Weekly Astro Pro-Tips
Integrate. It’s one of the most important things that we can do on the days following a full moon. It’s hard to incorporate lessons when we are rushing through them. This past Sunday’s full moon deserves that kind of respect.
Monday, May 4th
Mercury enters its pre-retrograde shadow, meaning that in its retrograde backtrack it will go over the degrees it is currently occupying. Mercury doesn’t station retrograde until May 18th and will be in retrograde until June 11th. So it’s up to you whether to begin new projects between now and May 18th or wait until after June 11th.
However.
Mercury isn’t out of its post retrograde shadow until June 27th, which for the fastidious and possibly freaked out is the time to go forward with your plans.
My feeling is this: We all have to live our lives, so we should. But, having said that, if I have a choice about it, I’d rather start something brand-spanking-new out of Mercury’s retrograde and out of its pre- and post-shadow periods.
If you must begin something now, do so with the understanding that you may have to rework, revise or redo a part of your project once the retrograde is complete. Just don’t fret about it too much, chances are that is what will make you miss something, mess something up or overlook something altogether.
If it’s a project that is from the past or if it’s bringing up the old to be reworked in some way then it’s a perfect project to work on during any part of the cycle; pre-, during or post-retrograde.
Wednesday, May 6th
The sun trines Pluto lending us a helping hand to process powerful psychological experiences.
An exact conjunction of Mars in Taurus and the binary, blinking star Algol also occurs on Wednesday. I wrote about the combination in the Scorpio full moon post but, in short, it’s bearing a high-pitched potency; a charged, intense and volatile combination that refuses to be ignored. When Mars and Algol team up we are asked to recognize how we deal with our power, how we channel our fury and how to make the most out of the situation at hand. If we can contain our unconscious desires for bloody revenge, we can utilize this combination to fuel our long range plans to serve our highest good, protect our human rights, the rights of all that need protecting and to rise victoriously over injustice.
Thursday, May 7th
Venus moves into Cancer, just in time for Mother’s Day. This combination reminds us that everyone needs a good home cooked meal and a back rub every now and then. It can’t be all intensity and overthrow. Taking care of our emotional needs, being connected to those that feel like family and taking time to nurture ourselves and others in whatever way(s) we need is the best way to honor this transit.
Saturday, May 9th
Mercury squares Neptune making linear thinking challenging and choices confusing. If you don’t know what to say or what you think about something, just stay with an I don’t know yet, I’ll get back to you when I do. Judgement may get clouded and the intentions of folks may be hard to decode so don’t try. Best to use this energy to go for long walks, paint messy works of art, reread childhood story books and bath in your favorite floral essence.
Aries & Aries Rising
Resources can be used to support all sorts of interesting reactions. We can use what we earn to engender a sense of superiority. Our bank accounts can create a cushion between us and unkind realities, realities that we don’t have to witness if we wish to stay looking the other way.
Or.
Resources can be freed from the clutches of greed, envy, fear and privilege and used in a way that supports our humanity, reminds us of our dignity and reunites us with the idea that anything we have been given can be used for our spiritual growth. Perhaps the most spiritual thing that we can do is share what we have extra of, freely and without hesitation.
Get to the heart of what matters to you and use your resources to support that.
With the sweet new influence of Venus moving into the part of your chart that deals with your home, your family and your internal private life there are many reasons for you to carve some time out to spend in your home sweet home. Your fiery nature and need to be in the action (if not leading it outright) means that you need to be persuaded every now and then to listen to your feelings and succumb to their demands. Every great warrior needs to step off the battlefield every now and again to remember that there is more to them than what they head up, face off with or challenge outright.
Taurus & Taurus Rising
Great privilege comes with great responsibility. Your gifted at the moment with a seemingly inexhaustible will and a resiliency that can rival the pluckiest pop diva.
Or.
You are being visited by an overwhelming ferocious fury that wants you to wreak havoc on your hope for the future.
Or both. We are many things in one moment and all possible outcomes are always beckoning us to come play.
Your responsibility then, is to use this current of creative chaos to your advantage and not your demise. Suit up with your strength and simmer down with any feelings of being betrayed and belittled. Just because others don’t do what we want them to doesn’t mean that we have been betrayed and waiting around for anyone to act how we want them to is a royal waste of time.
To counter any feelings of separation speak in ways that you wish to be spoken to. Soothe others with the caring conversations that you wish your kin would have with you. Create connectivity through listening to what others are feeling in the moment, not just what they are saying to you. Find ways to connect to yourself during your everyday interactions so that you are using the entire day to practice self-care.
Gemini & Gemini Rising
Don’t let yourself sink into misery just because you can’t explain away sorrow. We all know you are a brilliant being who sometimes thinks too much. We all know that if you just stilled your whys? and your whens? and your what ifs? you’d remember that asking those questions will never bring you peace.
Meditate on what you most wish was available to you. Maybe it’s support. Maybe it’s acceptance. Maybe it’s being seen for who you are and being loved precisely because of it.
Then give yourself what you most wish you had. Like your life depended on it.
Meditate on the mystery of your life. The wonderful things that have happened to you that you cannot explain. The times when you were saved by Grace. The circumstances that conspired to give you an experience of ecstasy. The howling winds of hope that whipped up and carried you through the more difficult days.
Cancer & Cancer Rising
Get your face on, gurl. Get your hair did and your duds done. Create a fresh new updated version of you to see your days through. Nothing wrong with a little vanity especially when it’s used to free your creative self-expression and reclaim your right to be beautiful just as you are. Decorate yourself with love, don a wrap of self-acceptance and look in the mirrors that will grant you an honest reflection.
Sacred adornment has been around since we figured out how to put a flower in our hair and call ourselves Queen. Your entire body is a landscape to decorate. Don’t worry about whether or not you fit into a beauty standard, just celebrate that you have a body to bedazzle.
Also, get out. In the world. Get social. See your peeps. See your relationships as sacred vessels to experience your compassion, your self acceptance and your patience. See your friends as struggling sweethearts straddling the same impossibilities that you do. Being a person is a precarious position to hold. With so much love to give and so many illusions to sort through the best of us get lost at times. Let your loved ones be as complex as you are and urge them towards utilizing the strengths that you see them so often display.
Leo & Leo Rising
Rule with an abundant heart and a commitment to lending your influence to life-affirming outcomes. You are set up this week to annihilate the enemy so if you stay keen to kindness it will help you outsmart the egos of your opponents without setting off a chain reaction that would render you untrustworthy.
Don’t create havoc just because you can. But do help to create situations that raise awareness, raise consciousness and raise the bar. Take vows to be a generative source of hope and take comfort in resolving to make courageous strides towards justice.
Notice what you are celebrated for and ask yourself if these are the types of qualities that you strive to become famous for. It’s easy enough for someone with as much charm as you have to get noticed, but are you attracting the kind of attention that you feel upholds your highest or magnifies your less worthy attributes?
Virgo & Virgo Rising
It might very well be worth your while to stick your neck out and say what you really want to. What you believe in doesn’t have to be popular. In fact if it’s a good idea, it probably isn’t.
Don’t worry about being contentious but don’t pick at wounds that would be better off healing right now either. Any great leader nows what to illuminate and what to let linger for the moment.
Choose your battles and the timing to reveal your beliefs strategically. Choose to spend time with those that can remind you of why it’s important to do what you do. Choose to spend time with people in completely unproductive ways too. Some of the greatest strategizing organically erupts after carving out time to do nothing. Lounging about with good friends, eating wonderful food and feeling like you’ve got the freedom to enjoy yourself is sometimes the most radical thing we can do.
No matter how short an afternoon spent in the company of loved ones, if spent fully present, we will feel refueled.
Libra & Libra Rising
Simple human kindness is greatly lacking in most spheres of our life, the career world most poignantly. This week I urge you to bring your sensitivity to work. You are well poised to get noticed and this is helped greatly when you are able to demonstrate to others that you sincerely care about their feelings.
You know, because you are human and so are they.
Don’t get all wrapped up in their drama, or your need to be needed, liked or loved though. Just be a good person in all your affairs.
Especially when it comes to something that you really need. Especially when it comes to something that you really need but might lose. Choose the higher road, know that if it leaves it wasn’t yours to have and remember that there are droves of good deals coming your way, as well as a boost in popularity. No need to squabble over spilt milk and missed boats. There’s too much on the horizon to waste time looking down or feeling it.
Scorpio & Scorpio Rising
In short, if all you did this week was integrate the effects of the full moon in Scorpio that occurred on Sunday, March 3rd, that would be enough. The full moon was bursting with opportunities to see what we often want to look away from. But not only did this full moon give us the chance to see these aspects of life, it also granted us the opportunity to see what we need to reclaim about our stories.
Full moons highlight certain aspects of ourselves and bring certain situations to light. Whatever was revealed about your relationship to yourself and about your way of relating to others is well worth the time it takes to assimilate the information.
Intimacy isn’t immediate.
Allowing time for your partners to reveal the layers of themselves is an important step towards your emotional maturity. Speeding through the difficult, rocky or tumultuous terrain of your relationships won’t get you to happy.
Your relationships might bare an extra dose of passion and purpose this week so make space for all kinds of reactions. Remember to take time to get quiet and take some space if you need it. Arguing about the details of disappointment, deception or denial never brings you closer to the truth.
Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising
The last full moon (on March 3rd) required, demanded or straight up took some time and energy away from your plans for world domination.
I hope that you submitted instead of just pushing through. I hope that you keep with you some of this wisdom. It’s OK to lay in the grass and gaze up at the passing clouds. It’s OK to let yourself feel the the rushing winds of springtime. It’s OK to work in ways that suit you best instead of making yourself suit the work that makes you the best.
I get that you want to achieve great amounts of movement right now and you are if you are showing up everyday and doing what you can do. But the body might be calling for a different kind of kick-ass. With Saturn in your sign you have to navigate through new responsibilities and new ways of being in control of your destiny. This isn’t a race. You are going through many learning curves and tests that will strengthen your resolve to be the commander in chief and the captain of your quarters. These need to be taken seriously and slowly at times. These require pit-stops of integration.
Remember that come August you’ll get a great gust of hope and help with your projects and your prowess so set yourself on a course of long term sustainability. You can’t judge success by your inbox but you can judge it by your outlook.
Capricorn & Capricorn Rising
Rejection stimulates the same pathways in the brain that physical pain does.
No wonder we are so prone to avoid it, and yet when we have experienced a lot of it we seem to be attracted to situations that will have us reliving it.
I suggest that you take an interest in how you attract what is interesting, alluring and compelling to you. Right now your chart is brimming with the possibilities for partnering and given that fact, it’s always good to know the mating dance we decide to display.
What kind of birds are we singing to? What kind of bait are we using? What kind of experiences are we hoping to create and does our mating call line up with our motto?
There is no need to judge the ways in which we want to hook-up with others, but we need to be clear on what we are calling in in order to understand why we might end up in the same situations.
There is a great romantic and/or creatively ambitious current flowing through your week. If you want to use it to re-experience rejection, refusal and to regurgitate the past, than by all means, be my guest.
But remember that you can always flip the script and choose yourself. Always and forever more. Set your life up so that it reflects your value, celebrates your existence and reflects your natural ability to find love wherever you are.
Aquarius & Aquarius Rising
Understanding the meaning that we made and still make out of family/childhood traumas and dramas is fundamental to experiencing any kind of peace.
Developing a surrogate family can be a means to ensure that we have a chance of consciously working through the scar tissue that may have built up over our lifetime. Family members that are unwilling to do their own healing work are not always our best chance at resolving old issues.
Finding ways to self-soothe is also a sure route to beautifying the spaces that were left bare in our emotional landscape.
Fill in your foundations. Act in ways that you wish someone else would have acted on your behalf. Fight for your right to exist as you are, without apology. You don’t owe anyone an explanation of why you are or who you are. But you do owe it to yourself to find a way to heal your resentments, your fears and any misconceptions your may have internalized from others.
Pisces & Pisces Rising
The fact of the matter is that in order to let ourselves be loved we must reveal parts of ourself that we really aren’t too proud of. We need not be perfect. We need not be prepared. We need not be enlightened. We need not be hip to the latest self-help hullabaloo. We needn’t be any of these things in order to get what we need.
All we need is to be witnessed.
We need to be seen. We need to be recognized. We need to be nodded to. We can’t help it, we are social creations who will forever crave the comfort of kinship. We go to any lengths for it, although sometimes in the most unhelpful ways.
All because we need to know that we are not alone.
We need to know that we can fuck up while on the path of growing up. We need to know that our friends will accept minor and even major missteps, that there is a cushion of forgiveness awaiting our inevitable fall and then we need to hold out the same kind of safety device for our loved ones.
This week helps you let yourself be known and helps you to have gratitude for those who appreciate all of you.