Jupiter in Aries & Mercury Retrograde: Astrology of 5/4 – 5/10

This week begins with the Sun and Uranus joining in Taurus, and each sextiling Mars in Pisces, emphasizing some internal revolutions around desire, beauty, aesthetic, wealth, pleasure. There can be building desire to change ourselves or change our lives such as to feel that our life more accurately reflects a dream that we have. Life design. Time, energy, and resource allocated for things we love doing. In tandem with this potentially life-affirming desire for more, it would also be helpful to truly acknowledge and honor what resources we already have (but not as a self-shaming technique to discourage true appetite). Within Taurus, it is often easier to magnify the good when we have cultivated an appreciation for it.

Then we have two significant shifts: Mercury stations retrograde in Gemini and Jupiter ingresses into Aries.

Mercury retrograde in general can have us reviewing things from the past or revisiting things on a to-do list we didn’t have (or make) time to complete before. In Gemini, we can also be looking at thoughts themselves and the way we think. Mercury in Gemini is a logician, and can create logic even in subjective or absurd contexts. It is a capacity that we all have to rationalize our perspectives. But as the Sun and Uranus join around the time of this station with an urgency for changing our lives in a more dreamy and beautiful direction, it is as though Mercury is conspiring by helping us adjust our thoughts so that we can get on board, or simply figure out how we’re going to adjust the logistical details to support change.

Then Jupiter in Aries ushers in a vitality for beginner’s mind (and consequently beginner’s luck), trying new things, and taking the leap. Confidence may become more important or even spiritually significant, like a kind of personality trait that opens doors and helps us, as the hero(ine)s of our own lives, on the mythic quest we’re on.

These transits include zodiac signs that are at the beginning of the wheel (Aries, Taurus, Gemini) and something to consider is that the burst of motivation or desire for adventure or change that we are feeling is often connected to storylines that have only just begun to be written. Rather than knowing everything from the onset, this kind of newness suggests that our instincts are helping to guide us and that we are learning as we go. Some degree of experimentation may be at play. May we tune into the good-spiritedness of Jupiter as we find ourselves initiating adventures – ones that are calling us into greater play with life and perhaps in ways we are only just beginning to imagine.

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: artist unknown)

Watch this week’s forecast on YouTube, or continue reading below:

Here’s our week:

May 4, 2022

Mars in 14 Pisces sextile Uranus in 14 Taurus: 8:46 AM PDT

(Image: Dieter Krehbiel)

• There is an urgency building around our dreams and the way we cultivate them – how we imagine things that are beyond our current circumstances and seek to change our lives. Mars in Pisces energizes dreaming, but it also energizes the threading of dreams into reality, the application of dreams.
• Part of applying dreams to reality is shifting our embodiment, aligning our embodiment with that vision or truth within us. Embodiment as the way we regard and carry ourselves, how we move through space, how we live out archetypes.
• Mars in Pisces may energize our faith, perhaps in relationship to places we have trauma or subtle mental trauma (Uranus) around scarcity (Taurus) – places where we don’t believe things are possible. We may have breakthrough around the situation by a shift in faith (Mars in Pisces) or a shift in our embodiment (Uranus in Taurus).

May 5, 2022

Sun in 14 Taurus conjunct Uranus in 14 Taurus: 12:21 AM PDT

• While Mars-Uranus is urgency of the dream, Sun-Uranus brings creative urgency! It is a radicalizing quality around self-actualization.
• We may be feeling the urge to break out of our own conditioned ways of expressing ourselves because we recognize that these limited patterns do not serve our wholeness or the spontaneity of the moment.
• At times when these creative shifts are more dramatic, it may cause an interruption in the role we have played in a social ecosystem – i.e. if people have come to expect a certain set of personality traits from us. In general, people’s behavior may be surprising with this transit (including our own).
• With Taurus, some of these novel or freer forms of self-expression may create sensation in the body. We might be having shifts in perspective around what these sensations mean, or freeing them from needing to have a meaning (which can sometimes end up being abstract and disembodied) and just being with the sensation.
• Becoming freer also involves the process of being able to sit with increasing amounts of sensation – i.e. how we learn to speak our truth even though our heart is racing. We can have our own creative relationship with how we ride the wave of activating sensations as well as how we ground/integrate sensations.

Venus in 4 Aries sextile Mercury in 4 Gemini: 11:01 PM PDT

• Venus in Aries is passionate, and with the harmonic aspect to Mercury this may relate to the act of naming our desires, as well as being able to be responsive and to pivot when feedback in the environment occurs.

May 7, 2022

Sun in 16 Taurus sextile Mars in 16 Pisces: 2:48 AM PDT

• The Sun-Uranus-Mars set-up for the week is a lot of creativity energy! It might fun and inspiring in some respects, and there may be agitation as well in the sense of really being dissatisfied with where we are at or what we have and that being part of the motivation for change.
• Dissatisfaction with where we are is not helpful if we cycle in those emotions and build a vortex of scarcity. It can be helpful to also take account of the value of the situation.
• Dissatisfaction with where we are at is helpful when it allows us to sever codependence with situations that aren’t really that true for us – a fed-up feeling may be a precursor to greater bravery or innovation with life, when we realize that what feels at stake in the process of change is not even something we’re trying to defend. That’s freeing.

May 8, 2022

First quarter moon in 18 Leo: 5:21 PM PDT

This halfway point between eclipses gives us the Moon square the nodes, as well as the Moon square asteroid Eros (who is still traveling hand-in-hand with the Sun).

• I like to look out for pride with Leo. Pride is, within the research and writing of Richard Dawkins in Power vs. Force, described as an empowering emotion that pulls out despair and grief, but is not in of itself a very enlightened energy. It is a midwife to a greater sense of personal power, but pride can also be ugly.
• Pride expressed creatively, in art/movement/dance/etc, can be very alchemical.
• When pride is constellating within, there is often a situation at hand where we do not feel an accurate reflection of our value or worth.
• It might be possible to slow down and see if we can find a place of alignment and embodiment with the value and self-worth that pride is pointing us to – but not from the place of pride, but actually the true inherent value that pride is a symptom of our disconnection from.
• Still, pride is ambivalent in the way as a word it both has the negative connotation of the ‘sin’ as well as the virtue of “taking pride in one’s __________”. Shadowy forms of pride can make good art, that intensity and sensation collected into drama and expression – but can be detrimental to real intimate relationship. Virtue forms of pride can come from a deeper accounting of our values, and our commitment to honoring them.
• This quarter moon may bring awareness to our relationship with and needs around feeling respected, cherished.

May 10, 2022

Mercury stations retrograde in 4 Gemini: 4:47 AM PDT

• In tandem with the activating Sun-Mars-Uranus field and any soul work eclipse season has been revealing to us, Mercury stationing retrograde opens up the portal of re-thinking, re-visioning, adjusting our mental logic and mental precepts. We can’t exactly step into version 3.0 without a software upgrade.
• Mercury in Gemini can offer a gift of mental detachment, that is being able to increasingly notice our own thoughts from a place of “interesting that I’m thinking that,” as opposed to just being in the thought and accepting it unconsciously at face value.
• Mercury in Gemini emphasizes cleverness, that we can have breakthrough because of intelligence. Gemini is nimble, acrobatic. Our thoughts can work against us when we come up with elaborate ‘stories’ that feel really convincing but aren’t true or have detrimental effects. When we are in story in that way, we often need detachment or a shift in perspective. Gemini is like an agent of change that can help us shift the story. Recognize when ideas lighten you up.
• When I notice myself struggling mentally by looping in certain thoughts, I often will pray for celestial intervention in my thinking, to see a higher perspective. Consider your agency (whether prayer, or taking a walk, etc.) in lightening your mental field.

Jupiter enters Aries: 4:22 PM PDT

Jupiter will re-enter Pisces during a retrograde on October 28, 2022 and re-enter Aries December 20, 2022.

• Jupiter enters a Mars-ruled sign and amplifies and magnifies Aries and Martian topics, like ambition, confidence, courage, risk-taking, and pursuing destiny.
• Jupiter largely brings buoyant, joyful, good-natured influence but does also blow things up in size, so as to accelerate wisdom, awareness, and potentially closure about a situation that is harder to ignore in its blown-up state.
• Jupiter in Aries can relate to feeling confident that we will win or succeed at our undertaking. It can also be the confidence to get back up and try again after failing, to bounce back, or to take lessons learned from mistakes in stride.
• Jupiter relates to higher learning, and this will be the academy of Aries! Aries often learns by doing, and will be in situations where the true impulse of our being is to set out on a new path, one where we are the initiate, where we don’t necessarily know how things will turn out – but we will find out! Beginner’s luck is a thing! Beginner’s luck is different than feigned ignorance. When we are truly being experimental and trying something new, there is often support in life and in the field. And, we end up having to learn from the feedback, mistakes included. Being in this state of learning by doing can be invigorating and lively.

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 in session 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