This week Mercury stations retrograde in Aquarius, there is a Full Moon in Cancer, Uranus stations direct, and the lunar nodes transition into the signs of Scorpio and Taurus for the next one and a half years.
Mercury retrogrades are commonly misunderstood as a transit that we can blame a bunch of problems on. While Mercury retrograde can relate to minor inconveniences, it is usually benign like missing a freeway exit and taking a little longer to get to your destination, or misplacing your keys. So besides being more careful about details should you like to do that, what I want to offer as an invitation for Mercury retrograde is to consider the sacred role of the trickster interrupting our normal routine ways of thinking and moving through the world. The detour, even if initially due to an inconvenience, may hold treasure – like meeting an important person you wouldn’t have otherwise. The point is being awake and aware of what is unfolding in the moment, and what unique opportunities exist in the moment, as opposed to hating the moment for it not sticking to the original plan and seeming to inconvenience you.
Detours of an Aquarian note (Mercury is retrograde in this sign) can relate not just to what we’re thinking but what we’re thinking about what we’re thinking – engaging the witness consciousness (detachment is Aquarian) and having novel or divergent insight about our routine way of interpreting our experience. We may have flashes of insight that light up otherwise autopilot cognition, and we get the opportunity to be more creative with our intellect.
Detours of an Aquarian note may also have to do with how we engage networks and ecosystems – whether that is a social media network, a mycelial network or a forest community, a network of guides/angels, or a community of humans gathered around a particular interest (or any other number of ‘networks’ or ‘systems’ you can think of). Take the time to become lucid in the waking dream of this life when you notice you are participating in a network. How are you being inspired to participate that may be different than your normal way?
A Full Moon in Cancer can highlight our emotional responses to the sense of how successful we feel we are in this moment at the game of life. It’s a Capricorn (success vs. failure binary to consider in that sign) Sun lighting up the Moon in emotional and receptive Cancer. Capricorn’s perception of failure can be overly harsh at times or the fear of failure can lock us into a less courageous or free way of being that sets us up for the very failure we fear (i.e. being afraid of rejection, so never taking the chance in love anyway).
One simple energetic I’ve been tuning into as the Moon is growing full (eventually to culminate in Cancer) is how when I reveal what is going on for me internally instead of hiding it under a mask, the person I’m connecting with will reflect me and I feel more connected to them and to the moment itself. (It’s not that I’m always masked, but in moments I’ll notice it and take a layer off.) It contrasts another patterning I’ve built up from earlier in life around hiding because I expect to not be understood or for information to be used against me (so why try anyway), and in the moment of revealing and being reflected, I feel ‘success’ in the relationship, in connection, in reality, in that moment.
Success can be as big as how we feel about our whole life, our relationships, our career, our finances, or as small as noticing what moments seem to ‘click’ or where there is clashing. It could be as simple as noticing that a houseplant we moved to a different spot in the house is beginning to look happier. Success on the Cancer/Capricorn axis is noting good fortune that comes about as a consequence of our thoughts, feelings, or actions, and feeling emotionally connected and aligned to the circumstances of our lives.
We are not in control of all circumstances and not all bad circumstances reflect poorly upon us – and yet, there are places we have responsibility or can take accountability for the state of our current experience. This Full Moon can be about having a deeper emotional response to celebration and grief alike, in response to how we feel about the concrete material experience we are having and our sense of self-esteem (or lack thereof) in the part we took in creating this reality. Seek to be kind – you wouldn’t yell at the houseplant for not thriving in a certain part of the house. Similarly, shame and reprimand are responses to the sense of failure, but they do not actually improve the situation. Underneath shame can be a more vulnerable call for repair, and it takes courage to actually step into that reality and throw off the heaviness that keeps us locked.
On the more celebratory end, our successes and wins can be very obvious to us during the full moon and we only need to allow them in and enjoy the moment. If they are not obvious, sometimes reflecting on how far we’ve come can be a way to open our perception to the achievements worth recognizing.
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.
Watch this week’s forecast on YouTube, or keep reading below.
Here’s our week after a few announcements!
Astrology reading books open – I am taking a small number of clients and hope to open my books more frequently than I have been. You can purchase a reading with me here (while spots are available).
METEORITE 2022: We begin again March 6, 2022! This is a yearlong advanced course for alumni of the Evolutionary Astrology Intensive (and the previous Meteorite). This group is an experimental adventure. Like a meteorite making it from outer space to the surface of the Earth, a purpose of this group is to become receptive to downloads and novel insights and to embody them. This is a high level practitioner group for people wanting to strengthen their astrology practice both for their own enrichment and for their participation in the world. By being in community and the unique field that opens up in this group, we’ll spark and accelerate our creativity.
The course facilitates each student to produce a project of their own invention within the year program, whether this project is creative, scholarly, or personal.
Read additional inspirations and themes for METEORITE 2022 (a course catalogue) here.
Apply by February 27, earlier is encouraged 🙂
Here’s our week:
January 14, 2022
Mercury stations retrograde in 10 Aquarius: 3:41 AM PST
(Image: Akira Kusaka)
Retrograde dates:
Pre-shadow phase began: December 29, 2021
Mercury entered Aquarius: January 1, 2022
Mercury stations retrograde: January 14, 2022
Mercury stations direct: February 3, 2022 (in 24 degrees of Capricorn)
Mercury re-enters Aquarius: January 25, 2022
Post-shadow phase ends: February 23, 2022
- This Mercury retrograde begins with Mercury square Uranus in Taurus and Mercury a few degrees away from a conjunction to Saturn in Aquarius – thus echoing the current Saturn-Uranus square.
- The Saturn-Uranus square relates to breakdown/breakthrough processes happening collectively and personally: stress is being introduced to systems and systems are being pressured into adjusting or innovating to respond to the stressor.
- How institutions (like schools or hospitals) and governments are dealing with the pandemic is an example of systems responding to a stressor. Family systems, relationship systems, or the personal system of the individual body are also sites of stress, change, and paradigm shift at the moment.
- Mercury activating this spot and stationing retrograde suggests that this retrograde cycle may be about our mental realm catching up to today’s stress & innovating how to respond to it. I used the pandemic as a broad example, but everyone is having their own experience. One person’s major stressor right now may be that they are uncovering personal childhood trauma at a rate that is challenging their existing romantic partnership’s capacity to hold that material. (Or, it’s upleveling the relationship meaningfully and challenging the internal expectations of what one could share in relationship!) Or, one person’s spiritual awakening process is having them feeling alienated from their current friend circle or community (and then perhaps, vibing with new communities). The general theme is that change has introduced disruption to an existing system, threatening that system’s stability but also offering new levels of freedom should the thread be followed through and/or integrated.
- Mercury in Aquarius holds an energy of group intelligence – it is the shared “hive mind”. This can be literal in terms of a computer program that shares information across a network, or also literal in terms of collective thought stream that many individuals can tap into.
- Groupthink and hive mind have different connotations no? The groupthink, while also a kind of hive mentality, relates to a group of people sharing the same limitation of consciousness, whereas the hive mind is a more expansive field of possibility. Consider your access (and exit) from either of these realms.
- In terms of the hive, this Mercury retrograde in Aquarius could have us reflecting and experimenting with how we source paradigm shift in our lives by talking to people and putting our qualms ‘out there’ instead of keeping them inside. It is also our own capacity to help others connect dots with our intuition/insight/expertise/information we have access to. Teamwork and sharing mental resources (i.e. ideas, referrals, and introductions) may break up stuck or stagnant impasses at the moment.
- Retrogrades relate to a reversal in normal patterning, so we may find our inspirations and impulses around connecting or disconnecting from community/hives surprising or novel to us.
January 16, 2022
Sun in 26 Capricorn conjunct Pluto in 26 Capricorn: 5:11 AM PST
(Image: Mark of the Vampire, 1935)
- One of the shadow’s favorite languages seems to be projection: seeing a quality we refuse to see in ourselves, in someone else. Or if not the exact quality, at least our triggered response to another person illuminates something within that we have not fully examined.
- This Sun-Pluto cazimi (a cazimi being when the Sun is exactly conjunct another planet) is like a moment of putting on the x-ray glasses for personal accountability (Capricorn). Something we have felt was too shameful or painful to confront may become apparent, and yet, the illumination itself holds the potential of diffusing the extra charge (of shame, distaste, etc.) at the material that is becoming visible.
January 17, 2022
Full Moon in 27 Cancer: 3:48 PM PST
The Sun is conjunct Pluto and asteroid Juno in Capricorn.
- This Full Moon can be an emotional reveal of how we are relating to our deepest commitments – where we have devoted our effort, time, and our most profound investment.
- In some cases there is a lot of pride and cause for celebration: we have challenged ourselves to work toward a more lofty or idealistic goal, grown our character, developed healthier boundaries, and now we are experiencing the reward of our reality reflecting our achievement.
- In other cases we may feel emotionally disparaged around how we have wasted our time, contorted ourselves too much to fit a goal that wasn’t truly honoring our nature, or unnecessarily sacrificed ourselves for little if no return.
- Brene Brown wrote a book “Rising Strong” which I’d recommend for anyone seeking to more meaningfully address failure in their life. Brene Brown slows down the moment of getting back up after falling to provide a map on how to truly grow from mistakes or failures.
- Even in the first scenario I pointed to – pride and cause for celebration because reality itself is reflecting our achievement – is usually the cumulative effect of learning from mistakes/failures and allowing that to be information to course-correct. Not all self-knowledge comes with ease – sometimes we learn about our values through what doesn’t work or what didn’t truly fulfill us.
- The Sun-Pluto-Juno in Capricorn conjunction could relate to a deeper commitment we have within ourselves to excellence – fulfilling a deeper potential in this life by soberly addressing our current limitations, hidden resources/skills, and truly confronting our most profound desires.
- To align our efforts with our deepest feelings, i.e. to climb the Capricorn mountain that really matters the most deeply to us, would be profoundly vulnerable and erotic. Consider Audre Lorde’s famous essay Uses of the Erotic.
January 18, 2022
Uranus stations direct in 10 Taurus: 7:26 AM PST
- Mercury is the lower octave of Uranus, and we have both of these planets stationing this week. Mercury is also in Aquarius, which is ruled by Uranus in modern astrology. This is a simultaneous stationing of planets relating to the mind (Mercury) and higher mind (Uranus). These planets both relate to the trickster archetype as well.
- At a most basic level, we can anticipate seeing things differently – experiencing insights, shifts in consciousness, or whisperings of new paradigm. So often we speak of this time on the planet as a shifting of ages: old paradigm to new paradigm, 3D to 5D, Gaia awakening, shifting into the Age of Aquarius, the new age of air, etc. Whatever the particular mythos, these tales of shift open us to the possibility that life as we know it is changing. Like our phones or computers so often get a ‘software update’, the collective ego or the personal ego can as well.
- To participate in shifts (life is already changing, whether or not we are all about it!) we can be open to insight, downloads, and revising our internalized programming around how we think the world works or who we are within it. What is fundamentally important to conserve (we know Taurus is great at maintaining stability) versus where are we simply rigid and afraid of change?
- Uranus in Taurus may also relate to a deeper awareness of the freedom we have to be resourceful or to adapt to change – that there is a deeper intelligence within us that made gardens out of the raw materials of our lives, and we could do it again, even if the raw materials changed.
January 18 2022
Nodes of the Moon enter Scorpio (south node) and Taurus (north node): 12:53 PM PST
The lunar nodes move backwards through the zodiac. We have had the south node in Sagittarius and the north node in Gemini since May 2020. At this ingress, the nodes are at the very end of Scorpio and Taurus and will be moving backwards through these signs until the nodes enter Libra and Aries on July 17, 2023.
Nodes in Sagittarius and Gemini in review:
- The nodes in Gemini and Sagittarius brought a lot of attention to our beliefs. With the proliferation of so many different streams of information and perspectives about pressing issues, there have also been challenges around what to believe and glaringly divergent narratives happening at once about shared situations. Such as the pandemic, and the variety of different perspectives on it and how it should be addressed.
- Sagittarius relates to culture/tribe/race and Gemini relates to language, and the capacity to translate between worlds.
- The eclipses the summer of 2020 on these nodes (Sagittarius/Gemini) also saw the murder of George Floyd and subsequent spikes in the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as an increase in collective conversation about race and racism. There was a widespread call for white people with the privilege to not really think about race or to be colorblind about it (“we’re all one anyway”/“all lives matter”) to become more aware of social dynamics around race and their complicity in maintaining the status quo around inequities.
- Cancel culture was a highlighted phenomenon (though it began before this nodal placement) and toward the end of the nodes in these signs, cancel culture also became critiqued as a form of ideological violence. (Credit to Ari Felix @saltwater.stars, without whom I’m not sure if I’d think about cancel culture’s rise and fall through the lens of these nodes.)
- As it turns out, astrologers Ari Felix and Kelsey Rose Tort will be giving a talk on these nodes in review. I know it will be revelatory, knowing these two.
With the nodes in Scorpio and Taurus, anticipate these themes:
- Taurus and Scorpio are heavily lower-chakra energies. Taurus relates to our survival needs and the ways we cultivate safety in our bodies and in our environment. Scorpio relates to sexuality and merging resources with others.
- Margaret Lynch proposes in her book “Unblocked” that many people seek to fix their issues through the upper chakras – mindset, affirmation, spiritual perspective – without addressing the root and literally the root chakra – the deeper places inside of us that feel unsafe, or are still traumatized by a set of impressions or traumas we absorbed in childhood.
- The root chakra will relate to how we have the energetic capacity to have what we desire or materialize our intentions/plans, versus if we self-sabotage, procrastinate, or are too mired in low self-worth or lack of belief in the self to actually step into our power and receptivity.
- The north node in Taurus will relate to personal and collective effort to create more stability and sustainability, financial livelihood, and meaningful relationship with resources, the body, and the Earth.
- The south node in Scorpio will relate to personal and collective releasing around the psychological complexes that make livelihood difficult to attain or hold onto. Note, releasing does not mean it goes away – it becomes visible on its way out, and we also have to make the choice if we are gripping onto it or letting it go.
- Consider the voice that has objections and resistances to you [insert the blank: being financially well-off, being in healthy relationships, being valued at your workplace, and so on…]. This is what I mean by the psychological material that needs to be released to allow for greater prosperity.
- These objections and resistances are not usually logical or even very conscious, they are of the subconscious and relates to unconscious programming we run based on cultural conditioning and ancestral/familial patterning.
- When we feed Taurus or Scorpio within ourselves from a place of being blocked or numbed, we tend to need more stimulation to feel something. These are patterns like emotional eating; needing intensity and drama to ‘wake up’; or wanting a lot of sex, money, food, recognition, etc, but it never really feeling like enough or never really hitting the spot. Consumer culture at a collective level lives because of this addictive pattern.
- During this transit we need the intelligence of skillfully letting go and clearing space – i.e. how we release emotional stagnancy and trauma. We also need the intelligence of proper feeding of our truest desire: like maybe it is easier to stuff ourselves with a Netflix binge, but the deeper thing we are craving will take a lot more courage and vulnerability to pursue.
- Taurus relates to the mouth and throat – what we take in and consume as well as the voice – while Scorpio relates to the genitals, reproductive organs, and colon – or how we merge and create life and how we process waste. Letting go of stuck material we have not successfully purged (but have held onto) will naturally help us make more nourishing decisions about what we want to take in. Similarly, having a hunger or desire for life may challenge us to let go of our stagnancy.
- The sturdiness of Taurus as the North Node may stress more popularity around people cultivating a life of value by releasing their attachment to unnecessary drama at a deep level: not simply by “cutting toxic people out” but actually by undoing their own addiction and compulsion connected to those toxic dynamics in the first place. (Thoughts on the labeling of toxicity inspired by a recent forthcoming conversation with astrologer Loren Delaney coming out soon on Magic of the Spheres)
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 be in their power, 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 in session and will be offered again and I am taking applications for METEORITE 2022 here.
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
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