it is—when you consent to staying with people who treat you like shit, who may talk a good game but do not behave in a way that clearly expresses care and in particular the kind of care that you need to feel if you invest in those relationships, then you will end up alone even if you've got a boyfriend, even if you're surrounded by friends, because it's not enough to have people next to us. Real interconnection, real intimacy, it requires an interplay of trust, care, lots of stuff that I just don't see how you could have with him at this time.

And, unfortunately, because Pluto is currently squaring your natal Venus, if you stay with him, it's likely to get more intense and not less intense. And, unfortunately, because Neptune is squaring your Sun, this isn't just heartbreaking. It's demoralizing. And this brings me to something really important that I need to say to you, which is other people can break your heart in life. Other people can treat you like shit and do whatever, because people can be shitty. That's life. And no one—no one—goes through life never getting treated like shit by someone, either on purpose or by accident. That, unfortunately, is just part of life.

But nothing will break your heart—any of our hearts—more than the shit we do to ourselves, because you can say to yourself, "Well, that person was an asshole," or that person—he was broken, and that's why he did a damn thing. But what it is that you do to yourself, the situations you choose and invest in, if those things break your heart, if those things create harm and more harm and more harm, then what happens is your trust in yourself gets diminished, and it can get severely worn away. And over the course of time, the way that ages is pretty fucking terrible, to be honest.

And so, as scary as it is to be single, and as scary as it may be to stay with him—which I definitely am not encouraging you to do, but whatever it is you choose to do, the most important thing to avoid here is abandoning your job of being a good friend to yourself, centering your own wellness in your relationships. When someone treats you like shit, when someone hurts your feelings, it's not just information about who they are, although it for sure is. It's feedback about what you're willing to put up with, what you believe about life and about yourself. And this builds up over the course of time. Some things happen to us, and sometimes we get trapped in situations. And that is really complicated and layered.

But in this situation, you have a lot of options, and the most important one I want to encourage you to center in your thinking is, "What do I choose? How am I willing to be treated? What am I willing to compromise for a good partnership, and what are the terms of that? What are the boundaries of that?" If you break up with this person and he is meant to be, then he will take the steps needed to win back your trust. But that will take time. If you stay with this person and you do not require him to win back your trust, then we can talk about what will happen, but I do want to encourage you to reflect on, what does that mean about you and how you do or don't love on yourself or take care of yourself?

The transits that you're in and the way that your birth chart is written, it is really important that you say no to unhealthy and unsafe relationships and to center your own wellness and to understand that you do not need to abandon yourself in order to be loved. And anyone who requires you to abandon your own happiness and wellness in order to be loved isn't loving you the way you deserve to be loved.

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Darlings, let's get astrological. This week, there's actually not a lot going on astrologically. And when I say that, what I really mean is that there are not many exact transits to talk about as opposed to, for instance, last week. But when there is, in some ways, an absence of exact transits, what we have is more space to feel our feelings and to experience the consequences of the transits that we've been going through, a.k.a., shit rises to the surface.

So there's a lot to talk about in this regard, and in this episode I do also want to touch on the Pluto Return of these here United States. I know a lot of people listening are not in the U.S., but this is likely to impact the world, not just the U.S. So we are looking at the week of November 21st through the 27th of 2021. This week in the U.S., where I live, is the National Day of Mourning, or Thanksgiving. I just want to spare a few words to it, if I may. It's really hard to find an ethical or responsible way of celebrating a massacre and the ongoing oppression of a people, but that's pretty much what Thanksgiving is. And we can call it Friendsgiving, and we can be realistic that the truth is it's a national holiday, so lots of people have work off. And it's an opportunity to be with loved ones and just eat some food and be thankful and grateful. These are beautiful traditions, and I don't want to shit on anyone's traditions in that way.

But we here at Ghost of a Podcast Industries are big fans of being honest and authentically facing things that are complicated. And it's honestly not that complicated to acknowledge and own how fucked up Thanksgiving is and the historical and present-day injustices and atrocities perpetrated by the colonizing nation to the people indigenous to this land. Right? If you are going to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends, family, or whatever, I just want to give you a couple little ideas about how to do it more responsibly.

One is drop coin. Give money to organizations that are run by and serve Native Americans. If you're shopping, shop Native American-owned businesses. If you are learning online on social media from Indigenous influencers and content creators, find their Cash App or their Venmo app or whatever app the kids are using these days, and give what you can. These are all just ways. You don't have to do all the things, but certainly try to do at least one of the things.

If you don't have any cash, signal boost. Let's say you have 200 followers on a social media platform. Signal boost news and stories from Indigenous folks, and talk about the roots of the holiday and what's happening here and now to Indigenous people on this land. And then, finally, pay a land tax to the tribe or tribes that are indigenous to where you live, especially if you're a landowner or a homeowner. These are all things that you can do any damn day, but especially important things to do on this day if you do celebrate Thanksgiving.

Okay. So there's, of course, more to say. I've been getting a lot of questions via DM and for the podcast in general about critical race theory, why and how it's become such a big deal at this time in the U.S., and I want to just acknowledge it because enough of you have reached out to ask me about the astrology of this. And from my perspective, there's a lot of ways we could look at this. It is connected to the Pluto Return of the United States. It is also connected to the fact that Saturn is in the zodiac sign of Aquarius. I've talked about Saturn in Aquarius before, more when it first started at the start of the year, but the transit of Saturn in Aquarius—and keep in mind Saturn moves into each zodiac sign once every approximately 29 years, right? So what we know about the transit of Saturn in Aquarius is that it coincides with major developments in human rights. And those developments can be setbacks, or they can be advances.

But the thing that's very important to remember is it's the power of the people coming together collectively to demand change, whether they are guided by really great ethics and principles or not. That's the transit.  And what's really important to understand is that this transit is directly linked to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the United States, and this is something I've talked about before in the podcast in greater detail. It's also directly connected to the internet and net neutrality and safety online, whether that's with your mental health or your security in a more technical sense.

The advancements and setbacks we are dealing with now are not things that are happening in a vacuum. What we want to do is to look at the world and identify what is happening that we believe is wrong and we believe needs to change, and then to use that clarity of what isn't working to go about making choices and changes that empower us to reorder the structure of society, if we're talking about social issues, or of our lives on a more personal level.

When we're dealing with Saturn energies, when we're dealing with collective and social energies, there can be these meteoric moments, these things that happen that change the course of history in a blink of a moment or change the course of your life in just a moment. But, generally speaking, when we're talking about social issues, these things happen slowly over time. And so, if you are seeing things happen in society that feel unjust and that you are motivated to learn more about and change, I want to encourage you to get involved. And if you are new to a cause or you are newly aware of something, find people who are already leading the charge. You don't always have to be the leader. It's great to back up activists and educators and people in politics who you believe in that are already doing the work, that have been doing the work.

With Saturn, we're always learning humility, or we're meant to be learning humility. And that sometimes means realizing, "I am just figuring something out that activists have been working on for decades or more. And so I can educate myself in my own time and fall in line and do some of the grunt work, do some of the work to advance this movement." It is way too easy in this period of disinformation to become so overwhelmed and so outraged that we feel like our overwhelm and our outrage is activism, is doing something. But it isn't. Right?

What we want to make sure that we're doing is making space for our feelings and also getting involved to the best of our ability in whatever way works for us based on who we are and where we are and what's important to us. And I am of the conviction that having a spiritual life requires being civically minded and being socially engaged, because it's really hard to be a spiritual person and not strive to advance the welfare of others and consider how your actions and your privileges and your life and lifestyle impact the world around you.

We'll get a little bit more into the Pluto Return in a moment, but first I want to go through the transits of this week because that's what you came here for; is it not? We're looking at November 21st through the 27th, as I said, and the first exact transit of the week happens on the 21st. And it is Mercury sextile to Pluto. Now, in the context of the astrology of the moment, what I am so excited about with this transit is that it supports us in making connections and figuring things out. Even when Pluto is getting sextiled, it's still kind of a bitter pill to swallow. Pluto transits tend to be really intense. They don't always have to be bad or unpleasant, but they tend to be a lot.

And we just went through the first Eclipse of Eclipse season. We have gone through so much intense astrology in the past years, but certainly in the past weeks. And so this Mercury sextile to Pluto is a really good time for getting comfy with your dear diary, talking to your therapist or your bestie, and processing through your thoughts about how you engaged with your feelings, how you engaged with your life. And the cool thing about this transit is it supports us in making real progress in our thinking. It's also a really great time for connecting with others. So if it's about getting out there, mingling, this is very supportive to that and having fun conversations with people and fun connections.

But, also, if shit went down in recent weeks in any of your relationships, whether they're with your colleagues or your closest loved ones, the Mercury sextile to Pluto is a great transit for supporting us in just being like, "Hey, let's just talk it out," or, "Let's smooth things over." Mercury sextile to Pluto is not exactly a diplomatic transit. It's not exactly a transit where we make things easy. But it is a time where we find the right words and we can kind of see things from another perspective. We're not so locked in our own perspective.

So, just like with any other sextile or trine, you have to use the energy to make the most of the energy. When we're going through harder transits, usually your ass is handed to you, and you're like, "Well, shit. Now I gotta do something with my butt." But with sextiles and trines, it's energy for you to use, but you must choose to use it. So choose to use it, my nerds.

On the 21st, we also have the Sun ingressing into Sagittarius. In more plain language, it's Sagittarius season, which means—I don't know—have some fun. Have some adventures. It's certainly a shift in energy, and that shift in energy is only strengthened by the fact that on the 24th, Mercury ingresses into Sagittarius. So now we've got some sparkly, exciting, fiery Sagittarius energy, and its energy is great for adventure and play and exploration. If it's harnessed really intentionally, it can be a time where we learn. And we learn through experience. And who doesn't fucking like that, I ask you?

That brings us to the last transit I'm going to tell you about for the week. And then, next week, we're in December already somehow? I don't understand. I don't understand time anymore. Anyways, on the 25th, Saturn is forming an exact sextile to Chiron. So this transit is right on time to happen around Thanksgiving in the U.S. It's right on time to be looking critically at the systems in our lives and in society, whatever society you live in, and to understand or consider your participation in how it does or doesn't reflect what you really believe in and your ambitions.

Chiron and Saturn, in very different ways, can govern fear and rigidity, and a lot of evil that humans perpetrate comes out of fear and rigidity. It can lead to being really judgmental, dismissive, defensive, aggressive, and oppressive towards people. This can happen both societally—again, these are both social planets—or it can happen in your relationship to yourself. It can happen in your relationships at home.

This is a good time to consider how these themes are working in your life. And this might be really psychological and really literal for you, especially if you've got planets around eight or nine degrees. Saturn's in Aquarius and Chiron's in Aries. So, if you've got anything in your birth chart that's getting hit by either of these planets right now, you're going to especially feel this. But what we want to be aware of is that the systems in society, the systems in our lives, are flowing the way they're kind of set up to do so.

So the sextile represents a time where we have things working as they're meant to. If you set up survival mechanisms inside of you or dynamics in your life more personally or systems in society more socially or politically—if you set these things up out of fear and rigidity and the conservatism that tends to come from fear and rigidity, then when those systems are working effectively, it's not good. It's really not good.

And so it's really valuable to go through a transit like this, Saturn sextile Chiron, where we can reflect on those things and more easily make changes, or lay the groundwork for making changes, for the next time those two heavenly bodies form a square to each other, when things are going to be a lot more tense. So this is a good transit to make use of. And, if I kind of pull it back to considering the fact that, again, we are in Eclipse season—we've just gone through the first Eclipse of the season—this might feel extra stressful. So I don't want to encourage you to overthink this transit.

But I do want to encourage you to know that when shit gets lit up, when our triggers are activated, we can react to them in an impulsive and reflexive way, which is what most of us do most of the time and all of us do at least some of the time, or we can be like, "Okay. When I am triggered/when I am lit up is the exact time that I want to get more present and more contemplative and thoughtful about what it is that's getting triggered and what my instincts are in how to react." In this way, we can be more effective, compassionate, honest about what responses we want to give to these things, again, whether it's social issues or very, very personal issues.

So this transit can be incredibly useful but very difficult to want to use. So, all of that said, my loves, use this week to reflect, to reflect on how you have been engaging with yourself and others and the world, and to consider how you might need to make changes, how you might need to be more grateful or present for your successes, how you might show up more. Being present is hard. It's so simple, but often, the most simple things are the most difficult things. So do your best to be present for whatever it is that is going on this week.

Now, I'm just going to very quickly run through that. If you want to keep track of the transits and you don't want to have to wait until the podcast to do so, please do subscribe to my astrologers' pro tool, my astrology student pro tool, called Astrology For Days. It's at astrologyfordays.com, and you can track all the transits every week and take all kinds of notes so that you are prepared for the week ahead, the month ahead, the damn year ahead.

Okay. So, on the 21st, Mercury's forming an exact sextile to Pluto, and the Sun moves into Sagittarius. On the 24th, Mercury moves into Sagittarius. And on the 25th, Saturn forms a sextile to Chiron.

Now, as promised, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the Pluto Return of the United States. And the first thing I want to tell you is I'm not going to talk about it too much because, quite frankly, my nervous system is not a fan of me talking about it too much. And I've mentioned this once before on the podcast, but I like to try to practice what I preach. And after the past couple/few years of predicting collective trauma while also experiencing it in 2021, my nervous system pretty much crashed on me, and I've had to recalibrate how I engage with mundane astrology. And the truth is the Pluto Return of the United States is a scary transit. The potential that it yields—I'm not an optimist. Have you heard? I'm not an optimist. So it's not easy to say what will happen. And because Pluto takes about 250, 240-something years to return to any given point in the zodiac, no person will ever go through a Pluto Return. I've gotten lots of questions from you guys being like, "I'm going through my Pluto Return." The answer is no, you're not, unless you're 250 years old.

And this nation, the United States, has never gone through a Pluto Return before. So astrologers have a lot of theories and a lot of ideas, but none of us have gone through it before. And, in truth, astrology is so effective because it's reading patterns. This is the first Pluto Return of the United Sates. So there is some greater uncertainty with it, but for sure, we know that the great experiment of these here United States is going through a transformational confrontation with whether or not it's working and how it's working and for whom.

We have throughout the past several years been confronted, collectively confronted, with the shadow side of this nation and the institutions that hold it up. And that's what the Pluto Return of the U.S. is about. I've gotten questions from some of you saying, "I've heard other astrologers say it's the fall of capitalism." There is no reason for us to believe that capitalism is falling based on what's happening right now. Now, that doesn't mean that there will not be severe consequences for capitalism. But, unfortunately, when there is a crisis within capitalism, it falls on the backs of poor people, middle-class people, not wealthy people. Right?

So the shadow that capitalism casts, the shadow that this nation casts, may get deeper. It doesn't mean—when we talk about the transformation of a society, it doesn't mean that we'll have a transformation that we want. And whenever people say, "Thank God the system is changing. Let's burn it to the ground," it always makes me worry because that's not a realistic thing to really call for, right? If we're all magical manifesters, manifesting the collapse of a nation, if you really think it through, who does it collapse upon? It's not as simple as something will collapse and something better will be just ready to go in its place. When things collapse, the unrest and the uncertainty that comes with that can be really devastating for people. And the risk with the Pluto Return of the United States is that we have a civil war, and there's a lot of ways in the modern world that a civil war can be fought. One could argue we're already in some kind of very modern civil war.

The Pluto Return is likely to mark a time of great transformation, destruction, and healing. So much of what we're seeing in American society around white supremacists not being ashamed, getting real loud—this has to do with the Pluto Return. It's not exclusive to the Pluto Return, but it has to do with the Pluto Return of the United States. This is a period where things will transform. They will change. But how they change and to whose benefit is really the question.

Yeah, this can be pretty intimidating and upsetting to hear about. But so much of it comes kind of outside of your control. There's so little you can do about this in one way of thinking. But in another way of thinking, to me, this is greater motivation to get involved. Get involved with activism. Get involved in politics. Be responsible with how you spend your money. Stay informed. This is not the time to fuck off and expect someone else to take care of it for us or for you. It is important to have empathy because when we go through heavy Pluto transits, we get so focused on our own vulnerabilities and our own insecurities and our own triggers and shit that we can stop thinking about others. And this leads to, again, some of the worst behaviors associated with Pluto transits.

So embracing your humanity means not just acting for your own preservation and the preservation of your most immediate people. It means considering the planet and all the people in it. If this is sounding a little like, oh, that makes sense in the context of COVID, yeah, it fucking does in the context of COVID. From my way of understanding the chart of the Pluto Return, I absolutely expected years ago, when I first started looking into this, for us to have a pandemic during the Pluto Return. And this is for many reasons, but one of them is when our individual liberties, when our individual safety and survival, is feeling threatened is when we are most likely to embody toxic individualism. And when I say we, I mean humans. I just mean humans.

And a lot of humans, when we feel personally threatened and scared, we become more altruistic and we become more empathetic and we work harder for others. Maybe not most people. Maybe not most people. So this is a really intense transit, and I will talk about it in much greater detail before too long. But it is really interesting. Look it up. See what other astrologers are saying about it. Do your own research, absolutely. This is one of those times where I just want to say it's great to research interesting things, but what are you going to do with that information? That's actually what's important.

The point is to use this information. So let this information—and if you have any fear around it, let that fear—inform you around what you need to get determined around, where you need to be activated and engaged in the world around you, because this is an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation. We all must be a part of the solutions we're seeking. And, again, being outraged on social media is not being a part of a solution. That might be part of your emotional process, and that's totally great and fine. But we don't want to just stop there.

We don't want to stop at self-care. We don't want to stop at outrage. We want to understand that those are phases of development and then step up and do the best we can based on our resources, our energy, where we're at—whatever it is. Do your best. Be a part of the solution if you can, even a tiny part, because here's the thing: we don't need to be perfect as individuals. None of us are. We're all fucking up. We're all doing the best we can. We're all making compromises. That's life.

But if you just make a teeny, tiny bit of progress and I just make a teeny, tiny bit of progress, but we're all doing it—we're all making a small amount of progress—that has a massive consequence for the collective. It can be demoralizing, it can be helpless or hopeless-feeling, to think about the world and all the things wrong in it, let alone your community and all the things wrong in it. But if you find one place where you can make progress, one place where you can take active steps towards making something better, something more humane, more just, more sustainable, then you're doing great. You're doing great.

Now, my loves, I hope you take time to integrate whatever it is that came up for you around the November 19th Eclipse. And do remember that it takes about six months to fully integrate whatever it is that comes up for us during an Eclipse, so be patient. And if it didn't seem that spectacular, don't overthink it. Take the time and energy you need to compassionately respond to whatever gets triggered in you this week, especially if it's stressful or you feel really blocked. When it seems like there's only two options, you know that you're not seeing all the options because there's always more than two options. There's almost always more than two options. So look around for options, and do your damn best.

As always, if you haven't already subscribed to Ghost of a Podcast, please do. Makes such a difference, means so much. I want to remind you that if you want to learn more astrology with me, there are some classes for sale, including the class I just most recently gave on demystifying the twelfth house in the birth chart. It's a goodie. So you can go to my website at lovelanyadoo.com/shop to see the classes I have for sale there and get whichever one resonates with you.

You can also grab my book, Astrology For Real Relationships: Understand You, Me, and How We All Get Along. Is it queer inclusive? You better fucking believe it is. Does it include friendships and not just love relationships? You better fucking believe it does. So, yeah, if you're in the market. Only if you're in the market. And if you just want to keep on enjoying shit from me for free, that's cool, too. Join me over on Instagram, and of course, now that we're close to the first of the month, it's a great time to join me over on Patreon. On the first of every month, on the Kittens level, I drop a month-ahead horoscope so you can get the skinny about the month ahead in advance. Who doesn't want that, I ask you? Who?

Okay. I think that's it. Take care of yourself and others, okay? Okay. Buh-bye.