We have a New Moon in the sensuous, erotic sign of Taurus. Pluto in Capricorn stations retrograde shortly after. Mercury in late Aries will square Jupiter and Pluto on its way out of Aries and then will enter Taurus this week and square Saturn. As a combination with these transits, we can see a burgeoning of self-love and self-presence (the New Moon in Taurus) in tandem with clunkiness and awkwardness (the squares to Mercury) and a reckoning with deep inner-pressures and tensions (Pluto stationing retrograde).
Perhaps there is a part of us that thinks that self-esteem is sourced from being some kind of way – being perfect, or having reached some particular goal. But if I’ve learned anything from the Taurus people in my realm, the Taureans can be gritty. They can feel the same pleasure touching dirt with their bare hands that they would feel touching velvet. (Dirt is sexy though, right? Tell me it’s not.) Taurus teaches us that anything can be erotic.
One Taurus told me one time she spent a lot of time observing her facial expressions in the mirror, and it was not that she needed her face to look any kind of way, but she just wanted to intimately know what she looked like. “I’m awkward,” she said, “but I’m confident about how awkward I am and I know the shapes that my body and my face make.”
We think we have to delay having nice things or feeling good inside because we haven’t yet achieved the thing that would grant us symbolic access to those states. Yet, it is also true that we can be in a more erotic state of consciousness now by choosing to be more fascinated and compelled by what already is.
(Image: Kiss Andrea)
Taurus relates to the crucial development of self-esteem, and while this potential for a new evolution of self-esteem is in our midsts with this lunation, the mind (Mercury) experiences challenges and frictions. I offer an invitation to leave behind some illusions around perfection this week. If you were journalling and experiencing writers block, I would encourage you to lean heartily into your resistance and make art with it until it breaks open. If you were trying to communicate with your body through dance but felt blocked I would encourage you to make shapes with your block and really be there with that.
In both of the above examples I am communicating that it is intimacy with where you are at that is where the art and eroticism of Taurus lives. It’s not about putting yourself on a shelf until you get to a place you think is nicer. I hope you get to experience the magic this week that is dropping more deeply into yourself as you are.
Welcome back! Or in case this is your first time here, I’m Sabrina Monarch and I’m a soul-centered astrologer. I love providing perspectives on the opportunities of transits and putting into words what the vibe feels like at this moment in time, to support you on your path & open a dialogue between us and the cosmos. If you would like to receive these weekly forecasts to your inbox, sign up for my mailing list here.
Here’s our week in more detail, after a few announcements:
Video versions of these weekly forecasts are now available on YouTube. I’m trying this out! Let me know if you like it! This week’s forecast is available here.
Monarch Astrology Kickstarter coming June 2020:
June will begin the sixth year of writing these weekly forecasts and I’ll be asking for your support to crowdfund the year ahead. I’ll be offering astrology readings, discounted tuition to my Evolutionary Astrology course, and more. These forecasts have long been free and providing so much value to many people’s lives, and I truly need the support of you as my community to thrive. (Consider me like public radio!) I aim to keep sharing valuable free content for years to come and I ask for your help achieving a salary for the consistent high-value content I share with the public.
While I have managed to do better each year financially through client work and teaching, I haven’t made salary yet, and I live month-to-month. I am hoping that crowdfunding the free content I share, in addition to offering services, will help me reach my goal of funding this work I do year-round, and be that much more energized to continue serving you!
I recently asked those on my mailing list to consider tipping $ after reading the forecasts, and after receiving your generosity in messages and donations I realized I DID have the energy (thanks to you) to go all out and do the Kickstarter – which would allow crowdfunding the forecasts to be a public, communal effort. Stay tuned for updates!
To finish out the fifth year of forecasting, before June, I’m asking for your small tips (a latte or less) after reading the forecasts if you’d like to contribute before the Kickstarter. My Venmo is @SabrinaMonarch and Cashapp $SabrinaMonarch.
Thank you so much for your support! ❤️
New episode of Magic of the Spheres:
I interviewed fellow astrologer and podcaster Melanie Gurley of Beautiful Astrology about the Venus and Mars retrogrades of 2020. Melanie shares insights with us on retrogrades in general (what they are, what they feel like) and we dive into some possibilities for the year ahead. We’re newly in Venus retrograde’s shadow, and Venus will station retrograde May 12, with the Mars retrograde coming this fall.
Melanie Gurley hosts The Beautiful Astrology Podcast and has had her horoscopes and articles featured on Tarot.com and in the Astrological Journal. Melanie has spoken for the Portland School of Astrology and the Oregon Astrological Association and serves on the boards of local and international astrology groups. With over 20 years of study and practice in esoteric arts, Melanie holds intelligent space for creative meaning-making and self-development. Melanie holds a Master of Arts in Contemplative Education, a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts, and has graduated from the Portland School of Astrology. Melanie facilitates Retrograde Clubs, which focus on individual journeys, contained in a group atmosphere, and seen through an Astrological lens. Learn more at beautiful-astrology.com.
Tune in where you listen to podcasts, or on you browser here.
Here’s our week!
April 22, 2020
New Moon in 3 Taurus: 7:25 PM PDT
The New Moon is closely conjunct Uranus in Taurus, and square Saturn in Aquarius. As this lunar cycle will peak midway with a Full Moon in Scorpio, I’d recommend The Taurus-Scorpio Mysteries Part 1 & 2 podcast episodes of Magic of the Spheres for listening. They are episodes #31 and 32 if you want to find them on your own.
- A simple description of Taurus I encountered recently and loved is “depth of appreciation related to immediate physical sensations” (Stephen Arroyo). Taurus highlights the art of receptivity and our capacity to relax more deeply into our sensations. For example, there is always air touching your skin but as soon as you direct your attention to feeling it, the sensation can magnify (or go outside and feel that air on your skin). Taurus is an archetype that relates to wealth and abundance, and one of its most magnetic features as an archetype is the capacity to so sensually merge with what is already present that more sensation seems to appear.
- In Taurean process we thrive with simplicity. A cultivated Taurean realm is highly curated – one’s possessions and the ambiance are highly intentional and reflect the values of the one who curated it. This lunation can correlate with a growing inner-impulse toward curating our environment (our home environment perhaps), our relationship with wealth and abundance, and our relationship to physical possessions. Curation implies we gain some insight on what we value and can from there, discern what we want to participate with as well as what we don’t.
- With this New Moon so close to Uranus (a planet of awakening, epiphany, and revelation) many of our liberating breakthroughs are wanting to come through the body. This would be a great time to re-engage with the pursuit of grounding or connecting with your root chakra reality, and wherever we are at in this process there are likely to be discoveries.
- Taurus relates to the critical necessity of self-love, self-esteem, and positive self-regard, and is sourced internally. It’s how we feel when we dance, not how we look to an audience. It’s how we enjoy sound moving through our throat when we sing, and not how well we sound to anyone else. It’s feeling pleasure and feeling worthy of pleasure, regardless of how conventionally sexy we think our bodies are.
- A great Taurean secret is feeling turned on by anything and everything – that we can feel the eroticism of all of our emotions, or the eroticism of the places of yearning or intensity within us – that we can give ourselves to experience. If there are internal places we have a harder time connecting with, this could be a good time to experiment with finding the eroticism in it. Who ever said eroticism and perfection were the same thing? Taurus is empowered by self-possession, taking ownership in and relishing in its own experience. This mindset can transform negative, mundane, or boring experiences as well as bring out brighter colors in the already joyful or ecstatic parts of our experience.
April 25, 2020
Mercury in 24 Aries square Pluto in 24 Capricorn: 10:35 AM PDT
(Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Paul, detail)
- We may be experiencing some recalibration around how we do or don’t hold our tongue. Mercury in Aries can be an impulsive style of communication, and Capricorn is more the essence of control and command. There is a difference between being responsible versus being repressed, and sometimes figuring out that balance can be a choppy process.
- We might have ideas or messages we’d like to communicate come through with some urgency and at the same time be attached to a mysterious source of trepidation. This can be an opportunity for some self-reflection or consideration before pressing “send” or making the move.
- Alternately, there can be situations where voicing what needs to be said IS the power move. This is likely to be a power move if we fully choose to express ourselves (as opposed to lashing out with our words compulsively and unconsciously).
- Some offering of caution: Mercury-Pluto contacts can relate to vicious communication or the desire to destroy an opponent through intellectual aggression and sharp words. We can equate ourselves with our ideas, and others with theirs, and be unconsciously over-attached to our conceptual framework or point of view to the point that having our ideas challenged is a threat and not just a conversation. If you find yourself in debate situations, consider the deeper drives and agreements at play.
- With Mercury in this position separating from Pluto in their synodic cycle together, it’s possible that we can have some breakthrough experiences that involve thinking in new ways that energize and vitalize us because these thoughts are a departure from the status quo or our own conditioned patterns of thinking. We may have had a historic way of looking at a situation, or a historic pattern of conclusion-making, that we are now seeing beyond with fresh eyes. Some scenarios we thought were external problems may have been more about our interpretation of them and the way we participated with our reality because of those thoughts.
Pluto stations retrograde in 24 Capricorn: 11:54 AM PDT
(Image: A Woman Is a Woman, 1961, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
A stationing planet becomes a louder or more noticeable energy in our experience – thus themes of transformation, regeneration, underworld journeying, angst, grappling with inner-demons, and grappling with power dynamics, may be more visible in our experience. Pluto in Capricorn specifically highlights the conflicting drives to maintain control or to lose control. Our concept of what it means to “have it together” is under transformation. What does “having it together” really mean to you and from where did you source these judgements?
“For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?” – Charles Eisenstein, opening lines to his essay “The Coronation”
- Capricorn is often recognized as a go-getter, put-together, worldly kind of energy, but there is an inner descent that is very much part of this archetype. This inner-descent is the experience of depression or disappointment, or the feeling of pause that we reach when we have attained a goal and we wonder what is next. It can also be the depression we face at the bottom of a mountain we feel we must or we have chosen to climb but we think, “this is going to be so hard!” Or, “why do I have to do this?”
- It can, in certain situations and at certain times, be powerful to ‘do the thing’ even when we don’t feel like doing it. We drive forward with our discipline. Perhaps we are taking on a larger goal that requires effort and delayed gratification and thus we know that we’re going to have to sweat a little.
- On the other hand, repeated pushing, or discipline without feeling, can accumulate over time as living a life we are not in emotional resonance with. We work a job we don’t like, we play a role in society we don’t feel is true for us, and life gets dry and robotic.
(Image: Henry Fuseli)
- It may be time to consider how much more feeling and life-force we can bring into the bones and structure of our lives, and the implementation of our discipline. Are we fully choosing to put our efforts where we are putting them, or are we trudging forward with a heavy weight of obligation pressing down on our shoulders? When it comes to creating change (and perhaps necessary change) in our situation, it may feel like we are making a weighty or moral decision. Things can be lighter, and things can get lighter, but psychological tension and resistance is a heavy energy and confronting it can be, as well.
- There can be a connection between our erotic life-force and erotic intelligence (the side of of us connected intimately to our deepest feelings) and our awareness of what is “right” or how we want to structure our lives. Re-thinking work or how we show up for work in life doesn’t mean *not* working – it just means more thoroughly enjoying our efforts and feeling more deeply-sourced morale behind them. Finding this deeply-sourced morale is a combination of de-conditioning from stale or stagnant constructs we’ve accumulated/inherited as well as radically connecting to our deepest truths.
Mercury in 26 Aries square Jupiter in 26 Capricorn: 9:31 PM PDT
- This transit may correlate with a more innocent recognition bubbling up in our awareness of where we are engaging in pessimistic beliefs or fatalistic thinking. Mercury-Jupiter can relate to exaggerated ideas or exaggerated thinking, but through this exaggeration we can more visibly see the contents of our mind – like holding a microscope up to our beliefs.
April 26, 2020
Sun in 6 Taurus conjunct Uranus in 6 Taurus: 2:01 AM PDT
- Awakening and peak experiences are highlighted here – how do we encounter the miraculous or encounter ecstasy? What makes the ecosystem of our inner-life fertile for awakening? We may be encouraged to be more generous about resourcing ourselves with the things and practices we know bring us pleasure and expansiveness, and as we enter this realm we can be further resourced with spontaneous insights and epiphanies. Think metaphorically (or perhaps literally) of the process of leaving a stale room to go outside for some fresh air and a walk.
April 27, 2020
Mercury enters Taurus: 12:53 PM PDT
- When I think of Mercury in Taurus, I remember one Mercury in Taurus years ago where I was in the practice of writing with a typewriter everyday. Mercury entered the sign of Taurus and I got a vision of pulling words from the ether and heavily pinning them to earth with the typewriter keys (which demanded a lot of pressure to make a mark). Mercury in Taurus can relate to a sensual, tactile relationship with language where we feel a certain possession of the words that come through us, and how they feel inside of us. Some Mercury in Taurus natives are slow and deliberate speakers whose words can be felt in the bodies of those who listen because the words are themselves, nearly physical presences.
- Taurus itself is not a cerebrally charged sign – Taurus relates more to the instinctual knowledge of the body. However, let us consider the ways that thoughts (Mercury) can be possessions, intentionally or unintentionally –
- If you have practiced the kind of meditation where you just focus on your breath and return to the breath whenever your mind strays, you may have direct experience of feeling how much the mind is ready to latch onto ideas and run away with them. Meditation helps us become more aware of how we attach onto ideas, and therefore helps us detach from this as an unconscious habit.
- If we think to how beautifully Taurus can curate a physical environment and ambiance, and how the beauty comes from the intentionality and the featuring of value (as opposed to clutter/hoarding) we could consider a similar process mentally. Developing the skill of detaching from our thoughts (knowing that we are not our thoughts, watching them go by in meditation, etc.) also opens up the opportunity to more intentionally choose thoughts of high value that we would like to build our life with, rather than clinging onto various thoughts by habit or un-intentionality.
April 28, 2020
Mercury in 1 Taurus square Saturn in 1 Aquarius: 10:28 AM PDT
(Image: Getahun Assefa)
- Our mental processes can slow considerably. Mercury-Saturn contacts relate to caution with communication, such as wanting to make sure that we say something ‘right’. Or perhaps we have to think for a little while before we find the words. In other cases, people can feel mentally blocked entirely. Should we come up against mental obstacles, these are actually opportunities. Here’s why-
- A dead-ended thought may be a signal that we can approach a mental process from an entirely different angle.
- We might realize that some of the premises we are working off of aren’t actually true for us and therefore we can pivot.
- We can be more cognitively in touch with a ‘problem’ and also more prepared to channel a solution. For a person attempting to make an argument, for example, understanding the other point of view (the obstacle to their argument) is eventually going to make a stronger argument than if they had never considered opposition.
(Image: Paul-Albert Besnard)
- In the signs of Taurus and Aquarius, the sensuality of the channels of thought we are tuned into is highlighted. Meaning, we may consider our mind like radio stations. Certain stations of thought are going to create a feeling of dullness or heaviness in our bodies, while other stations are going to create sparks, give us chills, or make us feel super alive. Our capacity to feel these signals can help us tune in with more liberating or life-giving ideas because our body is literally giving a full-bodied YES to enlivening ideas.
- If working with a mental problem/puzzle, consider brainstorming a bunch of different options and feeling into which one(s) feel the most alive or energizing in your physical body.
Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! I really appreciate you being here with me as I know that if you connect to this writing we have likemindedness and that is so special. Please share this article with a friend who you think would resonate!
Please let me know what you think in the comments – truly I want to know so leave a note! I love you and you are soul family to me, thank you for finding your way to these words and resonating with them in whatever ways you have.
If you enjoy these forecasts and would like more personalized guidance re your personal astrology, I would love to read your natal chart and transits for you! If you would like me to explore the themes in your chart, book a reading with me here.
I meditate on charts before the reading and combine my knowledge of astrology with my clairvoyant abilities to offer you some insights about themes you are working with in this life based on prior lives, and what is the evolutionary purpose of this lifetime. I recorded an episode on my podcast recently titled Befriending your Intuition and Clairvoyance if you’d like to learn more about my relationship with clairvoyance along with tips for increasing yours!
I can work with your specific questions and shed light on ongoing issues or patterns you would like to shift, as well! Book with me here.
I’m also becoming increasingly expressive on instagram, so go find me there @sabrinamonarch and say hello! I’m posting content there that I don’t share anywhere else and I love interacting with you there as well as on twitter @sabrina_monarch.
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts, works with clients and teaches. She is a novelist and has a M.A. in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
(Top Image: Jessica Perlstein, & monarch butterflies coming out of envelope by @chthonicbacchae)
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