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 going to be looking at the astrology of December 28th of 2025 through January 3rd of 2026. And for this very New Year's forecast, I want to just kind of give you just a couple little goodies. On my Patreon, for all of my free and paid members, I have a Tarot-reading spread with really clear instructions on how to do the reading for looking at your year ahead, 2026. So you can go over to my Patreon and check that out if that's something that you're interested in.

Also, on the 1st of every month, including January 1st of 2026, I have a month-ahead bonus episode Ghost of a Podcast that is released. You can find it on all the platforms where podcast episodes are found, or you can get it over on my Patreon. While you're there, you can join me for all kinds of good stuff, including my new mentorship tier called the Lover's Tier.

Finally, I want to remind you about my upcoming webinar with astrologer Tony Howard. It's called The Astrology of 2026: How to Work with the Biggest Shifts of the Year. I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that at the end of the episode, so stay tuned.

Let's talk about this week's astrology. We're not just going to talk about the details of the three very important transits that are happening this week; I also want to give you this umbrella view of the Saturn/Neptune conjunction that we've been going through throughout 2025 but comes into exactitude in 2026. Now, the reason why we're going to talk about this, other than the fact that it's damn relevant, is because this week's transits include a Mercury square to Saturn and a Mercury square to Neptune in addition to a Full Moon in Cancer. Again, it's a very heavy and important set of astrology for the New Year.

Pulling back from the details, I just want to kind of take a moment to hang out with the big picture. The Saturn/Neptune conjunction is really important. It's consequential. Whenever Saturn is involved, shit gets consequential. What this particular transit does is it takes reality—Saturn—and it creates confusion—Neptune. It takes the things in our lives that make up our sense of predictability, normalcy, and it creates the need for them to have meaning and purpose. Otherwise, we can experience disempowerment, helplessness, hopelessness, confusion, anxiety, heavyheartedness, overwhelm, and burnout.

Sound familiar? I'm guessing this all sounds familiar because, again, we've been going through this transit for quite some time in Pisces. In the New Year, it's going to shift into Aries, and I'm going to be talking about that in the webinar that I'm giving on the 3rd of January. But also, throughout the year, we'll talk about this more.

Now, staying present—because hopefully you know I want you to stay present. I want us to use the tool of astrology, which can be very predictive, and I want us to use it to empower us to be present, not just to think about the future, but to be present with what we know ultimately. The present is the only thing you have any kind of real control over. You cannot change the past, and the future is, as of yet, unknown. Even with the best tools, even with the best pattern recognition, the future hasn't happened yet. The present is yours. Tend to the present.

And the thing about Neptune/Saturn conjunction that we're going through and that gets really activated with Mercury this week is that it can be very tempting to want to escape—classic Neptune—or get hypervigilant—classic Saturn—in the presence of challenging feelings, thoughts, or experiences. What the Saturn/Neptune conjunction does, amongst many other things, is tests reality. It tests the structures that we've organized our innermost psychology around, that we have organized our lives around, that we organize our society and communities around.

And we are certainly seeing things breaking down in the collective. We are seeing that people's beliefs and convictions, people's humanity, is being challenged. And a lot of us have radically different takes on what's happening than a lot of others of us. And while that's always true, it's accelerated now, and it will continue to accelerate.

And so, in the presence of so much unknown, in the presence of so much paradox and confusion and misinformation and disinformation, how do you get present? How do you assess what's real and what's not real, what has meaning and value to you, what speaks to your humanity and what doesn't? These transits that we are going through are testing all of that.

If you are feeling particularly activated this week, you are not alone. You are not alone. And regardless of your situation, it is ultimately your response and engagement with your activation that defines you. There's a lot that's out of your control. There is a lot that's out of our control that is happening that we wish wasn't happening, that we want to find a way to seize upon but we just don't know how.

And not knowing how—it's part of the journey. Being confused, being tired, is part of the journey. Don't allow perfectionism, don't allow idealism, to block you from the present moment, as imperfect as it may be, because it is the present moment that you live in. It is the present moment in which you have the greatest amount of agency. In other words, this is where you have choices. You can make them now.

And it's okay if you're just tired. It's okay. Self-awareness is foundational to self-acceptance. And self-awareness, self-acceptance are foundational to navigating your life with integrity. And I talk about that shit a lot. I'm such a Capricorn. Integrity, alignment, authenticity—these are things I talk about a lot. They're things I think about a lot. And they're things I care about a lot.

There's a lot of reasons to care about these things, but at the most base level, living your life in alignment with your integrity, in ways that highlight and center your sense of purpose, your spiritual convictions—this just makes your life easier to live. It makes it easier to age, to grow old in your skin. It makes it easier to navigate the mistakes and setbacks that you will inevitably encounter. And I don't say that because I'm trying to predict something terrible. I say that because life is full of successes and setbacks. It's full of mistakes and getting-it-rights. And one doesn't cancel out the other.

We have as much to learn from our setbacks and mistakes, from our problems, as we do to gain from our successes and our wins and our assets. Just because it's hard for you doesn't mean it's what's wrong with you. Just because it's hard for you doesn't mean it's bad. And this week, with the astrology we're about to dive into, is an invitation for you to be curious and present, even when you're challenged. And those challenges may come from the inside—from your psyche or your emotions, even from your body—or it may come from the outside—relationships, obligations, world events.

Whatever it is that you are engaging with, you have choices. And the more clear-hearted you are about what's important to you, about your spiritual and material convictions—which to me are kind of the same thing. Spirituality is a part of all the things for me. But the spiritual Neptune and the material Saturn, convictions that you hold—are your priorities, are your actions, reflecting those convictions, those beliefs? And if not, can you make small or large adjustments in that direction? If you can, it'll be a lot easier to navigate life in general and the astrology of this week in particular.

Now, all of that said, let's dive into this week's forecast. Our first and only exact transit for December happens on Monday, December 29th. And at 11:15 p.m. Pacific Time, Mercury will be at 26 degrees of Sagittarius and 4 minutes, forming an exact square to Saturn at the same degrees of Pisces.

Now, this transit—kind of a bummer. And we know this because Saturn is heavy. Saturn is associated with depression, and Mercury—your mind. Saturn is associated with consequences, and Mercury is your ideas, your friends. Saturn is associated with maturity, responsibility, obligation, and guilt—positives and negatives. And Mercury is—again, it's your ideas. It's your plans. It's the platonic or friendship side of your connections with others. It's your communication in general.

And so this transit is consequential. And just as a hot tip, any square to Saturn is consequential. But this Mercury square to Saturn—it's not greatly timed because I know a lot of people like to party around the New Year, and it's just not a super fun or lighthearted transit. A lot of people will experience depressive thinking. Literally, Saturn depresses. It pushes down. It creates a heaviness or a weightedness to your thoughts. Now, this doesn't mean anything bad actually, inherently. But it can be unfun.

It can also be a time where you decide to really focus up on something that is really important to you. While this transit is not great for making plans because it puts you at a bit of a severe or a scarcity mindset—like it can make your thinking a bit too rigid or tight—it is a good time for exploring the details of a thing, for anything that takes a lot of concentration. So, if you have to do something like bookkeeping, it actually can be kind of helpful. If there's some sort of annoying, detail-oriented task that really demands focus and attention, theoretically, this transit can help. Unfortunately, it's overlapping with the Mercury square to Neptune, which I'll talk about in a moment. But as a result, it doesn't really help with focus as much as this transit might at other times.

Mercury square to Saturn is not a great time for friendship. It's not a great time for relationships and connection in general because it makes you feel isolated or lonely, or an existential crisis of "What even is connection?" may come up. And it may not come up with you, but it might come up with the people you're connected to. And so, again, people are going to be acting a little weird or off, and it may or may not actually be about you.

Sometimes under this transit, hard conversations cannot and should not be avoided. And this is because of the consequential nature of Saturn. Things come to the surface, and situations kind of force you to deal with them. Depending on how this hits your chart, this transit can be one that coincides with a breakup or just a very confronting conversation with someone. If what comes up is real, then it's better that it came up than that it didn't, even if it's hard, because sometimes the way relationships go deeper, the way we make our relationships substantive, is by talking about the hard shit, owning our part.

On my Patreon, we've been talking about accountability a lot lately, the spiritual, emotional, and psychological components of what accountability really is. And the transits of this week—all three of them—really require accountability. But if you don't really know what that means—like how to be accountable to yourself, how to be accountable to others—then this may be a particularly rough transit for you.

You may become aware of a way that you're in a rut during this transit. And that rut might be in your thinking. You might realize you're in a limited mindset. It may be in your friendships or in your day-to-day habits. What I want to encourage you to do is strive to be curious and open to getting information instead of strongly reactive. Saturn has a way of being, like I said, kind of hypervigilant and carceral. It can be very like, "Action, consequence. A consequence is a punishment."

So what you want to try to do is instead be curious. Tap into that Mercury in Sagittarius energy. With curiosity, you can learn about what needs attention, what needs loosening, what needs tightening, what needs care. And that information can be incredibly helpful. So throwing that in the mix.

One more thing. If you're like, "Oh shit. This fucks with my New Year's Eve plans," this transit favors intimate hangouts. It favors doing spiritual labor, spiritual work, like self-investigation work. It's not so great for going out clubbing or partying in some sort of big way, although I mean, a lot of people are going to push through.

Part of the larger arc of the astrology that we're in is asking each and every one of us to have a relationship to ourselves that is caring and responsible. And so, if you put yourself in a social situation, and then once you get there, you're like, "It's just the vibes aren't vibing," love yourself enough to not force yourself to have fun in a way that is actually not fun for you. It's okay that your definition of fun is different than somebody else's. We all get to be different.

This is not a time for being punitive and perfectionistic. I mean, honestly, it kind of is. You might really be feeling that way. But I want to encourage you to resist the urge to be a shitty friend to yourself. You might need to tell your other friends, the not-you friends, that you had a change of heart, that you need to change plans—something like that. And it's important to really listen to how people feel based on the information you share because self-care is not just about taking care of your own individual needs; it's about taking care of your individual needs in concert with the needs of the people around you, the people you're connected to. And sometimes that concert is glorious and beautiful, and sometimes it sounds terrible and you wish there was silence. But it's really just about how you show up. And I want to say it's a really important time to show up.

Now, that brings us to January. It's New Year's Day, Thursday, January the 1st, and Mercury is at 29 degrees and 31 minutes of Sagittarius, forming an exact square to Neptune at the same degrees of Pisces. Now, first things first, it is my duty—and I know this bugs so many of you, but here we go. It is my duty as your astrologer to let you know that when Mercury is square to Neptune, it is not a great time for doing drugs. It's not a great time for doing drugs because it increases the chances of you just really not having a good time, of having some sort of energetic or psychic negative consequence, for you to just feel drained and fucked up in a not-fun way.

And unfortunately, the transit is exact at 5:33 a.m. Pacific Time on the 1st, which means we are very much feeling it on the 31st. Now, you do you. You know what I mean? You do you. But also, go into New Year's celebrations knowing that it is wise to—if you're going to imbibe, to do it a little bit slowly, to drink a lot of water, and to make sure that you are in as safe situations as possible and with people that you trust.

Neptune makes a person susceptible. Now, susceptible to what? That could be misinformation or disinformation, gossip, uncomfortable situations, even unsafe—and this tends to be more psychologically and emotionally unsafe as opposed to physically unsafe—situations and exchanges with people.

Mercury square to Neptune provokes anxiety and uncertainty and exhaustion. So you might feel that way, and other people might feel that way. And if two people are feeling really off and exhausted and a little touchy, which—Mercury square Neptune can definitely make you touchy or paranoid—then you can imagine how a social interaction would go—eh, not great. Not great.

This transit happens in part to test your boundaries. So your boundaries are not just about how you identify and navigate or communicate your limits, needs, and preferences to other people, but it's also about how you listen to other people and honor and navigate their boundaries. Boundaries are a sticky topic, and Neptune has a way of creating a fuzziness. So it's really not clear what the parameters of your needs are, the parameters of a situation are. Now, that Mercury square to Saturn that I was just talking about—that's all about clarity of the parameters, but it can be a bit rigid.

So, unfortunately, the overlap of Mercury squaring these two transits is just uncomfortable for most people. Now, some people are going to err more towards Saturn. Others are going to err more towards Neptune. But it can just be uncomfortable. So it's hard to navigate through reality and the anxieties and mixed thoughts and feelings you're having inside of it.

This transit creates confusion, straight-up confusion. We don't have Mercury Retrograde this month, but this is giving Mercury Retrograde moments because the potential for misunderstandings and miscommunications is very up during this transit. Mercury square to Neptune is a risky time for pedestalizing people. So putting other people on pedestals is a not-great thing to do for a lot of reasons. First of all, a person can only fall at that point. You're not actually cultivating a real closeness or a real connection with somebody if you have them on a pedestal.

So be wary of idealizations that you hold for other people. Allow space and room and flexibility for people to just be people, which is to say imperfect. This transit can also be a time when you have an inflated sense of self or a deflated sense of self. Either one is unlikely to be very realistic. Mercury square to Neptune wants you to adapt based on your needs in the moment. That might look like a lot of different things, but it must first and foremost be about you listening to yourself and being responsive to your situation and your own inner needs.

This transit can coincide with really intense burnout and exhaustion. And so listen. A lot of people have time off of work on and around the 1st. If you are one of those people and you're tired, my friend, may I introduce you to the bed, the couch, the floor? Relax if you need to relax. Rest is not just about unplugging and escaping. Rest, when it's truly effective for your system, is restorative.

So, if you can, prioritize things that are restorative for you. For you, that might mean writing in your dear diary, going for a walk, getting in a bathtub. It might mean turning off your phone or—I don't know—meditating. There are so many things that a person can do that help you to connect to you. My advice this Mercury square to Neptune, a.k.a. this New Year's Day—it's to choose at least one of those things.

Because of the Mercury square to Neptune, I'm going to give you advice that I would honestly give you every single day of the damn week, which is mask up. Do what you can to protect yourself from getting sick, especially if you're feeling depleted, and do what you can to protect other people from getting sick if you are in public and/or spaces or crowded public spaces, because we know that masking is community care. And we love community care. A caring community? Come on. Who doesn’t want that? And who doesn't want to start the New Year off with some meaningful acts of community care?

Now, listen. Mercury square Neptune can provoke anxiety. Much like Saturn can provoke scarcity mindsets or just a heavy line of thinking, Neptune can provoke anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, and a lot of panicky stuff. If you catch yourself experiencing any of that—like panic, anxiety, overwhelm—tap into Mercury's influence. Mercury and Neptune, in very different ways, are both related to breath.

So, if you're somebody who likes and is helped by breathing exercises when you're feeling stressed, don't forget to tap into them. Don't forget to use them. If that doesn't resonate for you, but you know of something else that does, go ahead. And remember to choose to center in your thinking and in your habits the things that you know support your mental wellness.

This is a great time for connecting with friends that you really trust and that are on the same page as you, and it's also a great time for being alone, honestly. This transit can inspire meaningful spiritual experiences, but they're not necessarily what they seem. Mercury in Sagittarius square to Neptune in Pisces—it's a lot of energy. And it's hard to make sense of or create a reliable, well-informed narrative based on what you're perceiving, what you're experiencing.

And so there is a risk of conspirituality, people trying to sell you on some sort of grand spiritual concept that doesn't really have roots to it; it's not realistic. So do your best to not get grifted. Do your best to make sure that your spirituality is connected to life, that it is not something that exists far outside of you but instead something that exists inside of you and that is a filter through which you make choices and make sense of the world.

Again, this is a practice in boundaries. Having healthy, self-appropriate boundaries with your spirituality is a big part of this Saturn/Neptune mishigas we're living through and also this specific Mercury square to Neptune that's active on the 1st.

And that brings us to Saturday, the 3rd, where we have a Full Moon in Cancer. This Full Moon in Cancer is happening Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. It's exact at 2:03 a.m. Pacific Time. And the Moon will be full at 13 degrees of Cancer and 2 whole minutes. A Full Moon in Cancer is always a really big deal because the Moon belongs in Cancer; it's at home in Cancer. So, when we have a Full Moon, emotions are coming to the surface, and they're coming to the surface in their wholeness.

This can mean that there's really big emotions that are up. It can mean that there is some sort of situation that is culminating. What you want to know about a Full Moon in Cancer is that it's going to trigger issues of belonging. Now, for some of us, we have a great sense of belonging. We're connected to family of origin, or we have cultivated a family that we really care about as adults. And for many others of us, family is a really hard topic. We might have discord or disconnection from family of origin. Family of origin may not be safe. We may still be working out issues from our early developmental experiences—a.k.a. our childhood—and working them out in our adult relationships either with family of origin or with chosen family and friends.

The thing that a Full Moon in Cancer, and this Full Moon in Cancer, is going to activate in meaningful ways is how you do or don't feel a sense of belonging, a sense of connection. The thing about Cancer is it's actually a zodiac sign that's related to borders. It's like walls and borders that separate ours from yours—that's Cancer. Cancer is not just about the tender insides. It's about the shell of the crab. It's about boundaries, in a very different way than I've been talking about contextually with Saturn and Neptune.

But there's a similar theme here of, what do you need to protect your tender heart? What are the boundaries of where and how you feel safe with the people that I identify as your family? That could be roommates. That could be your partnership. That could be your family of origin, your friend group, your community or communities that you're connected to.

There's not one way of understanding of experiencing family. But whatever ways in which you do experience family connection or disconnection, this Full Moon is going to activate that because we don't just have a Full Moon in Cancer; we have Venus sitting at 12 degrees and 15 minutes of Capricorn sitting right on top of that Sun at 13 degrees and 1 minute of Capricorn, and Mars at 14 degrees of Capricorn and 32 minutes. In other words, the Sun in Capricorn is sitting in a Venus/Mars sandy—it's a sandwich.

What this means is that your relationships are going to be activated by this Full Moon. Your sense of identity and belonging, your sense of connection with others—big feelings are going to come up around it. And you better believe that the transits of Mercury square to Saturn, which we are no longer in the influence of, and Mercury square to Neptune, which we are in an out-of-sign square still, are going to intensify feelings of overwhelm around, "Who do I belong with? How are we getting along? Is it real? Is it not?"

Remember Venus is your values, and Mars is what you do and how you do it. It's your motivations. Having the Sun sandwiched between these two planets brings about the opportunity to show up in your relationships and for your relationships in ways that are better suited to what's authentic to you. But there's an emotional accountability that must be addressed in order for that to be something that your relationships can really grow within.

Now, as I said, that Mercury is still square to Neptune, and also, we've got Mars opposite Jupiter—it's wide. It's wide, but it's still there. And so the big emotions of the Full Moon paired with those two aspects are likely to bring about kind of a restlessness and an impulsiveness. So what I want to encourage you to do is just practice sitting with the feelings that you most want to get away from. I know that sounds terrible, but still, that's the assignment.

If you can practice sitting with your feelings without making a story up about them, without trying to figure out what to, quote unquote, do about them, without looking for a reason why someone else made you feel some sort of way or some reason why you should or shouldn't feel what you feel—just fucking sit with your emotions just a little bit longer than you're comfortable with—then you are really meeting the opportunity of this Full Moon in Cancer.

This is a time where you can show up in emotionally authentic ways for the messiness and the stickiness of who you are in relationship to others, who you are in relationship to your own values system, your own behaviors, and how you respond to and engage with that same content in other people that you're in relationship with and to.

Now, again, I want us to be really expansive in how we think about family because there's thinking about it in really personal terms in a really heterotypical way, and then there's thinking about it in more community-minded and Queer terms. And then, on a more social level, there's the family of the people in your town or your city or your state or your province or your country or the planet.

We are family. We are family. We are all relations. I mean, as much as sometimes it doesn't feel or look that way, we are all relations. So how we show up for the people closest to us is not the whole story. It's also how you identify connection and belonging within the larger community of the people, places, and things that you hold in your heart. And the thing about the heart is that it actually has the capacity to hold a lot, like a lot. And you don't have to be tracking it with your mind in order to hold it with your heart.

This Full Moon in Cancer is going to reveal to you something about your own emotional capacity. And functioning within your emotional capacity is a beautiful thing. At the same time, challenging yourself in healthy and self-appropriate ways and at self-appropriate moments to expand your emotional capacity—that's how growth occurs. That is a gift that you give yourself and that has reverberations throughout your relationships—the healthy ones, the not-so-healthy ones, the ones with people that you're like, "Ahh, I don't like this person, but I'm still in relationship with them," and the people that you're obsessed with and you're super into.

This Full Moon in Cancer is an opportunity for you to feel your big feelings with healthy boundaries—with healthy boundaries, but feel your feelings—and to provide for yourself—a classic Capricorn move, right—to provide for yourself and for others the internal and potentially relationship-oriented, situational stability in any given moment to feel your damn feelings, understanding that that's an impossible task, but it's a good direction. It's the good direction to be pointed in.

Now, one last thing I'm going to say about this Full Moon—we start off the New Year with emotions coming to the surface so they can be released. Think of this as an opportunity to clear things you've been holding on to, maybe for a really long time, maybe in the past year. This is an opportunity to get present, and getting present means not having an agenda and needing it to be tidy or perfect. It doesn't need to be tidy and perfect. It's the Moon. The Moon is all about the ebb and flow of things. The Moon is always in phase. It's moving, moving, moving.

You don't need to find a solid point to just feel your feelings and be there forever. Meet the damn moment. Feel what shows up for you in that moment without judgment, without cruelty, without an agenda, even. The more open you can be to yourself, the easier it is to extend that grace to others. And this really helps you to have healthy boundaries and loving relationships with other people where you don't just treat them well, and they don't just treat you well, but you treat each other well. Isn't that glorious? I mean, just to have a relationship that is mutually supportive—that is what it's about.

And that, my friends, is your forecast for this week's astrology. It's a very important week now that it's the New Year. And if you join us for the January 3rd webinar, you will get the recording in your inbox within about 72 hours of the event. So, if you can't make it live, there's no problem. And of course, as always, the class will be available for sale on my website on the shop page after the event, just in case you miss it.

Now, very briefly, let me run through this week's transits. On December 29th, 2025, Mercury is exactly square to Saturn. On January 1st of 2026, Mercury is exactly square to Neptune. And then, on January 3rd, we have a Full Moon in Cancer.

I hope you have a very Happy New Year however you choose to celebrate, including if you choose to completely not celebrate, because I'm a huge fan of putting my foot down in the presence of obligatory fun.

Just as a quick reminder, we're not dropping a midweek episode this week. So I'll talk to you again next week for the horoscope for January 4th, 2026.