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 Ghost of a Podcast. This week, we're looking at the astrology of November 23rd through the 29th of 2025. And I'm not going to get to say 2025 for that much longer. We are coming close to the end of the year, and things are shifting in a meaningful way.

I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the astrology of last week. Last week, I talked to you about a bazillion transits. It was a really active week astrologically. And most of the transits were what we call benefic transits, or supportive transits. They were sextiles and trines. And I don't know if you pay attention to politics—hopefully you do—but in the United States, just in this past week, the CDC came out with some really just false claims about ties between autism and vaccines. ICE continued to be kidnapping people off the street. The Washington Post came out with reporting claiming that the Coast Guard will no longer consider swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags as hate symbols. It's terrifying stuff. And the U.S. government is reclassifying many professional degrees—like teaching, social work, nursing—that are traditionally female-occupied fields so that they no longer can benefit from student loans above something like $20,000.

Now, this is not a news podcast, right? Verify everything I'm saying through the news and trusted reporting. I think it's really important that we all have habits and practices around our due diligence. But that was just a couple of things that I'm aware of that happened in the U.S., and that's just in the U.S. It's a big world. But the reason why I am bringing this up in the context of last week's really positive astrology is because there's an astrological lesson to be learned within this.

There's a tendency to think a benefic or easy/supportive transit means things are going to go good, and a challenging or malefic transit, a transit that really confronts you or is uncomfortable, is bad. But astrology—it's not moralistic in that way. Listen. You or I may apply moralistic qualities to an experience of a birth chart or a transit, but the truth is it's not moralistic.

When we have something like a sextile or a trine happening to—I don't know—let's say a country that is currently being run by an authoritarian figure and has descended into fascism—yes, I'm talking about the United States—when that occurs, and then there are sextile and trines, these positive, supportive, easy transits, a lot of times, things get worse because our supportive transits—what they do is they support what you have set up, whether you're thinking about a country, you're thinking about your job, your relationship, or your own birth chart; you're thinking about your own relationship to yourself, your psychology, your way of dealing with your childhood and your present life and all the things.

When a system is set up poorly, when a system is set up to be unfair or unhealthy, and then you get supportive transits, what happens, unless you really put a lot of effort to make it not happen that way, is that the energy for how things are set up flows. And we don't want everything to flow. If you have an unhealthy habit, you don't want it to flow. You actually want it to be challenged. You want to be confronted around it, ideally, so that you have the opportunity to think about what you're doing, reassess, and maybe shift gears.

And so I want to invite you, if you are somebody who looks at your birth chart, to really look at those sextiles and trines in your birth chart as well as the squares and oppositions and consider, are the ways in which your chart is easy and flowing reflecting your best possible self? Because what those "easy" aspects really indicate in your birth chart is that there is a capacity for flow and ease and potentially success and growth, but you have to find the motivation. And a lot of times, motivation comes from challenges.

And so those challenging parts of your birth chart are actually, a lot of times, the wells that you can draw from for your greatest advancement and growth and accomplishments. And I think a lot of times we see things in terms of good and bad, but that's not really how human development or life itself is. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn't. And I think this is important reflection to have for your use of astrology, but it's also important in the context of this larger transit we have of Saturn and Neptune being conjoined. And that won't be exact until early next year.

But it's important that we move out of black-and-white, good-or-bad thinking. We are being challenged to lean into the nuance, and to do so requires some sense of what you believe to be true. And that's in the context of Saturn, like what is real, but it's also in the context of Neptune. What do you believe? What are your convictions? Where is faith inside of you, and how does it function or not?

And so, to that end, I want to also acknowledge that in the United States this week, on the 27th, there will be the national day of mourning also referred to as Thanksgiving. And it's important to recognize the choices you make around how you engage with that holiday and which version of reality you are centering in your life through the rituals and routines that you perform with your friends and family or with society at-large and in your own thinking. It is beautiful to have a ritual that centers around gratitude and coming together with family, but it's horrifying to acknowledge what this holiday of Thanksgiving is really predicated on, which is genocide and the continued marginalization, repression, and oppression of Indigenous communities in the United States and, honestly, worldwide.

I want to invite you to sit with the nuance, with the messiness, and to recognize that sometimes being confronted by something that is uncomfortable but true is an opportunity for you to evolve. And your evolution is not a good or a bad thing. It's not a fixed point. It's about being on a journey within yourself, in your relationships, or in whatever context you're thinking about it in.

Now, we're about to get into your horoscope for November 23rd through the 29th of 2025. But I want to just give you one last little detail here. We are not going to be dropping a midweek episode this week, but there will be one the following week. And if you miss getting extra readings and content from me, you can always join me over on Patreon, where I drop content frequently, and we are always going deeper and deeper into astrology and the woo and all the things.

All right. Let's dive into this week's forecast. So, on Sunday, November 23rd, at exactly 11:20 a.m. Pacific Time, the Sun will be at 1 degree and 45 minutes of Sagittarius—because welcome to Sagittarius Season—and it'll be sextile to Pluto at the same degrees of Aquarius. Sun sextile to Pluto is another benefic transit. It's a lovely transit. In terms of its indications, it takes your identity and your sense of self, what you feel the capacity for—the Sun—and it gives it a little spark of creative energy to Pluto. Pluto relates to the depths—the depths of a situation, of your psyche, of your capacity to grow, evolve, and heal. Pluto is not about surface-level insights or developments. Again, it's deep.

And so this is a great transit for any kind of healing work—like, any kind of healing work, like healing the divide between you and your bestie over a weird thing that happened with money, healing the relationship between your knee and your love of running—whatever it is, whether it's physical, whether it's dynamic, whether it's psychological and really personal. This transit is just wonderful for empowering you to go deeper and to find alignment through being authentic with what's really happening at the heart of a matter.

If you use this energy or if it hits your chart in any particular way, really, this transit can help you to activate and make things happen. It kind of spices things up and can intensify your passions. If you don't really do anything with it, then as I said earlier, whatever it is that you have set up, whatever your deepest motivations are, will just flow. Now, I can tell you as somebody who does trauma-informed consulting work that most of our individual, deep motivations towards pretty much everything are not ideal.

And so, if you find yourself behaving in a particular way to yourself, to other people, holding a truth or something that you're dealing with in a way that is unkind towards yourself or others, bringing awareness to that thing is progress. I cannot state this emphatically enough. Progress includes the stage of awareness. This is why education is so important. And in fact, this transit is really good for education, for—whether it's studying something in any way, because there are so many ways of engaging with learning, or just being open to being more aware about what's motivating you, about what you're doing and the impact it's having on others, or you may experience the impact that others have on you. You may gain more clarity about who you are, who you're with, and how it all shakes down, what it means.

The Sun sextile to Pluto is powerful. It can happen kind of quickly. It can kick up some quick energies because we're dealing with the Sun in a fire sign and Pluto in an air sign. So I don't know if you've ever seen what happens when you add fire and air. The fire gets bigger. The fire spreads. And so this can be a fire of learning, the fire of alignment, the fire of being passionate about bringing reform or healing or awareness to something that needs those things. So tap into these energies because they're absolutely worth engaging with.

Now, that brings us to Monday, November 24th. Mercury is Retrograde. How could we forget? And at 5:52 p.m. Pacific Time, Mercury will be at 22 degrees of Scorpio and 45 minutes, and Venus will be at the exact same degrees of Scorpio. And so Mercury Retrograde conjoined Venus is overlapping with that Sun sextile to Pluto. This deepens our capacity to understand how it's going to show up in relationships. This is a great relationship transit, theoretically.

So the Sun sextile to Pluto deepens your desire for a real experience. It deepens your capacity to understand and to be understanding. It also can make you excited. So that could be having crushes on people, hooking up with someone you're already in a relationship with. It can be excited about projects or other developments. It could just mean that you're having a nice day, that you feel good, you got a little spring in your step.

Mercury conjunction to Venus in Scorpio is also a pretty passionate transit. It kicks up the desire to connect deeply with others, and that depth could be super woo and about having the desire to have a spiritual experience or share your spiritual experience with others. It may instead be about flirting, dating, hooking up. It could be that kind of passion.

The energetics of Scorpio are really good for reform, and the reason why is because Scorpio holds within it the emotional energy—because it is a water sign—for going deeper and understanding the messiness of a thing. And so, when you pair that messy, emotional presence with Mercury, which is friendship—it's also your mind. It's how you think. It's how you process data. It's how you listen, how you communicate—and Venus, which is diplomacy—it's your values system. It's the people you value. It's your relationships and your sense impressions. Then you have within it the capacity to garner greater reflection and understanding, keeping in mind Mercury is Retrograde, so we're still reflecting. We're reassessing. We're recalibrating.

This transit is excellent for figuring things out, for connecting with people. And I'm not talking about hanging out with people. Hanging out with people is great. I'm talking about connecting with people. That means listening to people, really listening, showing up and sharing of yourself. And depending on your nature, one of those things is likely to be a little bit easier for you or more organic for you than the other. So whatever it is that is not as organic or easy is the thing you want to practice doing during this transit.

This is a lovely transit. There's no real downside, other than I suppose you can find yourself in the comment section, just wasting your energy and time telling people what they should think or what they should value. You get a lot more traction, honestly, out of your time and energy by allowing other people to reveal themselves to you and then establishing your needs, your preferences, your boundaries from there, instead of trying to tell people what they should value, what they should think, how they should behave around other people.

We often find ourselves so quick to communicate our version of reality, our version of whatever it is, that we don't really listen to where other people are coming from. And that creates a lot of problems in the short term but even deeper problems in the long term. My hope for you this Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio—we only have a couple days left of it at this point—is that you really practice listening; you practice noticing when you get defensive, when you are busy rebutting in your thinking, so you're no longer actually listening to what the other person said because you can't really form a rebuttal or a defense or whatever and listen at the same time. I don't know. Maybe you're special. Maybe you can. But it's not really deep listening.

Now, one last thing I'll say about this transit is it's great for making art. It's great for any kind of creative endeavor that you feel drawn to. So, if it's listening to music in your bedroom or watching a film that really inspires you, that's great. Again, this transit is an opportunity for you to know yourself a little better and maybe get to know the world or a person better. So lean in.

Now, that brings us to Wednesday, the 26th. And on Wednesday, the 26th, we have two transits from Venus. At 8:31 a.m. Pacific Time, Venus will be at 24 degrees and 47 minutes of Scorpio, and it'll form an exact trine to Jupiter at the same degrees of Cancer. Later that afternoon, at 3:48 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus will be at 25 degrees and 10 minutes of Scorpio, forming an exact trine to Saturn at the same degrees of Pisces.

Now, if you want to be tracking the transits and using the same tool that I'm using—and maybe you're watching the video version of this podcast available on YouTube or on the public page of my Patreon. You can look along with me and see the transit-tracking tool that I use. It's called Astrology for Days, and my partner and I made it a couple years ago because I needed a way to track the transits without having a bunch of crappy astrological interpretations shoved down my throat. So, if you want something like this to track the transits, you can go ahead and subscribe to Astrology for Days over at astrologyfordays.com.

Okay. So Venus trine Jupiter—this is one of those transits that, a lot of times, you'll see on the internet promises of love and romance and just everything's going to be perfect; make a wish, and your wish will come true. This is all bullshit. It's not how astrology works, okay? Venus trine Jupiter is a transit that is lovely. It can represent a day where you're like, "Oh, I feel good," or, "My outfit turned out cute," or, "I had a cute flirty moment with a stranger at the supermarket," or, "I just had a loving time with my partner." You know, it feels good. It's a feel-good moment.

Venus trine to Jupiter can also be a transit where you connect with your values and have a growth experience. So you may decide, "Oh, I'm doing some sort of shopping, and I had the choice to shop with a company that I think has really terrible practices, and I made a better choice. I decided to shop with a company that somehow embodies my values or doesn't work against my values." That's a great example of Venus trine Jupiter.

This is a transit where you can really expand or grow your relationships, your creative practice. So, if you're an artist or you're just somebody who's playing with creativity, this can be a transit where you experience love and like and tenderness and flirting and all those kinds of lovely, life-affirming feelings. It's great. It's wonderful. Will you fall in love with somebody, or if you meet somebody, is it destined to be something you can rely on that will work over the course of time? No. No. No. But it's a feel-good transit. So, if I feel good and you feel good, and then we meet up and I feel good and you feel good, and I feel open and you feel open, then there's more energy between us, and things can happen. And that's exciting.

So lean in. Have fun. Just don't be superstitious and idealistic with astrology because that's not how astrology works. If you don't believe me, let me assure you that Venus trine Jupiter happens frequently enough that you have lots and lots of proof that this transit does not always coincide with love and luck and growth and all the things. You want it to hit your chart in a nice way for best results.

Venus trine Saturn is such a great transit to have happening at the same time as Venus trine Jupiter because Venus trine Jupiter is—it's Jupiterian. It's like, you know, something happened in a moment. Venus trine Saturn grounds and stabilizes this energy. And it is important to know that Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn are forming a Grand Trine to each other. That's a configuration when three or more planets are all in water signs at the same degree. So it's a big, old triangle. And this is a benefic flow of energy.

Now, let's say you're somebody who struggles with a shopping addiction or other compulsive behaviors of people-pleasing or avoiding conflict and therefore kind of feeling stuck or sidelined in your own relationships. A Grand Trine like this can fuck you up because it can indicate a flow of those energies. But the good news is, if you are able to confront whatever it is that's happening—confront your behavior or your attitudes, your relationships—whatever—in an honest way, if you can prioritize alignment over accommodation, being aligned with what's authentic to you over being accommodating to your circumstances or to other people, then what can happen is amazing emotional and interdynamic growth can occur.

Venus trine Saturn is grounding. Venus and Saturn are the two planets most associated with stability and security. The Moon is close at hand, but Venus and Saturn really like stability and security. And so this transit is one in which what you do and how you do it in your relationships, in regards to your finances, in the long-arching relationship between you and your values can get more realistic, more sustainable. In fact, this is a great time for you to think about sustainability, what's sustainable for you and how you are engaging with the world, how you are engaging with your finances—because Venus is related to your personal finances—how you're engaging with those you love, with the projects and people you're invested in, and on a more social level, in the movements that you care about in the world.

The world is changing. It's changing fast. And how you show up and actively engage is a reflection on you, and it's also something that shapes the world because, whether or not it feels like it, what you do super fucking matters. You do nothing—that matters. You do something—that matters, even if what you do doesn't yield the results you're hoping for. Everything we do actually matters. The money that you spend, the values that you prioritize, the people you keep in your life, the actions you take, and the times you sit back and let other people deal with shit—all of that adds up. It adds up to our collective conditions, to your social world, your social life, and it adds up to your sense of self.

Venus, which is the planet involved in both of these transits, is very much related to self-worth. And the way in which it's related to self-worth is not whether or not you look cute. It's not whether or not you get along with people, although those things feed into self-worth in a meaningful way. Over the course of a lifetime, self-worth is related to whether or not you are living in accordance with your damn values. So, if you don't know what you value, these two transits are your friend. Watch videos. Read articles. Read a book about values. What are values? What are examples of values that people hold?

And if you do identify your values, ask yourself, "Am I living in ways that reflect those values?" And life is full of compromise. But these transits—Venus trine to Jupiter and Venus trine to Saturn—are opportunities for you to cultivate greater awareness and activation around the things that you value and the ways in which you participate in this world.

Now, the last thing I'm going to say about this is I know a lot of people are going to be around family—family of origin, chosen family—this particular week. And I want to just say that these particular transits are supportive. They are challenging you—not in a challenging way, in an easeful way—to hold your values. Hold your values. When it comes to a lot of things, it's important to understand there's different ways of looking at a thing. And when it comes to some things, there is right and wrong.

A tricky thing about life—and in particular, life in 2025 and, you'll find, in 2026—is recognizing where it's important to hold space for all sides and where it's important to pick a damn side. Some people are much more comfortable with one behavior than the other. But with a transit like this, it empowers you, if you're willing to do the work, to truly listen to where other people are coming from without having it negate or invalidate your perspective. Again, this requires self-worth. And whatever it is that comes up for you on and around this date is a great reflection of where you're at in relationship to your values and your self-worth. And that information is gold. You can use it to facilitate greater progress and growth in your life and your relationships.

Now, that brings us to November 29th. It's a Saturday, and it's the last day of this week's horoscope. And on this date, two important astrological things happen. The first is Mercury goes direct at 20 degrees of Scorpio and 42 minutes, and that will be exact at 9:38 a.m. Pacific Time. So 9:39 a.m. Pacific Time, you can no longer blame your problems on Mercury Retrograde. That's over. It's over.

Now, we'll go through the Mercury Retroshade as Mercury now moves forward through the degrees that it just retrograded past. And at that time, you'll be like, "Oh shit. I made this mistake. I had this misunderstanding." You have the opportunity to kind of tidy some things up, clarify some things. It's a little Mercury shady, but it's no longer Mercury Retrogrady, which means sign your contracts. Make your decisions. Make your plans. It's all good.

Okay. Now, later that day, on Saturday, the 29th, at 6:48 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus sits at the very anaretic degree of Scorpio, 29 degrees of Scorpio and 5 minutes, exactly opposite to Uranus at 29 degrees of Taurus and 5 minutes. So let's just start with the anaretic Scorpio in Taurus vibes.

The first thing I want to point out about this is simply that it's an opportunity to lean into messiness, to assess your values, or to have your sense of stability challenged by emotional realities. Let's just start with that, because Venus opposite Uranus is inherently a transit that will impact your relationships. So that may be your relationship to self-worth. It may be your relationship to a person or to a sense of belonging in a really personal way to a community because Venus is that sense-based, personal relationship planet, while Uranus is community. It's groups of friends. It's alliances within movements, even.

When these two planets are opposite each other, we can expect a number of things. The first is unsettling circumstances in your relationships. Now, this can be that a surprise happens, and that surprise may be pleasant. It might be activating. It might be unpleasant. It can really be anything. But the point of this surprise is that it rattles you or your dynamic in such a way that you're forced to fall back on your values. You're meant to fall back on what's important to you, your priorities.

Venus opposite Uranus is not a good time to make anything permanent, to have conversations that really impact where a project or a relationship is going unless that conversation is meant to explore all possibilities without attachment to how things were or even to creating stability and security tomorrow. Uranus wants freedom and is really like a mosaic planet. It wants to break things up that are too big and put them back together in new ways. Venus, on the other hand, loves the way things were, loves for things to stay stable and in one piece. So you can see how this transit can be disruptive.

This can also be a really exciting transit where you meet new people or you engage with the

people in your life in new ways, where passions are stirred and habits are interrupted so that you have more fun or you explore new possibilities. Again, it can be a really great transit. And in that context, there also may be developments in public, in social and political contexts, for the rights of women or around the rights of women, keeping in mind that in patriarchy the "rights of women" include all genders that are not cis male, and also, they include the rights of Queer people oftentimes. So women may have more rights in a society than Gay people, but there's a deep connection between the two.

We may see the development or some sort of curtailing of rights for women, Queers, and Genderqueer or Trans folks. And this is something that will likely have a strong reaction from the populace because Venus opposite Uranus can be a really great transit for community-led movements. This is a great time to get involved in mutual aid, whether you are in need of it and you need to reach out and ask your community or your communities for help, or if you have time or resources to share, this is a great time to be like, "Oh, yeah, I can share my abundance in some meaningful way, and I don't have to be attached to what it looks like or who is on the receiving end of that." But the act of sharing your resources tends to create greater sense of abundance, especially if it comes from an honest and aligned place. So that can be kind of exciting.

This is a bad time for making major purchases, especially ones you haven't really thought through. We're a couple hours outside of Mercury Retrograde, and also, Venus opposite Uranus can, for some people, inspire impulse spending that can be really problematic. So, if you're somebody who has a tendency to buy happy or make purchases and then regret it, just hold off. Give it fucking 72 hours. 72 hours is all you need to let this transit pass a bit.

Now, in the context of dealing with family, if you are around family or people who are not exactly aligned with your values, this transit can bring about disruptions. I am of the mind that values-based conflict and confrontation is valuable. When we have difficult and confronting conversations or interactions with people based on something that's real and important to us, it's healthy. Not all disruptions or conflicts are inherently bad, and getting along is not necessarily or inherently good. Again, we want to pull out value judgments and instead strive to seek alignment and authenticity in how we engage with our inner dialogue and how we engage with others.

And that, my friends, is your horoscope for the week. I'm going to do a quick recap. On the 23rd, the Sun forms an exact sextile to Pluto. On the 24th, Mercury Retrograde sits on top of Venus in Scorpio. On the 26th, Venus forms a trine to Jupiter and Saturn, and we have this beautiful Grand Trine between Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter. On the 29th, Mercury goes direct—huzzah—and Venus sits opposite to Uranus.

On the 1st of every month, I drop a month-ahead forecast on the kittens level of my Patreon. You can go ahead and join me over there, or if you just want to purchase that reading as a stand-alone and you don't want to be a monthly supporter on Patreon, then you can get it there and get ahead on the astrology of the last month of the year. And get ready because after Mercury goes direct, I'm going to announce my webinar for looking at the astrology of 2026, coming soon. So details to follow.

As always, I thank you so much for joining me here for Ghost of a Podcast. And I hope you take really good care of yourself and others, and I'll talk to you next week.