It began May 18th, Mercury is retrograde until June 11th and makes three passes over Neptune. With Venus opposing Pluto, well let me translate the celestial stew into something you can put to use.
Over the next six weeks you have an incredible window into what you long for and where you’ve been fooling yourself. Neptune has to do with the longing for wholeness, connection, bliss. It’s associated with addictions, illusions and a range of other watery unboundaried subjects.
It goes back to when we are in our mother’s womb. We float completely suspended in a soft environment where our every need is anticipated and answered while we grow at an astronomical rate. It all happens as if by magic and we feel marvelously connected to a big soft loving environment (for the most part) that feeds and nurtures us.
The next six weeks are about where we have been connected to something, someone and wished for that impossible magic to be duplicated and have resentments and frustrations that have built up and spill over. With Pluto opposing Venus it’s the death of what we thought we wanted so that we can have more of what we deeply wish for.
It’s the possibility of deepening connection and living from the place of being responsible for our own nurturing, sustaining, comfort and connections. Where are you expecting others to give you what you have not given yourself? Time, importance, love in the form of nourishment in some form? (As Rhonda Britten says, expectations are just premeditated resentments)
With all the planets in the pot, Venus is the desire of the self, Neptune is the longing for the perfect other. We cannot experience ‘out there’ what we have not found a path for inside of us. Mercury is how we give meaning or story to what is happening to us. Most of us have a story that badly needs rewriting for a much more favorable truth, collaborative truth.
So where can you more deeply connect with your own desires, selfish though they may be? In denying them, you wind up with a domino chain of secret expectations and resentments that will show up, have shown up!
Where do the disappointments of your life show you where you’ve stayed connected rather than risking separation and trusting you can meet your own needs? Your unhappiness or frustration may be there so you make a different choice on where to partner up or take a good look at what serves you now rather than the perfect connection of the womb we may long for. Or it may be there to change HOW your continue in the ones you do have. What’s your illusion and where you can invest in you to make it come true…?
Does a baby who cries and resists walking because it’s not what the baby knows get punished when the parent teaches it to walk? Or is a whole new avenue opening up when you are nudged, tipped or tossed into a reality different from what you have known?
This Mercury retrograde gives you the chance to view the world you are living in as collaborating with you to create more of the BIG picture, the real truth of you, not withholding what you want.
With Mars in the mix, we have to make different choices and ACT on them. The actions cement the transformation. For some it’s waiting to act, reflecting before jumping in to the mix. For others it is pulling the trigger on what’s been waiting for you to put words and thoughts into motion. That’s your graduation people, when the actions back up the internal shift.
Do give yourself time to grieve the loss of those young wishes, whatever your age, for it all to be perfect NOW. When we don’t grieve, when we force ourselves to move on, get over it and push through we build up a life-long locker of hurt and grief.
Fear becomes the guardian and as the accumulated grief over the loss of paradise (mother’s womb plus all the disappointments) builds to astronomical proportions, so does the fear. Then fear directs your choices instead of your desires. Fear of loss consumes all potential and limits your growth because the risk to lose what you have is so overwhelming to you.
Grieve. Our grief requires ritual. Give it one of your own. This Mercury retrograde will give you reasons to overflow. Write your losses out, feel the pain of separation and burn the list. Or bury it. Send it out to sea in a bottle. Come up with your own ritual. Just spend time with your losses. Just sit with it and it will pass. Emotion takes roughly 10 minutes to travel your nervous system. I like to write mine on the sand as the waves come in to wash them away. Let the waves come and go over the next six weeks. Add to the purging when additional stored emotions come up. Then let it go…
If you want help, seeing where the grief and loss have marked out a smaller territory in your hand with insight from your Astrology, I’m here. It’s what I love to do.
See what supports you most on my services page and give yourself a witness. Pain loves a witness as part of its transformation. Here’s wishing you a grief busting six weeks that clears the way for a much richer, joy filled life for you!
Thank you,
Lisa Greenfield
