Mercury Retrograde & Tomorrow's Solstice: Horoscopes for the Week of December 19th

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Monday, December 19th

Mars enters Pisces

Mercury stations retrograde at 15° of Capricorn

Wednesday, December 21st

Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice; Sun enters Capricorn

Saturday, December 24th

Saturn in Sagittarius trine Uranus in Aries, both at 20°

Sunday, December 25th

Venus in Aquarius trine Jupiter in Libra, both at 20°

Venus in Aquarius sextile Uranus in Aries, both at 20°

Venus in Aquarius sextile Saturn in Sagittarius, both at 20°

Into the Deep

Mercury’s frequent retrogrades, or underworld journeys, are alchemical in nature. Mercury is the Messenger. It symbolizes the ways we give and receive information. Its retrograde journeys ask us to re-think certain aspects of our lives. Its retrograde journeys asks us to review, rewrite, re-listen and reorganize our relationship with life.

Life is not a straightforward path. These are not straightforward times.

While there is truth in Mercury retrograde’s reputation for mixing up messages and sending us in the wrong direction so it can steal our keys and reset our passwords, it’s unfortunately not as famous for the kind of in-depth soul retrieval it can help us do. A life well-lived is one that is frequently reviewed, scoured over and gleaned for the veins of gold that run through it.

We have a lot to retrieve. A lot to review. A lot to sort through. 2016 has been a year that has taken much, leaving us with no choice but to muster the courage and soul needed to face the future in front of us.

As many of us gather to celebrate a holiday, we will be collectively reviewing the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our past, present and futures. Holiday seasons are jam-packed with emotional triggers, tests and rewards. Holidays reveal the growth that we have made. Holidays expose the power of our intention to heal and how solid our commit to our healing is. Holidays are times when we can make quantum leaps in our healing process if we aren’t afraid of the process of reviewing our lives and revisiting the oldest aspects of ourselves.

Letting Light In

On December 21st, the sun enters Capricorn, adding to this week’s emphasis on the sea-goat’s sign. The Winter Solstice, here in the Northern hemisphere, is a time of endings and beginnings. Much like the new moon, the Winter Solstice closes one cycle and begins another. It is a time that is used to set intentions for the year ahead. A season to plant our seeds in the darkest hours of the year. A time that marks the shortest day and longest night. A time where many cultures celebrate the miracle of light and the miracles related to it. It’s a time to focus on the internal light we can find in ourselves and in each other.

May the season help us to join our lights, illuminating a way forward together.

Steady Innovation

Saturn in Sagittarius will trine Uranus in Aries on Saturday, a combination that can be wonderfully supportive for reinventing the structures of our lives. This is the first of three trines that Saturn will make to Uranus in the next year. Each aims to help us take another step towards what liberates us from the old without losing the structure of what holds us together.

Venus, planet of love and connection, will sextile both Saturn and Uranus on December 25th as well as making a trine to Jupiter. This bodes well for sweetening situations and time spent bonding and being joyful.

Take hold of the moments that are calm, take comfort in what you can and take no moment of bonding or joy for granted. May the light we cultivate from within light the way to many acts of kindness. May the connections we seek come easy. May healing permeate throughout all our interactions. May we know peace and may we spread that peace far and wide.

*Horoscopes are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. Your rising sign horoscope resonates more specifically with your actual birth chart but both horoscopes contain important useful information. You’ll know which resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, leave the rest. If you find inspiration here we love and appreciate donations. If you want to share this work you must quote it and link it to this post and website. Thank you for your support and for spreading the work around, we really appreciate it and you!

Aries & Aries Rising

Mercury’s retrograde begins and spends most of its time reviewing your career goals. As the sun enters this part of your chart on Wednesday, the emphasis is doubled. This is both your time to shine in your chosen field and your time to notice what information your achievements bring you.

Strange things happen when we reach a goal. We are either filled with insight about important next steps or filled with the knowledge that the goal wasn’t really as exciting once fulfilled as we might have thought.

Your astrology suggests that you’ll have a mix of both experiences. It also suggests that there is great assistance for you regarding your career and the choices you’ll need to make for its betterment. Especially from friends and folks in your community.

Take this time to reflect on the next chapter of your career. Pay attention to what comes to you during your down time. Notice the little pieces of information, intuition and insights that come in regards to your work when you are doing something completely unrelated. Take a moment on the solstice to write down what you most want to experience in terms of your career, but also just in terms of life in 2017.

Just in time for the winter solstice, I’ve got The Year Ahead For Your Sign, which includes a sign-specific ritual to release 2016, a sign-specific intention setting ritual for 2017, and an overview of what areas of your life the major astrological transits of 2017 (eclipses, venus retrograde, etc.) will impact and how. Purchase today and the link will be emailed to you within a few hours!

Taurus & Taurus Rising

Mercury mischievously retrogrades through the part of your chart that deals with your big plans, big ideals, overarching philosophies, grand adventures, pilgrimages and travels. This could be a time when the more annoying aspects of Mercury retrograde effect you in terms of your plans being switched up and shifted about but, more importantly perhaps, it’s a time of reviewing long-term goals and aspirations.

Take a look back at 2016 to see how your ideas have shifted, what beliefs have changed and what philosophical resources you have been able to make use of.

Take a look back at your journey in 2016. Where were you planning on going? What did you think you wanted to achieve? Where did you end up instead and what did that teach you? Many of us tend to spend a lot of time mapping out what we want to achieve and not as much time listening to what life is asking of us.

Take Mercury’s retrograde as an invitation to deepen your intuitive relationship with your life. You might get an inkling about a training, class, or course of study that you should embark on. You might be reviewing what you have already learned and thinking of ways in which you can make use of it. You might be ready to take a different kind of direction than you had thought of before. Use the next three weeks to meditate on the information and the insights that come so that, in the new year, you’ll be much better informed and emboldened to move towards life’s call.

Gemini & Gemini Rising

Mercury’s retrograde asks you to plume the depths of your psychological makeup. It asks you to take a deeper look at all the people, projects and ideas that you have invested in. It asks you to review your debts, loans and agreements. Both financial and psychological.

There is nothing quite like the holiday season to help us dredge up the oldest monsters that we have. And need to make friends with. There are no greater allies to get to know than the parts of self that live in the shadows of our ego. When we know our envy, our fear and our downfalls intimately, we also know what triggers them. When we know what triggers await us, we know what to stay out in front of. It’s not about never getting activated, it’s about knowing when we do and what to do to take care of ourselves when we do.

We are both our own greatest enemy and our own greatest ally. Be on your own side by being more interested in what you don’t know about yourself, than what you do.

You’ve got more than yourself to lean on this week however. Saturn’s trine to Uranus late in the week signals an important innovation in your relationships. What freedoms are your significant others in need of? What new insights about your partnerships help both parties to be more authentic? What frees up your creativity and ability to self-express without shame or fear of being rejected? Let your relationships tell you what they need and then find within you the courage needed to give it to them.

Cancer & Cancer Rising

Mercury’s retrograde puts you in the perfect position to review your most significant relationships. It helps you to understand, by way of review, your most important relationship fears, gifts and patterns.

What part of relationships are really good at? What have you always been able to do? In what ways are you able to show up for others?

What relationship patterns get you stuck in the same old stories of rejection, hurt feelings or painful places? What have you learned about yourself in this regard in 2016? What have you been able to develop? Heal? Move on from? What is still hanging on? What has come back for review? What is out of your control? What do you have to let sort itself out? Who helps you sort these stories out? Who is helping you relive these patterns? Can you see them as your teachers when appropriate? Can you have patience with them, knowing they get stuck in their own patterns of pain and defensiveness?

Mercury retrograde loves to hide important details from us. It also loves to reveal aspects of the truth to us, aspects that we never knew even existed. Be patient with any relationship issue that arises. You don’t have all the facts but you can rest assured that whomever you spend time with right now will have, or inspire in you, copious amounts of important information to integrate.

Leo & Leo Rising

Mercury’s retrograde will most likely reveal the importance of reviewing certain aspects of your financial life. Reviewing what you are making, the hours that you are working and the product that you are creating will be helpful to overall plans for the year ahead.

This Mercury retrograde might also effect your work schedule or the relationships that you have cultivated with the folks that you work with. It might have you working through a communication issue with coworkers, clients or employees/employers. It might have you needing to raise an issue in regards to your salary.

It gives you reason to rethink how you are using your resources on the job and what shifts you can make so that you are working smarter, not harder.

This week also brings a bevy of beautiful connections, important times spent with loved ones and the experience of being seen, heard and helped by those that you love and that love you. Make time for those important to you, especially on the 24th and 25th, as they are days that maximize the potential for healing in your relationships. They are also days that can help you rekindle your creative spirit, gain important insights into your love relationships and/or address the needs of the children in your life.

Virgo & Virgo Rising

Retrograde for the next three weeks, your ruling planet, Mercury is asking you to review your relationships to your creative projects, children and/or love relationships. How have you spent your creative energy in 2016? What have your children (creative or human) taught you? What messages are love relationships bringing you? What have they taught you this year?

This Mercury retrograde is also asking you to review the personal and professional steps you took in 2016. It’s asking you to take a moment to think about how you want to work on both in 2017. It’s asking for your yearly proposal. It’s asking you to remember to take part in the creation of the year to come. Don’t write yourself out of any important scenes, plots or themes of the year’s story. Keep thinking of ways to write yourself into it all.

This week also calls attention to a strategy that can help you work out a living situation or family system. This week is asking you to look at the structures that hold your family together. This week wants you to think about what you can do to keep the integrity of those structures while allowing for new ways of working within them. This week might help you to reimagine your space, leave more room for a family issue to work itself out or liberate you from feeling responsible for everyone else’s happiness. Give yourself a break and move on from any traditions that keep you thinking that you are.

Libra & Libra Rising

Mercury stations retrograde in the deepest, most personal part of your chart. Information pertaining to your family, your foundation and your origins abounds. Notice what stories get told about your past. Notice what truths you make up about your kin. Notice the tales that are on repeat about you and about them.

Take time to listen to the folks you share blood with, that you share space with, that you share history with. Ask to have the patience and the generosity of heart needed to move beyond the family patterns that historically cause harm. Try being vulnerable enough with yourself to witness what you normally miss due to defensiveness.

This is a process of excavation and it is an important one. It helps you to see the family patterns you might consciously denounce but unconsciously live out. It helps you to see what beliefs lie beneath your everyday decisions. It helps to make obvious what takes up too much of your time.

And you have none of it to waste.

This week begins a year long process of looking at the way you spend your days in a new way. It asks you to invigorate the structures of your day with new strategies, ideas and ways of getting from point A to point B. How you schedule your days is a critical to living out a successful 2017. Structure them in a way that leaves room for innovation, experimentation and recreation. Implement the insights that this week brings as the new year rolls around.

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising

Mercury’s retrograde might try to make a mess of your plans so allow a little extra time for packages to get to their destination and messages to land where they need to. Remember that you might not have all the information. Remember that others might not be picking up exactly what you’re putting down. Remember that information might go astray, wander off into the night and end up in the wrong town. Remember that truths and information will also have an interesting way of resurfacing.

Watch what comes to light.

This week, especially Sunday, fairs well for family gatherings and getting together at home with loved ones. Sunday settles a situation with sweetness. Sunday helps you want mend a fence and bond what was broken. Sunday helps make sense out of a slice of your history. Part of the job of being human is having to live through all the ups and downs that occur with those that are closest to us. It’s not always pleasant. It’s not always what we would choose. But it’s the work we have been given to do. This week helps you to see the benefit of the effort you have put in by offering some sweetness, some connection and some food for your soul that is deeply satiating.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising

Mercury’s retrograde encourages you to crunch numbers. It asks you to spread out your spread sheets and take a good look at them. There are aspects of your financial life that need a review. There are solid reasons why it’s beneficial to take an account of all that you have to work with, work on and work around. There is an opportunity to get more familiar with what you consider your talents to be.

Mercury encourages us to rethink an aspect of our lives or, at least, to consider how it is we are thinking about it. Do a recount of your resources. Know what you have to work with and how to encourage the practical application of it.

But this week has more than just a few financial planning strategies in store for you. This week is intent on helping you to infuse your structures with the latest innovative update. This week is angling towards setting you free to work within the form you have built. This week is the beginning of a steady and constant year-long reminder that this is your time to shine in the roles that you have been diligently dedicated to inhabiting. In short, this week reminds you that no one is boss of you, but you. And as CEO of Yourself you get to make up the rules and work with the consequences.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising

As Mercury stations retrograde in your sign, a review of how you live your life is in order. How do you make meaning out of life’s events? How do you interpret the information that life brings you daily? What do you tell yourself about the harder aspects of your experience? What do you tell others about your process of becoming? What lessons do you repeat, review and return to the most?

As the sun moves back into your sign on Wednesday, Mercury’s retrograde is highlighted, illuminated and met with the annual renewal you most likely feel at this time of year. This retrograde is clearer than others, helping you to trust its mysterious process. This week’s astrology is, in general, encouraging for you in many ways. It wants to help you see the progress that you have made and what is possible because of that progress. It wants you to see the good that you have been able to create out of the difficult. It wants you to see the deep and long-lasting change that has taken place because of your dedication to self-awareness and self-care. It encourages you to keep making peace with what was lost. It encourages you to keep healing.

It also encourages you to take bigger strides in your financial life and to take note of the ideas and inspirations that fill your business meetings, meditations and ruminations. Take yourself out on a long walk around your neighborhood with your favorite muse and ponder with them what kind of business adventures 2017 holds for you.

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising

A bevy of beauty occurs in your sign this week. On the 25th, Venus, planet of love and connection makes multiple aspects, magnifying its power and ability to connect you to what and who you love. This week, Venus helps you to cultivate feelings of emotional security by allowing experiences with those that are rock solid in there ability to love and cherish you. This week, Venus brings inspiration via your intuition. Pay attention to the creative plans and progress that you are able to visualize for yourself. This week, Venus magnifies your effect on folks. Stay in touch, reach out, and make yourself available for the flirtatious fun that wants to find you.

Meanwhile, Saturn’s trine to Uranus is reinvigorating your friendships, community memberships and connections with allies and accomplices. Because of the work that you have put in over the last year, because of the ways in which you have consistently shown up and because of what you have been able to bring to your communities, you are now able to see what is possible within those connections. This is a year-long theme that begins to unfold this week, but will be working with you for much of 2017.

Mercury begins its retrograde on a different note for you, however. Ruminating in the back halls of your brain, Mercury’s retrograde asks you for a review of what you might not usually look at. It’s an appropriate close to your year as this particular Mercury retrograde gets you to review the endings that naturally need to occur. As 2016 comes to a close, you get to move through a deeper process, closure and clearing of what you don’t need to carry with you into the new year.

Pisces & Pisces Rising

This week marks a shift in pace for you. Life might tend to speed up, get shaken up or get fired up. With Mars in your sign, you’re likely to be in touch with a wider range of emotions, including your anger, drive, passion and purpose.

Through the filter of Pisces, however, Mars acts a little messier than it might in other signs. In Pisces, Mars tends more towards intuitive action than a logical or straightforward path. In Pisces, Mars is more interested in seeking out what can bring it spiritual sustenance. Use this influence to move towards what fulfills you but also use it to understand what you do with your anger, energy and passion.

Mercury, meanwhile, retrogrades through the part of your chart that puts you in touch with friends, peers and the people that you feel most drawn to in life. In general, Mercury retrograde loves to meddle in our communications, tripping us up and entangling us in a bundle of half-baked truths. It can, however, reveal the information that we usually skirt by, pass over or ignore all together. Use this installment of Mercury retrograde to listen more intently to your friends and community members. Interactions with them will most likely return to you an important nugget of truth and reflection that you need right now.

Mercury Retrograde & Tomorrow’s Solstice: Horoscopes for the Week of December 19th

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