Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back. It's nothing but another week in paradise. Am I right? We are going to look at the astrology for the week of April 28th through May 4th of 2024. There's a lot happening in exactitude astrologically this week. I have to just acknowledge that the energy⁠—I mean, can you feel the energy in this world? There is such intense energy at play between the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus, with its revolutionary humanitarian spark that has been lit worldwide, and the ongoing transit of Pluto in Aquarius.

We are seeing movements, many which are youth led, but just movements of people gaining in passion, gaining in traction, gaining in impact. And along with that rebellious and revolutionary energy comes power struggles. Pluto is involved. We are absolutely seeing people fight the empire and the empire striking back.

For longtime listeners of the podcast, you know that for a couple of years there, I was obsessively talking about journalists and how we need to protect journalists. And I was talking about infrastructure and how our infrastructure needed to change. Well, so much of what we did or didn't do as societies, as a collective, is coming to bear now and will continue to come to bear over the next several years. This is a particularly important time. And for all people of conscience⁠—and I suspect most of you here are people of conscience, even if we don't all agree on all the things⁠—this is an exceptionally important time.

We must find ways of engaging with our individual activation, with the ways in which we are triggered by shit that's happening in the world, shit that's happening in our heads, in our relationships⁠—whatever it is⁠—and that includes our thoughts, our emotions, and our survival mechanisms⁠—and to engage with our activation in sustainable ways, in ways that help us to both strive in real time to advance justice, freedom, empathy, kindness, and action, but also to navigate our own internal lives and our own personal lives because, my loves, motivating yourself by fear and rage and defensiveness⁠—not only is it bad for your spirit, but that's a strategy that only works when you're trying to sprint, when you're trying to really just do something fast and furious.

But we are engaged in a marathon, a marathon for human rights. And I am, of course, very much speaking about the struggle for a free Palestine, but I'm talking about other things as well. There are so many things to be concerned about that are happening within our government, within the environment, within global politics, etc. There's so much happening, and that's saying nothing of the fact that we all have lives. Many of us have trauma histories and health problems and bills to pay and life, right? You have so much to do for life.

So here's the thing. Motivating yourself, as I said, through rage and fear is a good way to burn yourself out. It's a good way to feel like shit. Even if it works in the short term to help propel you to fight the good fight or get things done, it's not it. I want to invite you to treat yourself in more humane ways, to find ways of centering your humanity, centering empathy for yourself, for people you don't agree with/you don't understand, and for people who you have an easy time having empathy for⁠—for all people, for all circumstances, because motivating yourself through love, cultivating a worldview that is powered by empathy⁠—that's sustainable. Not only is it sustainable, it's powerful. And power doesn't have to be some fucked-up thing that harms people. Power can be a healing force.

So I want to invite you this week and every damn week to find ways of centering love and empathy in your motivations, whether you're dealing with family shit, you're dealing with navigating work stuff, or you are learning about what's happening in the world and trying to find ways to make the world better.

The astrology of this time is meant to be revolutionary. It's meant to not be stable. And within that is so much room for growth, room for fertility. And yet not all change is equal, right? Not all growth is equal. I want to encourage you to return to your motivations, to check in with your motivations, because even our kindest and best motivations can get corrupted. And so checking in with yourself is not a way of pointing yourself away from the things that are important to you, but instead a way to support your system so that you can sustain the efforts needed to navigate your life, whatever that means, wherever you're at and whatever that means.

Now, I want to touch on the first exact transit of this week. I touched on it last week, but let's get into it right now. So, on Sunday, April 28th, at 9:31 p.m. Pacific Time, we've got a Mars/Neptune conjunction at that anaretic degree of Pisces. It's at 28 degrees and 52 minutes. We can round it up to 29 if you like.

Now, Mars conjunct Neptune is a lot. We've been feeling this transit building for quite some time. And the way it feels is demoralizing. You may be feeling physically exhausted, psychologically exhausted. This transit⁠—it kind of makes you feel like there's holes in your pocket, and you're just walking around town with a bucketful of water, and you just keep on losing the water through the holes in the bucket. You know it's a Sesame Street thing. Maybe only gen X knows. Anyways, it's exhausting.

Mars is our ambitions and our motivations. It's sex and sex drive. It's competitiveness, and it's the body. Neptune is spirit. It's the way in which we are all connected. It is the ether. It is high spirituality. It's also anxiety and disassociation. And because of this, when these two planets sit on top of each other, we can feel pretty damn disassociated. We can feel burned out, exhausted, like we can't quite get enough energy to mobilize.

This is not a particularly good time for advancing individualistic aims. Mars is all about "what I want," and Neptune is how we are all interconnected. When something is done for self-involved motivations, it doesn't work⁠—not under a Mars conjunction to Neptune.

This transit can find you having a hard time staying grounded in our shared reality. And so you may be idealizing situations or people. The flip side of idealizing people and situations is imagining that you are much, much worse than them or you are much, much better than them, that they are much, much worse than you or they are much, much better than you. When we place people on pedestals, it's easy for them to fall. And we are engaged in a kind of thinking that basically kind of needs one person to be worse than the other. So sometimes it's you; sometimes it's the other guy.

The potential of this transit is that you infuse your goals and motivations with meaning, like real spiritual meaning. So it's the stuff I was just talking about. It's empathy. It's consideration. It's humanitarian. It's caring about others not just through thoughts and prayers but through your fucking actions⁠—Mars conjunct Neptune.

This transit absolutely can play out in a romantic way where you idealize a potential sexual partner or sexual partner that you have. If you are having sex, make sure to have safer sex because one of the things that a Mars conjunction to Neptune can do is incline you to take unnecessary risks with your physical and emotional health, but especially your physical health. So bag it⁠—whatever works for the kind of sex you have. This transit⁠—if you find yourself catching feelings for somebody, wait a week. Wait a week before you really make any decisions because you are unlikely to be seeing that person particularly clearly.

The thing to know about a Mars conjunction to Neptune is that it's an opportunity to bring more spiritual meaning to your goals and ambitions or to bolster your sense of self, your vitality, to take material actions to bolster your vitality. That's why, last week, I was talking to you about doing the simple things you know you need to do to take care of your body, like drinking water or sleeping or eating foods that you know nourish you, because these two planets are influencing each other in such a way that we can make real progress to deal with burnout, to align our actions with greater meaning.

A Mars conjunction to Neptune, like every conjunction, is the planting of the seed. It's the beginning of a new phase of development. And so we can make this phase of development be idealistic, a little disassociative, infused with defensiveness and paranoia⁠—easy. But the best-case scenario is that it is infused with meaning, with humanitarian care and concern, and that these energies are approached in a way that brings about sustainability.

Now, there's nothing about Neptune, Mars, or Pisces that is inherently sustainable energy. But there is something about how we choose to engage with energy. And in this case, we're dealing with Piscean energy, so how we choose to engage with our spiritual energy, with our deep innermost motivations and feelings and convictions.

If you can find a way to motivate yourself through generative impulses instead of those impulses that rob you of your vitality, rob you of your humanity, rob you of your energy, then you have created a level of sustainability that just kind of builds on itself.

One more thing I want to say about this transit is in reference to its influence more collectively. On a collective level, this transit can signify just a whole bunch of people feeling real fucking burned out all at once. Conversely, it could just as easily or simultaneously signify that groups of people feel motivated by deeply spiritual beliefs and convictions. So this can be a humanitarian push that is not, per se, religious. But when it comes to Neptune, it's often people who are kind of⁠—have a religious zealotry being motivated to defend their beliefs and the worldview that they want to cultivate. And so we have been and are likely to continue to see all of that⁠—the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it.

We don't want to forget that Mars governs policing. And already in the last week leading up to exactitude, we have seen across the United States cops being called in to universities and beating on students and teachers unprovoked. But it's not really unprovoked, is it? The provocation is groups of people coming together to demand that the system, that the empire, change and change in ways that is not profitable to the system, but instead just and centering humanitarian aims. And that's a threat to a system that thrives when people are locked up, when people are divisive and fighting each other instead of it.

So this transit is a really good reminder to never forget who your enemy really is. Your allies⁠—they don't have to agree with you on everything. Your allies⁠—they're not your besties. But your enemy would harm you at any turn just for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, for collective movements to succeed, we must watch our infighting, which really requires watching our own psychological and emotional and spiritual welfare so that we don't misplace our anger and fear away from where it really deserves to be, which is pointed at the systems that we're fighting against.

Okay. Let's go to the next exact transit. It's happening on April 30th. At 9:30 p.m. exactly⁠—that's Pacific Time⁠—we have a Venus square to Pluto. This is happening at two degrees and six minutes with Venus in Taurus and Pluto in Aquarius. Venus square to Pluto is a very fucking intense transit. Earlier this day, like 12 hours earlier on the same day, Mars moves into Aries. But we are still very much feeling the Mars conjunction to Neptune. And now we've got this Venus/Pluto square. Now, we were already feeling the Venus/Pluto square, to be clear. But now it's exact.

And so, separate from everything else, we have two very challenging transits to Mars and Venus, which are two very relational planets. So we know that friends, the people you're dating, people you share community with, any kind of social or romantic connections that you have, are likely to be more tense, more intense. There is a risk of drama. Now, I'm not against drama. Not all drama is bad. Sometimes drama is exactly what we need. But again, I want to remind you to pick your battles wisely and track your own internal workings so you don't get defensive or start shit with people when you don't need to, when it's not appropriate or helpful.

So let's talk about this Venus square to Pluto. Now, of course, Venus is the planet that governs our relationships, our values. It's a planet that's motivated by diplomacy and security and stability. Venus wants to get along. And Pluto likes to tear shit up. Pluto wants to transform and heal. It wants intensity. It motivates us to be compulsive and get fixated and can often find us in our survival mechanisms.

So, when Venus squares Pluto, what happens is things get intense interpersonally. And this is because power struggles come up. Now, those power struggles may be the power struggles that you're experiencing inside of you as you reflect on some shit that happened in your past. It could have been last week. It could have been 15 years ago.

You may be really just struggling with yourself. Because Pluto governs our survival mechanisms, when Pluto gets activated in your birth chart or in your psyche, it's hard to really be aware of it. And it's not hard because it's subtle, because Pluto is the opposite of subtle. But it's hard because our individual survival mechanisms feel like they are necessary for our survival. So, when your survival mechanisms are activated, you are likely to feel like the way you feel, the way you're thinking, is the only way to feel and it's the only way to think because your survival depends on it. That's how survival mechanisms work.

I guess this is a good time to remind you that I'm teaching a class on Pluto, and you can register for it. At this moment, there are still reduced-price tickets available. It's happening on May 4th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. It's a live webinar, but if you cannot make it live, it's fine because I always send out the recording to everyone who has registered within 72 hours. We are going to go as deep as we can in the time allowed into Pluto in the birth chart and by transit.

This is a class that I have been planning on teaching for quite some time, but thanks to my beloved patrons, who voted on me teaching this class at this time, I'm really excited about this one. And I hope you will join me. The link to register for this class is on the show notes to this episode and also always on my website and in my Linktree on social media.

I have digressed. Let's come back into this transit. Okay. Venus square Pluto and our survival mechanisms. This transit is going to reveal something of you to you, and it would be very easy for you to feel like it's revealing something of other people to you. And that's likely to be true, as well, but the thing to focus on is your own damn homework.

This is something else I was talking about on Patreon just a couple days ago. Astrology is fucking fascinating, right? I mean, we can all agree astrology is fascinating. And it is really, really interesting to look at other people's birth charts, to understand them, and to better contextualize and understand our relationships with them.

Many of you are going to want to do that this week because of the transits at play. But it is healing to look at your own birth chart, to focus on your own impulses, your own compulsions, your own behaviors, your own choices, your own motivations, your own history as is written in the chart.

The more that you are willing and able to own your part, to understand your patterns and what motivates them⁠—that's where the healing occurs. And when a transit like Venus square to Pluto happens, we have the opportunity to engage with our ugliest impulses that generally come out over survival mechanisms and engage with them in a different way, make different choices

And this is where I remind you that progress is progress is progress. And of course, we all want big, meteoric progress in all of our shit all the time. But that's not realistic. Even if you make a teeny, tiny little bit of progress in how you engage with your survival mechanisms, I want to salute you because progress is progress.

Now, a Venus square to Pluto transit can kick up your desire to be loved, your desire to get attention or validation. And kind of connected to that, it can kick up jealousy and fixations on people, possessiveness, manipulation⁠—all that kind of heavy Plutonian stuff.

This transit, especially if it hits your birth chart directly, so if you have anything at around two degrees of a fixed sign, which⁠—fixed signs are Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio, and Leo⁠—then you're likely to have power struggles. Right? You're likely to have power struggles. But again, I want to encourage you to ask yourself, what is it that you're really struggling over? What is it that you're struggling for? What is it that you're struggling against?

Understanding your own motivations can help you to clarify your own choices, your own behavior. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do when engaging with a difficult relationship dynamic is to stop, is just not to engage. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is to engage with greater self-awareness and greater intention.

But I will remind you of something that I've probably said a bunch of times on the podcast. Don't process with people you don't trust. No point in it. If you don't trust a person, do not open up your vulnerability and share it with them and process. If you determine on or around this transit that you don't trust someone, then it's on you to determine what your boundaries need to be⁠—not what you do with the relationship. That can kind of come. Relationships are collaborative.

But what your boundaries are⁠—that's all on you. It's on you to identify. It's on you to embody. And it's on you to protect. And when other people don't respect your boundaries, that's really good information for you to have about them. And with that information, you can develop better boundaries. Venus square to Pluto will often have people feeling dire and dramatic. And again, it's how we hold and respond to these emotions and these impulses that is the kind of deciding factor of whether or not this is healing or destructive.

So my advice to you is to not go straight to confrontation with other people and with situations. First sit honestly with your own thoughts and feelings, even though it's confronting to do so, to really be honest with yourself about how you feel, the messiness of how you feel. But that is where your truth lives. And when we're willing and able to sit with our truth, that's where our agency becomes more accessible, like your ability to make choices, to even recognize what your choices are.

It really requires being here now. And so much of the time, when we're in our survival mechanisms, we're not here now. We're in all the other times this thing happened. We're in our core wounding of when it happened in our childhood. In other words, we're in the past. And we are applying all of our shit from the past onto the present or onto our fears of the future.

And so, again, practicing being here in the mess with your feelings, no matter how intense they are, to understand yourself so that you can make the best possible choices⁠—that's a real good strategy for navigating this transit and for navigating Pluto in general.

A Venus square to Pluto transit can coincide with an abandonment. And nobody wants to be abandoned. I mean, it's a heartbreaking feeling. But at the very least, what you can make sure is that you don't abandon you in your time of need; you don't abandon you because you have judgments about the ways in which you feel. Also, you can commit to not behaving in ways that are abusive, cruel, or punishing towards others. And that includes people online, just for the record. What we do on the internet is what we do.

And it's really important to be owning our own behavior because this week in general, and certainly on and around this date, I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of trolls on the internet because a lot of people do not know how to stay present in a healthy way with toxic emotions. And so what do we do with our toxic emotions? We throw them at other people. And it's particularly easy to do that when you're anonymous and they can't talk back.

Instead of picking fights with others, tend to your emotions. The energetics of this astrology, of this transit but in particular of this transit and how it overlaps with the Mars/Neptune conjunction, has within it so much potential for healing, so much potential for healing. But it's not easy energy. And that shouldn't surprise you because we're not in easy times.

But if you're willing to do the work, if you try, you are likely to make progress. Probably, you won't be perfect. Probably, your life won't be perfect magically just because you tried. But that's not what we're going for. What we're going for is progress. Progress is progress is progress.

So that brings us to May 2nd. So I don't talk about Retrogrades of outer planets very often because they're Retrograde half the goddamn year. And for me, I don't personally tend to notice anything too major about it other than the fact that when a planet retrogrades, it can reignite an important transit. So there's that.

But the Retrograde on its own for outer planets, generally speaking, for me is not a big deal. That said, on May 2nd, 10:47 a.m. Pacific Time, we have Pluto at two degrees and six minutes of Aquarius start its Retrograde motion. And this is fucking newsworthy. May 2nd, it retrogrades. And at the start of September, it's back in Capricorn just in time for the American election.

And this, my dears, is fucking terrible news. It's something I talked about in the year-ahead forecast. And honestly, the astrology of the American election upcoming is⁠—it's so bad that it's something I will talk about later. I want to acknowledge the fresh and revolutionary energy. So I say fresh because it's still new having Pluto in Aquarius.

This is retrograding. It's moving back into Capricorn. And so my instinct here is that we are going to have more of a fever pitch of this experience of Pluto in Aquarius as it moves back into Capricorn. So this is something we'll talk about more, but it felt worth a solid mention.

Okay. And that brings us to the last exact transit of this week. On Friday, May 3rd, we have got a Mars sextile to Pluto. Mars is at two degrees and six minutes of Aries, and Pluto is at the same degrees of Aquarius. This is a fucking lovely transit, and I'm really happy to tell you something positive. It's nice. It's real nice.

Mars sextile to Pluto is like the antithesis of Mars conjunction to Neptune. Mars conjunction to Neptune drains and demoralizes. Mars sextile to Pluto fortifies and enlivens. This transit can really give you a boost, especially if it's hitting your chart directly, and extra especially if you have something at around two degrees of an air sign or a fire sign. So, of course, the air signs are Aquarius, Libra, and Gemini, and we've got fire, which is Leo, Sadge, and Aries.

This transit gives us a boost. It makes you feel motivated, deep, deep in your belly kind of motivated. This transit does not give you stamina. It's like fire and air. It's Mars and Pluto. But it does give you a solid push of motivation to make a change or get something done or just to be motivated to leave the house today. It depends on where you're at.

If there's something in your life that takes bravery, that needs a little juj, try to do it on or around this date. Mars sextile to Pluto gives you that juj. It gives you that boost. It's a transit that can coincide with feeling yourself. You might feel pretty sexy. You might feel like you want to get out there and get some. This is a great time for sex and sexual dynamics because it can be really⁠ like just a fun and energized moment.

It's also a really good time, if you've been feeling particularly burned out and drained, to fortify your system so that you feel the full benefits of this transit. So do all the things that you know you need to do in order to feel good in your body or your psyche. This transit makes it easier to find the motivation that you need to do a thing, especially if a thing needs confronting.

This transit will be especially helpful for everyone who's been just having such a rough time with the Mars/Neptune conjunction. If you acted out this week, especially with Venus square to Pluto, if you had relationship drama or you just were being weird because you were in your head and weird, Mars sextile to Pluto might make it easier for you to just own your part and start to work towards a better understanding or peace, whatever's needed.

Anything that requires bravery, anything that requires a burst of energy and focused energy⁠—right, because Pluto can be quite focused⁠—this transit will help you. This transit will help you a lot. My guess is that we're going to see really strong actions from activist groups around the world on and around this date because when Mars and Pluto form a sextile to each other, people are motivated. And they're strengthened by movement, by moving together. And movement can happen on a physical level, but it can also just be movements, like the movements that we have, and the feeling that they are stronger when we are actively engaged in them.

The one other thing I'll say about this particular transit is that in context of the rest of the astrology of this week, you may have been dealing with a lot of vulnerability in various parts of your life. This transit⁠—it's not like it's going to magically give you answers. But it can give you that boost so that you feel brave enough to stay with the work or that you feel energized enough to go deeper or to cultivate acceptance for where you are now.

A Mars sextile to Pluto is just a lovely transit. And it's not going to, again, magically give you answers, but it is going to support you in cultivating greater understanding if that's where you put your ambitions. It's all about where you point your ambitions. And if you find yourself putting a lot of energy into bullshit, basically, things that don't make you happy, things that don't make your life better, then this is a good time for you to ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing, what your motivations are. And if you don't like what you're doing and your motivations aren't that impressive to you⁠—they don't actually make sense⁠—then this is a great time for change. And this transit's energies will help you to make a change, which is really wonderful and powerful.

Now, that's it for this week's transits. As always, there will be a transcript of this episode up on my website over at ghostofapodcast.com within 24 hours of the episode drop. Also, if you would like to track the transits, just like I do, you can do so by subscribing to my transit-tracking tool. It is very simple. It does basically one thing: it tracks the damn transits and offers you a place to keep notes so that you can make sense of your predictions and your insights and all that kind of good stuff. And that's over at astrologyfordays.com.

And while you're out there clicking links, you may as well click on the contact form on my website at lovelanyadoo.com or ghostofapodcast.com⁠—whatever; it all brings you to the same place⁠—and send me a question to be considered for the podcast, where I give readings every single week to you, my community and the people I love.

All right. Take really good care of yourself and others, and I will talk to you in just a couple of days. Buh-bye.