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 to another episode of Ghost. This week, we are going to look at the astrology of May 5th through the 11th of 2024. And we're going to talk about feelings. But first, I want to thank everyone who came to my May 4th class called Pluto Party. It was really fantastic. It was just a great class and a great group, so thank you for that. And if you missed it and you would like to purchase this class, it will be for sale on my website either by the time you hear this or shortly thereafter on the Shop page.

And if you didn't know, I have a Shop page. And on that Shop page, you can get cute Ghost of a Podcast T-shirts, but also, you can buy webinars and learn astrology with me. You can also learn astrology with me on my Patreon. So there's lots of ways to learn if you're in the market for such things.

Anyways, we're going to talk about the astrology of the week, including the New Moon in Taurus. But I want to take a moment to acknowledge your feelings, to acknowledge how absolutely fever-pitched the world is right now, how overwhelming, out-of-control-feeling things are, and how that inevitably is going to trigger inside of you, inside of your sweet and tender heart, all kinds of complicated responses⁠—psychological, spiritual, emotional, and physical.

And I don't know what's happening inside of you personally, of course. But I do know that we as humans are not great at processing this much fear and grief all at once. And it's okay if you're having a hard time processing your emotions. I had this experience last week where I was just going about my business and taking in the news and trying to process it and taking in the world and trying to process it. And my anxieties were just, day after day, getting worse and worse.

And then I had this huge "aha" moment where I was like, "Oh. I'm not feeling my feelings at all. I'm not processing any of this emotionally because the emotions are so hard to bear, and there's nothing I can do about my emotions. So I'm just trying to live around them." And when I caught myself doing that and I was able to take that awareness and put it towards actually sitting with my feelings, sitting with my emotions, it shifted kind of everything. And that was me. That's a personal share. But it got me to thinking I cannot be alone in this.

The power of acknowledging the emotional mess that exists inside of you is actually quite transformative, not because you can then figure out what to do with it or fix it or change it⁠—it's just the practice of being present and releasing attachments to the way you think you should feel or what you should do or where you should be, just laying judgments and the desire to control or contain or even progress⁠⁠—just putting all that shit aside for a minute to just feel what you feel can be so transformational.

And so I wanted to take a moment as we embark upon this astrological journey together to invite you to feel your feelings and to gently remind you that experiencing your emotions, even when it doesn't feel awesome, is really healthy. And shoving them down or trying to explain them away or minimizing them or losing yourself in them so that you're no longer feeling them, but they're feeling you⁠—all of that stuff catches up with you. And that's okay. Hey, that's okay. It's okay if it catches up with you.

But the way that you have greatest access to your healthiest and best-adjusted parts is by remembering to bring along your emotional, vulnerable, and tender parts for the ride. And this life is quite a ride, so I guess giddyap.

Okay. As I said, we're looking at May 5th through the 11th of 2024. And this week starts off with not one but two exact transits on the same day. On Monday, May 6th, Mercury hits 21 degrees and 2 minutes, sitting right on top of Chiron at the exact same degrees of Aries. So we have a Mercury/Chiron conjunction that's exact at 7:27 p.m. Pacific Time. Later that same day⁠—in Pacific Time, anyways⁠—we've got a Sun sextile to Saturn that's exact at 10:42 p.m. And that's with the Sun at 17 degrees and 10 minutes of Taurus and Saturn at the same degrees of Pisces.

Now, Mercury conjunction to Chiron is a little bit of a mixed-bag transit. This transit may be a time where you feel called to speak up about something that you think is wrong, that you think is an abuse of power or just simply not just, that it is hurting people or hurting you. So you may speak up for yourself or you may find yourself speaking out on injustices. There may be something meaningful that happens in the news⁠—somebody with power says things just right or says something that is somehow really moving because this transit⁠—it intensifies our ability to speak on suffering, to speak on our wounds.

And this is the thing. Most harm that humans perpetrate comes from their own wounding, from harm that they have internalized from something else in their lives. Now, of course, there's exceptions to every rule. But generally speaking, we know hurt people hurt people. And when a transit like Mercury conjunction to Chiron comes up, we may figure something out. Individuals or groups of people may come together and find a way to articulate the pattern of wounding and how it is continuing to harm a dynamic at home in your family life, a dynamic at work, a dynamic in the world with any of the number of atrocities that are happening from human design and human behavior.

On a more personal level, this is a great time for therapy. It's a great time for spending a little time with the dear diary because you can sort through past wounds, both events that hurt you in your past but also patterns in your thinking or in your experience of wounding that have really hurt you, especially in regards to your feelings of belonging. And you can make sense of these things. You can make sense of them in a new way and in a way that actually shifts the needle a little bit.

This transit will yield opportunities to get right with yourself, to shift your thinking, to bring greater clarity to what hurts, and to potentially come to a different understanding, a better understanding, of yourself and of the patterns that are playing themselves out in your life or in the world. Because this is happening in Aries, the themes that this is likely to touch on for you is your sense of belonging, like your identity and your sense of self, your ambitions, your sexuality, or your feelings in your body. Mars is related to embodiment.

And any of these things may be triggered by the Mercury conjunction to Chiron, and you have the opportunity within that to flip the script. And I'm not saying to create a fiction or to weave a narrative, but to profoundly shift your understanding of where you're at by contextualizing where you've been. This is not an easy process, and it might happen through labor. It might happen kind of spontaneously.

But what you want to be open to is staying present with what hurts so you can better understand it and, if it's relevant, finding ways of communicating what's going on for you with other people. You just want to keep in mind that Mercury conjunction to Chiron can coincide with people acting out of their wounding. And because it's Mercury, it's talking shit/not listening out of their wounding. So we may see a lot of fighting. And Aries can be combat and combative, and Mercury is the mind. It's fighting through arguing conversation as opposed to fisticuffs.

It could also be a transit⁠—and this is something I don't know about because it's still a developing issue⁠—where we see something with AI or deep fakes emerging, and we just don't know who or what to trust. The thing to keep in mind is that in order for you to have a sense of peace or equilibrium within yourself and to be able to bring that energy to the things that are important to you in your life, it's necessary that you sometimes spend time with your own sadness, with your own grief, and with your own wounding. And I know that's a total boner, but it is also a way of practicing not abandoning yourself, practicing being more whole and being more empathetic and kind to yourself and hopefully sharing that delightful kindness and empathy with others.

Now, again, I expect there to be a lot of fighting and disagreements in private and in public with this transit. But if you stay interested and curious⁠—Mercury⁠—about what wounds are getting triggered within you or within the person or persons that you're dealing with, that can be really transformative. So consider it as you go about your day, okay?

On the same day, we have a Sun sextile to Saturn. Luckily, this is a very fortifying and grounding transit. This transit helps a person feel more grounded. Thank you, Saturn. If you need to conserve your energies to sustain your efforts, to kind of suck it up and get it done, Sun sextile to Saturn is here to help you. This transit empowers you to act from a place of integrity and self-awareness, self-knowledge. This can improve your ability to recognize a thing, name what needs to be done, and then get 'er did.

This transit helps you to sort through what could be menial or difficult tasks and to complete them. Saturn is a closer. So, if there are things that you need to do that are administrative or kind of requiring Saturn's steadiness, this is a great time to do it because a Sun sextile to Saturn helps us to do things efficiently and to conserve your energy in a smart way.

Now, the fact this transit is overlapping with the Mercury/Chiron conjunction is great news because what it tells us is that the Sun sextile to Saturn will steady what could be kind of a reactive and defensive Mercury conjunction to Chiron. This will help you to remember who you are and to do whatever work needs doing on yourself, in your relationships, on projects, or in the world⁠—maybe a little bit of both, a little bit of all of it.

This is a really stabilizing transit. And if you have planets at around 17 degrees of an earth sign⁠—which is Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn⁠—or a water sign⁠—which is Pisces, Cancer, and Scorpio⁠—you're going to get especially a little boost from it. Now, these two transits overlap with the last major transit of the week, which just so happens to be occurring on May 7th, which is a Tuesday, at 8:22 p.m. Pacific Time. Let me tell you all about it.

This New Moon occurs with the Sun and Moon at 18 degrees and 2 minutes of Taurus, and we have a nice little stellium in Taurus. We've got Venus sitting on top of the Sun and Moon. We've got Jupiter sitting on top of Uranus. And we've got Uranus sitting on top of the Sun and Moon. We've also got, of course, the Chiron/Mercury conjunction that is very close to exactitude. And we have got that Neptune/Mars conjunction still in the vibes. There's a lot going on. Saturn is forming a sextile to Venus, the Sun, Moon, and Uranus. Some of that is very wide. None of it's exact, but just to give you a backdrop.

There are some really lovely things about this New Moon chart and some challenging things. Let's start with the hard part. Listen. This is a time of revolution. This is a time where the world order is changing. Or maybe it's not changing. Maybe it's doing what it does, but masses of people are coming together to stand up for what they believe to be right. And the system is doing what the system does, which⁠—let's talk about here in the United States⁠—cracking down, limiting our free speech, limiting our right to protest, two very important rights in any functioning democracy.

So there is this chaotic Jupiter/Uranus conjunction that sparks rebellion and revolution and people-led movements for social justice, for centering the humanity in others⁠, right? Beautiful and messy all at once. We've also got the Chiron/Mercury conjunction. The North Node is in the mix, but we've got the Chiron/Mercury conjunction, and it is having all of us experience our own wounding in our thinking. We are defensive. We are looking for evidence of our wounding either because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy⁠—you know how humans do⁠—or because we're trying to heal it, or some sort of messy mix of the two.

And this wider Neptune/Mars conjunction is a transit that is connected to religious fanaticism and religious violence and also, unfortunately, spiritual bypassing. So it's a mess. It's a mess. What this means for the world can be very good in the long term but is unlikely to be spectacular in the short term because when fighting against oppressive or violent systems, there tends to be further oppression and violence from the system back onto the people who are fighting against it.

So I expect, in the world, it will be a very intense time. But because it is a New Moon in Taurus and Uranus is real close to the Sun and Moon⁠—Jupiter is not that far away⁠—what we have is the potential for real change. And so this New Moon is a spectacular time, in terms of social movements and social change, for there to be material improvements made. Now, again, whenever we're dealing with world issues, we need to keep in mind, whose improvements? Improvements by whose standards?

This New Moon brings with it the potential for making real improvements in the world. So, however you feel called to do that, this is a great time to participate in material ways in actions that reflect your values. Now, on a more personal level, this is a really exciting New Moon because it is really fertile. It's Taurus. It's really fertile. This is a great time for setting intentions, for making change, not just random change, not just sideways change, but creating progress and improvements.

Taurus is related to, of course, your values, also our finances and our relationships. And so this is a really great time to be intentional about what you're bringing to those things and what you want to co-create or manifest with these things. Jupiter and Venus's presence in this New Moon absolutely support the idea that things can go well, that we can have appreciable improvements in parts of our lives that we feed, that we feed with our attention, that we feed by being aligned with what is authentic and values-driven for us.

And so what that's going to be is going to be different for you than it is for someone else. It's going to be different for you today than it might have been a month ago. This is a New Moon, so it's all about your feelings. It's about being emotionally honest with yourself so that you can align with your truth.

Because of Uranus's presence, the potential for progress is huge. And within that, we may have real surprises. Something unexpected may come up within you, may come up in a relationship, or something may happen in the world that directly affects you in ways you were not planning on. That's Uranus's function.

Uranus helps us to be open to exploring possibility, to trying new things. And because the Sun is sextile Saturn, there is a grounding element here to support us in not going off the rails in a way that isn't helpful, but again, acting in ways that are sustainable. So this New Moon has a lot of amazing potential.

If you've been burned out, this is a good time to get in touch with your own resiliency, to tap into your body⁠—into the present moment first and then your body⁠—as a way to get grounded in the here and now and the potential that exists within the here and now. A Taurus New Moon is a great time for tapping into abundance and gratitude. And if you can't do that, this is a good time to practice, to plant the seeds, because New Moons are the time for seed planting.

If you're going to do any kind of New Moon manifestation ritual or anything like that, this is actually a great time for doing it. No notes, except be open to what you can't yet conceive of. Don't be too controlling. You know how Taurus can be a little stubborn, get a little fixed on what it wants. We don't want to do that. That's the only thing I would warn you against with this New Moon because you may not cease what's around the corner, and what's around the corner may be absolutely fucking lovely. Be open to it. Don't block your blessings.

And finally, I want to say⁠—and this is something I've been saying, I think, a bit lately. But love can be a fortifying and catalyzing force if you let it. Whether you need a little more self-love⁠—not theoretical self-love, but actual self-love, like practices, behaviors, acting like you value yourself⁠—that kind of shit. If you need to practice self-love, this New Moon is a great assist to that.

If it's time for you to show up for the people in your life and actually materially show them how much you care about them, how you value their role in your life⁠—or maybe you need to work on a relationship and kind of deal with or acknowledge what isn't working in your relationships⁠—this New Moon is actually quite helpful for that.

I know, because a lot of you write in and ask questions about this⁠, so many of you are wanting to find ways to help with what's happening in the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, and all these places in the world and not knowing how. This New Moon is a great time to find an action⁠—an action⁠—and do it, to set the intention that you're going to do something that reflects your values.

And a lot of people are writing in and telling me how burned out you are and scared you are. Okay. This New Moon is a great time to identify what kind of boundaries you need to have in your thinking, in your behavior, whatever it is⁠—in your news consumption⁠—so that you can sustain doing the things that are important here.

A New Moon in Taurus is always going to be an invitation to get emotionally clear about what you value and how you are or aren't embodying those things in your life. And sometimes the answer to that question or those questions is going to be uncomfortable, and sometimes it's going to be inspiring. And we need to be here for all of it.

Taurus is associated with security and stability. And again, that's related to finances. It's related to relationships. But it's also just related to your sense of safety in the world, in the material world. And there may be things that you feel that you need to do or be thinking about or working towards to preserve your safety or to deal with your feelings of not being safe or your concerns about the safety of others. And that's triggering. It's messy.

Listen. We have Chiron. We have Pluto. We have Saturn. We have these planets in astrology that speak to the fucked-up and painful nature of humans. Now, I don't believe that we can't have peace or that we can't have nice things. I don't believe that. But I do believe that we have evidence, by looking around the world and also by studying astrology, of how we humans are fucked up and how we hurt ourselves and how we hurt other people.

If we can take opportunities like this New Moon, like this Mercury/Chiron conjunction, to investigate our own core wounding and our own maladjusted coping mechanisms and responses to the shit that we're dealing with, the shit that we're living through, then we can start participating in more sustainable, healthy, and aligned ways. And that makes you better, and it makes the world better. And if we're all doing it, the world gets a lot better. But you can't control the world, unfortunately⁠—or fortunately, depending.

All you can do is navigate your own course in this life and know that you will fail, and you will struggle. And you will succeed, and you will prevail⁠—and all of it. And none of those things need to define you. It's the journey that defines you, not each individual misstep or successful leap. None of these individual things really do define us, even though it feels that way. It's the big picture. It's the path. So stay with the path.

This New Moon is an invitation, and can be an invocation, for you to align with your integrity and the ways in which you can live that reflect that alignment and that integrity. And that is just good news, if you ask me. I mean, not unqualified blessings, but good news. We could use that, I feel.

So this is a short and sweet horoscope, so I'm not going to run through the transits for you. It's just three. But of course, as always, you can read the transcript on my website, the very same place where you can send me a question to be considered for the podcast. And you can find the link to join my Patreon, where I teach astrology and woo. And if you're at the kittens level, I drop a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast every month on the 1st of the month where I break down the transits for the month ahead. So I got lots of offerings.

And if you get value from this podcast, please hit that Subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me for another week of Ghost of a Podcast. I hope you take really good care of yourself and others, and I will talk to you in just a couple of days. Buh-bye.