This week Mercury and Neptune form a conjunction in Pisces, while Venus and Saturn join up in Aquarius. Mercury and Neptune come together for boundariless thinking and perceiving, and the tendency to dream and fantasize, while Venus and Saturn together are serious about artistic and aesthetic standards, good conduct and boundary in relationship, and effectualness and pragmatism.
Venus-Saturn has a drive for materializing (Saturn) what is valued (Venus), which as a process involves the artistry of saying yes or saying no – to say yes to that which contributes to the architecture of the vision, and to say no to or restrict that which does not. Consider a film director or a fashion designer bringing a concept concretely to life, or person in a healthy, grounded, long-term relationship with a real foundation.
When Venus-Saturn is in a more disenfranchised state, there is a sense of calcification around Venusian themes, so the heart might be too guarded or one’s standards might feel too isolating. The challenge is in learning how we relate with our boundaries and where it is appropriate to soften them, and where it is appropriate to maintain them. Further, Venus-Saturn can teach us about the grace of navigating obstacles and boundaries instead of hardening in the face of them.
Mercury-Neptune is visionary, if not mentally diffuse. In being an adept dreamer, we create more avenues and portals within reality for ourselves to explore. With anxiety, we also create stories, but ones that haunt us if we don’t have tools for alchemizing it. Mercury-Neptune can relate both to being mentally adrift or being inspired and enchanted. The gift of Mercury-Neptune is to open the mind, to be able to fluidly navigate higher streams of inspiration and become less attached to anxious loops without avoiding real concern.
Considering these two influences together, we might consider our creative and aspirational processes – what we seek out of life and in our dreams, and how we are willing to take responsibility for what we value. Mercury-Neptune promote a creative agenda of opening our minds, while Venus-Saturn promotes an agenda of firming our aesthetic boundaries. If there was any week to feel like life was an interactive and participatory art installation, with fluid membrane-like walls that could be re-arranged and our experience altered as a result, it’s this one.
This may also be a week to play with choice – rather than waffling in a place of indecision (over which choice is correct, and then not doing anything), being willing to play with the way life re-shapes in the aftermath of making a choice. This is like an artist who sees their art as alive, and takes each step in creative relationship with what is spontaneously happening in the work of art. It could be the openness and curiosity we bring to our collaborations with other people, staying receptive to surprises and novelty, and amplifying ways of relating that come from places of dignity and respect.
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.
(Top image: Richard Doyle)
Watch this week’s forecast on YouTube, or continue reading below:
Here’s our week after a few announcements!
Astrology reading books open! – My practice is interdisciplinary, drawing from studies in psychology and philosophy, mysticism, embodiment, tarot and more along a lifelong pursuit of enchantment, knowledge & wisdom. I primarily draw from Evolutionary Astrology, a lineage of astrology that approaches the natal chart from the perspective of the soul being on a multi-lifetime evolutionary journey. I read charts from the perspective that your soul has a history and has chosen this incarnation as a meaningful continuation of the path you are on. In a reading we conversationally explore the stories, patterns and major theme of import in your life at a soul level: what kinds of gifts you have brought into this life to further deepen or live the fruition of, as well as where you might be pivoting or transforming the limitations of your past. The offering is that this experience is vivifying, moving & regenerative.
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The Evolutionary Astrology Intensive is open for enrollment 🖤🐉🖤 May 2 – September 14, 2022.
Pluto’s significance in the natal chart is as deep and mysterious as Pluto’s physical distance from Earth. Pluto is a gateway to dialoging with the unconscious/subconscious realm. It is a trapdoor through the veil – the way we find ourselves here on earth at some point without memory of where or who we were prior. Yet, life speaks to the deeper memory at the core of our being through our fascinations, desires, and struggles. We each have the opportunity in this life to awaken to our deepest inner truth and live from that place.
Working with Pluto and the lunar nodes becomes a direct communication with the soul – the being who has been here before and will quite likely be here again.
In the context of the world, we speak of the importance of history – that history repeats itself or at least rhymes. The soul has a past too, and our lives are the cutting edge of our souls’ evolution. This form of astrology is therapeutic and electrifying because it is a bridge to what we know inside at such a deep level but have likely not been given the language or mapping for it.
Making sense of my life through this profound wisdom school Evolutionary Astrology has been one of my deepest and most unrelenting adventures and I’m excited to share it again. Learn more and enroll here,
Here’s our week:
March 23, 2022
Mercury in 23 Pisces conjunct Neptune in 23 Pisces: 10:44 AM PDT
(Image: Lev Feliksovich Lagorio)
- Mercury and Neptune joining together can be supportive for mystical or miraculous thinking. After the potential rise of anxiety with the Virgo Full Moon that just occurred, there could be some settling or healing happening with this transit.
- The type of thinking that occurs with Mercury and Neptune together in Pisces is not necessarily that efforted – it’s more like a thinking that drifts into being, permeates into being. It might arise when we take some time to do something transportive and relaxing, like sitting with a tree, giving or receiving energy medicine, listening to music, painting, and so on.
- Something that defines these activities or points to them as a space through which we can receive the nourishment of this transit is perhaps a focus on arrival, rather than striving. When we are able to dissolve into a pocket of time and find intrinsic value in our presence with what is, we enter a more oceanic and even ‘religious’ state of being (religious as in the quality of the experience, not a particular doctrine or dogma).
- When it comes to practical life things, details, paperwork, etc. where we are trying to be accurate and perform business as usual, this transit can relate to our efforts feeling more diffuse. Things can still be accomplished, but there may be a greater sense of needing to participate with the Universe and trust how things are falling into place as a winding journey/ride, in places where the trajectory is normally a little more simple or standard.
- At a surface ego level, feeling like one’s plans or logistical plans are interrupted can feel annoying, but sometimes the detour surfaces a unique opportunity or turn of events that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
- Mercury-Neptune can have a way of putting small details into a much larger universal context, like in reality it mattered more that we meet an important soul ally through a silly inconvenience than it mattered for the original plan to go forward seamlessly.
- Not all details or Mercurial matters are rendered impossible or diffuse during this transit – it’s just that our concept of accuracy expands to include more threads than we consciously recognize as within our purview. When we are in touch with inspiration or an important intention, sometimes the specifics will also appear as though a sparkle of insight. People who work with the invisible, like inventors or seers, rely on this kind of consciousness.
March 26, 2022
Mercury in 28 Pisces sextile Pluto in 28 Capricorn: 3:35 AM PDT
(Image: Henk van Vessem)
- This transit brings to mind a common question at the beginning of the journey of developing intuition, which is something like, “how can you tell the difference between intuition and anxiety? A hunch versus paranoia?”
- When we begin to open our perception to more than what is concretely visible, we are not just reaching up to the Akashic and celestial heavens and angelic realms, but also likely expanding our awareness of the shadow or subterranean realms, which brings us to Pluto.
- The unconscious material of Pluto is not just emotional/psychological – it’s also the material that is encoded into our bodies through millions of years of evolution. It relates to our survival instincts, which in of themselves correspond with the capacity to recognize threat, to have fear, to flee/fight/freeze/etc.
- Our issue then, with discernment along the path of waking to greater powers of perception, is what kinds of stories or extrapolations we run away with. There is a difference between recognizing real threat and feeling physically/emotionally activated by potential or imagined threat.
- Mercury-Pluto contacts speak to mental purging or mental purification, which can happen at a logical level as well as a somatic/nervous system level.
- Mercury in Pisces works with inspiration, coming up with stories, plans, and visions based on a dream (or nightmare). Pluto in Capricorn can speak to a deeper container, the well or orientation that we are drawing from. There are certain ‘inspirations’ that come from fear, right? When we have time to reflect, introspect, pause, or be really intentional about how we want to move forward with something, we can exercise the kind of consciousness that draws more from real desire than aversion. What actually matters to you? How do you align plans and details with *that* dream?
- Try this in small ways. For example, sometimes when I’m interacting with someone where there is great love between us but we have a complex history (a family member, a friend I’ve fought with, etc.) I aim to be intentional about what I’m wanting to create with them that day, or in that conversation. It allows me to come in with a more generous, generative state of being than if I were to come into the conversation expecting the worst and on guard for the worst. It is a practical, mundane miracle to create something beautiful and loving in a place we could have been fearful.
- This type of miracle work is not an excuse for discernment – sometimes people’s spiritual practices allow them to endure particular situations or relationships because they have the capacity to digest the situation, but it doesn’t mean they should be doing all of that work. It’s one thing to rally for a challenging event, but another thing to be rallying constantly for a dynamic that is simply out of alignment.
- I have noticed that people can have spiritual openings/awakenings from very underworldly places – a drug addict can get there, a person in an abusive relationship can get there, etc. Spirituality and addiction are very connected, in the ways that addiction is an attempt to fill the “god-sized hole” that can never be filled (and it’s our relationship to longing or deeper meaning that is called for), and also in that ways that people often heal addiction in tandem with deepening or developing a spiritual orientation. Then along a spiritual path, we may be confronting our addictions, including subtle ones.
- So, opening spiritually ends up confronting us with real changes and transformations we need to make in our lives. Sometimes it takes us time for that transformation (Pluto in Capricorn). But we still can be lucid (Mercury in Pisces) that we are on that path. A person can use reiki everyday to cope with an unaligned situation in their life, but eventually the circumstance itself calls for transformation, not just our relationship to the situation and our coping skills. This can really call our spiritual practice ‘down’ into matter, down into the deeper recesses of our attachments, and our unconscious and shadow material. And this being said, as per the example above, it could be the reiki practice that is giving the person inner-strength or spiritual resilience to make these deeper changes in their life. We are continually responsible for how we balance the spiritual and the material, and one is not meant to entirely compensate for the other.
March 27, 2022
Mercury enters Aries: 12:44 AM PDT
- Mercury emerges from oceanic, often undifferentiated Pisces and into the sharp, assertive, “here I am” sign of Aries. At a mental or experiential level, we may feel the sense of consolidation into feeling certainty or willingness to pursue a direction in places we were previously feeling more nebulous or diffuse. The offering may be that the diffuse/watery places showed us something we couldn’t have imagined on our own, and now we are ready to act (Aries) from the vision we gained. If we were swimming in more delusional spaces, this transit can also be like a friendly/welcomed cold bucket of water to the face!
March 28, 2022
Venus in 21 Aquarius conjunct Saturn in 21 Aquarius: 12:27 PM PDT
- For the last several weeks, according to traditional astrologers (and this concept was newer to me as a mainly modern astrologer in practice) Venus was “besieged” as she was in between Mars and Saturn. It was a time of some challenge for her – not necessarily that Venusian things weren’t happening, but we may have been encountering issues with speed/slowness or undesired obstacles. So, Venus joining up with Saturn is a momentous occasion because it marks the end of the besiegement – Venus gets some air now. Read this series of infographics from my friend Cameron Allen for thoughts on the besiegement and its themes.
- Venus and Saturn come together for high aesthetic and relational standards. These standards are tyrannical and imprisoning if they are set up for failure (i.e. are impossible) but otherwise set up a real container for the physical, concrete materialization of our heart’s desires – a healthy and meaningful relationship, a masterpiece of art, a lifestyle, a career, etc.
- In Aquarius, the standards we might be considering now could be about resonance. Aquarius relates to our pursuit of being in deeper electric resonance with our own higher self, as well as connecting that electrically with others.
- So at the inner-level, Venus in Aquarius meeting Saturn here could correspond to how willing we are to facilitate our uniqueness as opposed to suppressing it out of fear of alienation or loneliness (“if I pursue this aspect of myself, no one will be around to meet me… so I’ll just chill here, where it’s familiar and where I half-heartedly belong…”).
- At an outer level, Venus and Saturn meeting in Aquarius is about how we cultivate community, friendship, and resonant relationship. We might want to be mindful of the ways we put ourselves into smaller boxes (or try to fit others into those boxes) in an effort to maintain connection, but at a cost. Instead we likely need inner-permission and inner-authority to be inherently free, as well as relational skill sets to work with the surprises and openings of meeting dynamic relationships and being dynamic individuals ourselves.
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 course METEORITE for alumni, and 1:1 mentorship (mentorship re-opening at a future time) – 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 open for enrollment and METEORITE 2022 is currently in session.
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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