Astrological Insights

It’s not as though we didn’t have enough to look forward to. We cooperated, we hit that pause button, we told ourselves “not yet” for the greater good. When your life gets put on pause, and you’re lucky enough to have the internet and free services like YouTube, the world meets you on the screen, hopefully to let you know when the astrology will let you hit the Play button. Or when it will hit itself.

During the next two months, there are heightened Neptunian themes propelled by the once in a lifetime Neptune-Jupiter conjunct in its home sign of Pisces. This article explores the important transits during this time, drawing upon an ancient Japanese Folk Tale to help you grasp the slippery nature of Pisces themes, and offers a treatment protocol as support during the coming Neptunian fog.

There’s a reason why you might be feeling down this Winter, I mean, other than the usual seasonal blues and the ongoing fluctuations associated with the pandemic. Venus, the planet of love, kindness, connection, and socialization, is retrograding through Capricorn, the sign of restriction, contraction, depression, suppression, hard-work, and solitude. She will spend three months in Capricorn and our heart Qi is going to need a little extra kindling to keep the flame burning bright.

In this article and treatment recommendations I explore ways in which both internal and external factors influence our thoughts and capacity to make informed decisions. During these challenging times, we may be heavily influenced by conservative or liberal mainstream narratives, or conspiratorial social media, as well as peer group consensus, all of which hamper our abilities to make thoughtful, well-informed decisions that are truly our own.

"The great work of our time is to bring the feminine into this culture, and it is not an easy thing to do." - Marion Woodman

“What you think you will become, what you feel you will attract, what you imagine you will create.” Buddha

As 2020 comes to a close, may we take time during the Holydays to reflect upon the tremendous change our cosmos, humanity and each one of us individually is experiencing. It is the end of a Grand Cycle when one world must end and a Grand New Beginning with another reborn. No one ever said that living here on our beloved planet Earth and being present during these times was going to be easy.

At this late summer, harvest point in the year Astrologically speaking we have come through a Venus and Mercury retrograde - both are now moving forward. Welcome shifts of forward momentum whilst Mars has slowed down and is warming up for the coming retrograde, a two-month stint from September 9th. To have Mars, Venus and Mercury all going retrograde in the same year is a lot, and is rare, but 2020 is a rather extra-ordinary cosmologically active year with significant planetary cycles ending and new ones beginning.

We are in a huge reset time on this planet. All the big hitters have been and still are in retrograde during most of this year; from Jupiter all the way to Sedna. Five of these six planets are in the earth signs of Capricorn and Taurus. As you well know, these planets take their time and move very slow. With all of them retro at the same time, we are globally in a state where we feel raked over hot coals, soul searching and reincarnating new versions of ourselves, the way we interact with each other, and the world in which we live. Though it is true that this is not an easy road to traverse, as we are thrown into unfamiliar circumstances with the unknown in some form, at our doorstep daily, it is also true that we are in a very exciting time in the history of our evolution.

One of the most challenging aspects of unabashedly embracing the astrological worldview, as I have for at least the past 25 years, is that it requires one to abandon a perspective that has been firmly embedded within Western culture for at least a century or more – that of the scientific paradigm, which posits that human beings inhabit a universe in which our existence as a species has no particular significance, and that our individual destinies, as members of that selective group of highly-evolved mammals, are dependent upon the concatenation of purely random factors – and likewise without meaning or purpose. It is an extraordinarily bleak lens through which to regard the nature of reality, and one which provides cold comfort where we are confronted with the harsh vicissitudes of survival on this small verdant globe which we call home, such as the majority of the population is now subject to in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.