Taurus Season Begins: Astrology of 4/14 – 4/20

This week, Venus and the Sun enter sensual Taurus. This can relate to us dropping in more deeply with our bodies and any material projects we are concerned with – tending to life in a very physical, concrete way. As simple as this level of practicality can be, it has many layers of intimacy – there are ways that our personal soul and the earth soul reveal themselves when we are in devoted presence. By devoted presence, I mean noticing opportunities for being with – but not trying to ‘get’ anything. Being in relationship versus being extractive is an energetic worth becoming aware of.

In addition to this wave of sensuality or presence that can appear for us as Taurus Season initiates and Venus enters this sign, there are some tensions and frictions in the social field. Mercury in Aries will form a midpoint between an exact Mars-Jupiter trine (Mars in Gemini and Jupiter in Aquarius), before Mercury enters Taurus. The Mercury-Mars-Jupiter dynamic is all composed of what we think of as harmonious aspects – the trine and sextile. Mercury-Mars-Jupiter however, would relate to discourse around ideas and philosophies, and in a harmonious context, this could look like having some very engaging conversations and becoming more self-aware about our biases, prejudices, and curiosities – and leaning into the possibility of collaborating with others when we are in disagreement, as opposed to being at war when we are in disagreement.

While not all relationships or ideological divides might be receptive to friendly conversation, the Mercury-Mars-Jupiter aspect this week does feel both sharp and friendly in possibility! In the context of Taurus Season, we can become somewhat possessive or focused on what we value or enjoy, and not have the space for extraneous pieces of information that don’t fit into our personal paradise. And yet, there is a certain liveliness in the exchange of ideas and opportunities for self-discovery this week if we put ourselves in the arena of exploring ideas and philosophies with others. As a meditation, we might consider how we bring openness and good-naturedness into such spaces at the same time as we bring forth honesty or directness.

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 zeitgeist 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 and be notified of upcoming educational opportunities, sign up for my mailing list here.

No YouTube version this week, but I’ll be back soon! You can also subscribe to my channel here.

Here’s our week after a few announcements!

Study Evolutionary Astrology with me in May 2021 – enrollment is now open! It’s always an inspiring group of deep thinkers that gather for this class. If you are wanting to learn karmic soul-centered astrology, and go deeper into the astrological craft in both an intuitive and a structured/guided way – and you resonate with these forecasts, you’ll love this course. Learn more, read testimonials, and enroll here. You can also listen to a podcast interview I did on Amelia Quint’s Bad Astrologers about what Evolutionary Astrology is for a feel of this system of astrology and how I approach it.

I interviewed two seance experts @the.eckharts who are making a point to bring visibility and awareness to the unseen! Often a topic shrouded in secrecy, the Eckharts bring this conversation out into the open so that other weird people can feel less alone in this world, and have real experiences of contacting spirits. If you’re interested in the paranormal, or can relate to being witness of normatively unseen layers of reality, you will enjoy this episode. We also discuss death, and the death positivity movement, a movement I’d not heard of before meeting this otherworldly couple.⁣⁣

The Eckharts are séance hosts, mediums, and Celebrity Occultists obsessed with exploring what lies beyond the veil. Through their work, the Eckharts strive to share their love of the paranormal by showing that spirit communication can be exciting, mystical, and ultimately accessible to us all.⁣⁣

Tune in where you listen to podcasts! Or on your browser here.

Forthcoming fiction novel: The Garden of Sleeping Hammers will be coming out late spring of this year! I’ve shared a reading of the first two chapters on a recent Magic of the Spheres episode, which you can listen to here. Thank you to Alex Maune @chthonicbacchae for the cover artwork, and Liina Koivula @local.smoke.press for the text on the cover and helping me design/format the book behind the scenes. 

Here’s our week:

April 14, 2021

Venus enters Taurus: 11:22 AM PDT

(Image: Giorgio Rava)

Venus will stay in Taurus until May 8, 2021.

• Venus in Taurus can be a beautiful time for cultivating and/or deepening our relationship with pleasure, the body, and self-esteem. It is a time for exploring sensation: luxuriating in scents, relishing in the sensuality of food, noticing the way that air feels on our skin, bringing our attention to how our body feels and expanding our receptivity to those feelings and perhaps even our vocabulary for naming those feelings. Where do you feel contraction? Where do you feel openness and aliveness? What is the sensation you feel right now in your heart center, and in your solar plexus? It’s magical that we can tune in with a part of the body and as though turning the volume up on a dial, increasing our sensitivity to sensation where we engage our attention.
• Taurus highlights embodiment – both how we relate to our body/physical form, but also how we wear our emotions on our face, or how we give manifest/tangible expression to the deepest truth inside of us. Taurus likes to make things real, for abundant plant life to grow from the soil we tended. 
• When Venus is in Taurus, we may consider how we create conditions that are suitable for life. There is going out and getting things — and there is also becoming receptive to magnetizing those things. The importance of the latter cannot be overstated. So much abundance in this life comes from receptivity. After all, life can literally be presenting us what we want/desire – and we still have to allow ourselves to actually receive it.
• So while noticing subtle body sensations is a form of practicing reception in an embodied way, notice how else you practice receptivity, where you open, and where you close. 
• One energetic I’ve been appreciating lately is feeling open, even while being presented with something that is not my preference, and navigating that from a space of truth. Being a no, but still being open to life. It’s been magical to feel like I’m not into something or I’m a no to something, but still feel connected to my eros, and my turn on for life. (As opposed to closing down in a greater, generalized sense when faced with something that is outside of my preference.)
• In manifestation, this can be likened to staying in relationship with our vision or what we value, despite the coming and going of material validation or fortune that reflects the manifestation process we’re on. Gratitude practices can be so powerful because they train our consciousness to spend more time and attention on noticing what is already good or abundant, as opposed to scanning for lack and fixating upon lack. Taurus isn’t just about physical possessions or money when we think of abundance. Pleasure, enjoyment, appreciation, and gratitude, are all forms of energetic currency that can build resilience and auric strength. It is an energetic bank!
• A caveat, however, is that just as someone can use money to shield and buffer themselves from certain aspects of life, any energetic currency can be hoarded inappropriately. Abundance isn’t just about having and keeping and hoarding – it is also about giving, sharing, and letting things go and letting energy be in circulation. Building a deeper relationship with pleasure does not just open up a world of pleasure — it also brings up stagnant energy, old memories, grief, sadnesses. Eros is a powerful energy that can bring us in touch with our deeper truths, and inspire us to lead more authentic lives – and that’s not always just ‘pleasant’. A beautiful garden is full of insects, thorns, compost, and so on. Taurean beauty and sensuality is just as complex and mysterious.

April 15, 2021

Sun in 25 Aries sextile Jupiter in 25 Aquarius: 5:59 AM PDT

April 16, 2021

Sun in 26 Aries square Pluto in 26 Capricorn: 6:18 AM PDT

(Image: Laurie Lee Brom)

• This transit may bring up themes around how we constellate a sense of identity in the context of the social matrix we exist within, and where that may become limiting and disempowering (to identify oneself within that context) and where it is simply true, and that knowledge potentially empowering.
• Just as individual people have shadows — families, communities, groups, countries, collectives, etc. have shadows. When we find a sense of personal liberation – connecting to the truth within ourselves and de-conditioning from thick social programming – it has a way of potentially altering society around us, as well. Aries is a trailblazer, and there is still a relationship there between that new direction and what is being left behind. When I was first individuating from my family in a normal developmental way (that I didn’t have higher context for at the time), I felt anger AT them, feeling like there were ways they had blocked me or messed me up, and what have you. The farther perspective I got, I see how so much of my gifts, talents, resources, etc. also come from everything I received from my family, good and bad. In a greater social context, I think there is also a phase of anger or demonization at ‘the system’, ‘the matrix’, and there also comes a point where we find empowerment in ourselves IN RELATION to where we have come from or what collective karmas we are simmering inside of.
• Deeper Pluto mysteries reveal a perspective on reality in which everything is FOR us, versus that things are happening to us. We are alchemists, and we create our lives with the raw materials we are given. It is a very clear part of public conversation that social reality is fraught with problems, power imbalances, systemic injustices, and the like. And the Sun in Aries squaring that asks the question of: who am I in this? There is a potential of reaching into a deeper level of purpose and agency when we get creative about how to be a free agent in a reality that does not appear to be free. At deeper levels, the more psychological shadow dynamics we can be accountable for in ourselves, the more capacity we have to make genuinely free choices, and to become more skillful in this complex and sticky, interconnected reality we live within.

Mars in 26 Gemini trine Jupiter in 26 Aquarius: 5:45 PM PDT

• Mars-Jupiter contacts relate to large amounts of activity and action – simply put! Our estimation of our capacities expands, or we find a large amount of projects/endeavors that feel exciting and appealing to us, all at once. We might feel optimistic about our capacity to handle it all, as well.
• So consider, perhaps, what is your relationship with expansion? Where there is an influx of activity, how do you navigate that? Do you allow yourself to go with the spurts of inspiration or fire that relate to getting things done, setting things in motion, and taking action?
• At a deeper level, Mars relates to the courage of being one’s self – of knowing who we truly are and being able to navigate life with that sharp sense of self. When it comes to taking on a lot of projects, or doing a lot, it usually is a journey of learning what our capacity is, and learning how we relate to the process of expanding our capacity, and how we relate to knowing our limits.

April 17, 2021

Mercury in 26 Aries sextile Jupiter in 26 Aquarius: 7:45 AM PDT & Mercury in 26 Aries sextile Mars in 26 Gemini: 10:53 AM PDT

• Mercury is not only sextile both Jupiter and Mars (who are trine), but Mercury sits at the midpoint of the Mars-Jupiter trine. Something about this alignment feels so magical and electric to me. It feels like an eagerness to understand something that is larger than we have understood before – a willingness to expand our conceptual maps.
• I would also take note of conversations that have to do with beliefs, and the energy of debate or discourse in the air right now. I’d tune into the frequency of friendly discourse or friendly debate. Not all debates are friendly of course – sometimes when discussing ideas, people identify with the ideas so strongly or really want to cut/destroy the opposition. There are, on the other hand, friendly encounters between diverging points of view, that can feel mutually animating.
• We might also find ourselves developing a point of view which feels weapon-like – like you know if you voiced it in a public space, it would activate polarizing responses in the field. When I have these kinds of ideas brimming within me, I tend to slow down with them. I usually realize I’m not interested in fighting or making enemies. I’m more interested in developing the viewpoint so it can be meaningful and supportive. So I find myself seeking greater contexts to situate my ideas in, instead of just flippantly throwing provocative, half-formed ideas into the field and pissing people off. (That’s just my preference though! It can also be fair to not be beholden to other people’s reactivity, or willing to experiment with ideas. It’s just, there are consequences both to using the voice and to being silent, and that’s something to consider our relationship with.) 
• Philosophically, the whole concept of disagreement is worth thinking about. It is interesting how reactive public spaces can be. Some people believe that people shouldn’t be saying certain things, and censorship is a philosophical issue in the air right now. There could be more to this – like how we digest information we don’t agree with, and how we discern what information to be offended by or not, or why we feel responsible to correct people, unsolicited.
• Energetically, strong opinions or perspectives create a field dynamic in which the support and/or dissent from others is activated. Creating a strong argument – should one like to be persuasive – involves creating a broad enough context for the idea such that it is evidenced that one has considered a variety of angles. When we play the game of putting ideas into the collective commons, it can get Martian real quick! And in that way, it can become an ample training ground, for understanding ourselves, our philosophy, and the social context we exist within.

Mercury in 26 Aries square Pluto in 26 Capricorn: 2:46 PM PDT

• This transit can highlight a desire to experience mental transformation or to be an instrument of it – to spread our ideas or use our intellect to change the reality around us. This can be shadowy (like needing to change other people’s minds because we would feel more secure if they changed) or inspired, alike. At an inspired level, it can be engaging with conversation or ideas as a way to expand past previous limitations – and being mindful to become aware of our own hidden agendas, and not simply be run by them.

April 18, 2021

Mercury in 29 Aries conjunct Sun in 29 Aries: 2:49 PM PDT

• Mercury cazimis (a cazimi is when any planet is conjunct the Sun within 1 degree) are special messenger moments. Stay tuned for how messages appear, where you feel clarity and illumination simultaneously. At the last degree of Aries, this could be a mystical download around Aries themes like selfhood or courage.

April 19, 2021

Mercury enters Taurus: 3:29 AM PDT

Mercury will stay in Taurus until May 3, 2021.

• After kissing the Sun, Mercury enters Taurus. Mercury in Taurus is a methodical placement for Mercury – where Mercury in Aries was sharper, more experimental, more provocative, Mercury in Taurus brings us into laying a foundation for something practical, something more carefully formed. Mercury in Taurus may also help us drop into understanding about certain areas of life which require more patience or slow presence.

Sun enters Taurus: 1:33 PM PDT

(Image: cosmofilius)

Taurus Season begins! The Sun will stay here until May 20.

• Taurus is a fixed sign, ruled by Venus. It can relate to ways that we stick firmly to our values, or our particular vision of what is good and beautiful. So even as gentle and calm as Taurus can appear, Taurus can be quite aggressive. When a person digs in their heels… for example, it is a power move that can make others bend to that person, or go away. It can be remarkably transformative to notice where we have this power, and how we use it or don’t use it in a more conscientious way. 
• Tenacity and resilience are energetically similar qualities here, also related to Taurus – it is having a trajectory or a vision, and sticking with it!
• The Sun in Taurus can open up meditations or experiences around how we utilize our fixity of value/vision to create, as well as where we can become more receptive to what is happening around us or in relationship to us. 
• Self-esteem and self-love is very important with the Taurus archetype. Self-esteem may influence what we believe we are worthy of receiving, in love and in our financial life, for example. Self-esteem thoroughly anchored may be what helps us leave draining situations or jobs we don’t like, and pursue environments that are more suitable for us. Self-esteem can give us the courage to engage our talents and inner-resources as opposed to keeping them hidden. Think of other ways that self-esteem supports you and creates positive and meaningful ripples in your life and in the lives of those you are connected with (and of course, more broadly, we are connected to absolutely everything… so what could a fractal pattern of personal love do for the whole universe?).

Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! If you would like further guidance, I have been increasingly focused on longer-term experiences in the form of the Evolutionary Astrology Intensive, higher level courses for alumni, and 1:1 mentorship – helping people form a depth relationship to their natal chart and personal transits over time, to develop themselves, to heal, and to reach their goals, all through the soul-making lens of evolutionary astrology. I would love to support you in building your relationship with astrology. The intensive is currently open for enrollment, and I am soon to take on new coaching clients.

Find me on Instagram @sabrinamonarch, get on my mailing list to stay apprised of all upcoming offerings and events, and I’ll see you next week!

With love,

Sabrina Monarch