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 are looking at the astrology of April 27th through May 3rd of 2025. And if you haven't yet registered for my online class on Forgiveness: The Astrology of Letting Go, please do join me. It's happening next Sunday, May 4th, at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time. You can join from anywhere in the world, and if you register but you can't join live, you'll get the recording in your inbox within 72 hours.

I should kind of clarify this class is not like hard astrology. It's not like a hard astrology class. It's really about exploring the practice and embodiment of forgiveness, and we're going to use the archetypes of the birth chart, of the angles of the birth chart, to kind of guide us. So we're going to start with the Ascendant and the forgiveness of self, the IC and the forgiveness of family, of your past, the Descendant and forgiveness of others, people who you were close to or are close to and have hurt you, and then the Midheaven, and this will be exploring forgiveness of generations before you and more societal ills and pain, really.

The truth is that there's so much to be angry about in the world, there's so much that in our individual lives can happen, that it's hard to recover. It's hard to let go. And my conviction is that forgiveness is not about letting other people off the hook. It's simply taking the hook out of your own heart. And so, in this class, we will practice that. How do you take the hook out of your heart? How do you free yourself from attachments to that which hurts you? Tickets, as always with my events, are available on a sliding scale, but they are limited in number. There's a link in show notes and on my website over at lovelanyadoo.com.

Now, before we dive into the astrology of this week, I want to acknowledge fear itself. We talk about fear a lot. Fearmongering is a very real thing that happens. And also, in the world of woo, in New Age spirituality, there's this conviction that we should keep our vibes high and not fixate on the negatives. That conviction is netted in some truth, for sure. And it is misapplied to social conditions, to political conditions. It is misapplied in many ways, honestly. And that is what we call, my friends, spiritual bypassing.

It is really important to be able to feel fear. I know that sounds a little bananas, but fear on its own is not bad. Being scared of scary things is actually really helpful. It's how you stay safe. It's how you protect others. Experiencing fear can be a catalyst. And this is a time where we all must be catalyzed because what is happening, certainly in the U.S. but in so many places around the world, is truly frightening, truly, truly frightening—but especially in the United States.

We can't be cavalier about the loss of human rights. We can't be cavalier about eugenics and white supremacy and misogyny, in any and all of its forms. And the truth is most of us are cavalier about it a lot of the time, and most people do it not because they're bad people but because it's too much, because it's hard to feel scared all the time. It's hard to feel upset all the time about the world when you've got your own shit going on. And that's real. Also, we are living through exceptional times where we must adapt. Adapting to reality is hard even under the best of circumstances. And, my friends, we are not in the best of circumstances.

So I want to encourage you to really think about how you experience fear, when you experience fear, in any of its forms. And there's lots of forms of fear. But when you experience fear, what is your habit? What do you do? Do you freeze? Do you go rigid? Do you hold your breath? Do you get really angry and irritable? Do you hop on your phone and start scrolling? Do you start talking to people compulsively? What do you do? We all do things in reaction to fear. Most of us have at least some maladjusted coping mechanisms—in other words, coping mechanisms that don't actually help us to cope but instead are a reflection of something that we did when we were, honestly, a child.

I want to point you towards your fear and encourage you, this week and beyond, to practice being present in your body when you're scared. This week, we move into May. And this month, as with every month, I drop a bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast. You can access it on my Patreon or by subscribing on whatever platform you're listening to this podcast. As I speak to in that podcast episode, in May, Saturn moves into Aries. So it's been in Pisces for two and a half years, and now it moves into Aries. And there's a lot of things to say about that, and I'll talk about it a little closer to the date.

But trust me when I say to you that being able to tolerate feelings of fear in your body is the assignment, okay? Breathing into your emotions instead of holding your breath or abandoning your emotions is a great starting place. Noticing your coping mechanisms is a great starting place because you can't really change, if change is what's needed, without having awareness, right? So I invite you to practice cultivating awareness, sticking around, noticing what happens in your head, what happens in your body, what happens with your breath, what shifts in your behavior when you're scared.

Wanting to be happy, wanting to feel good, wanting to align yourself with progress and expansion and things being okay or even great—these are fantastic impulses and absolutely impulses to be expanded upon. But it's not an either/or. It's about expanding your capacity to experience all of your feelings, your sensations, your emotions, without attaching to them or identifying with them in such a way that you become like a one-trick pony, where all you can do is focus on positivity or all you can do is focus on negativity or scarcity. We need adaptability, and it's really hard to cultivate.

In times of duress—and we are living in times of duress in the context of our collective and global conditions—we need adaptability. We need to be like plants growing towards the light. But that doesn't mean we ignore the cloud cover. It doesn't mean that we need to pretend that our conditions are optimal for our growth, because they're not. When we have the psychological, spiritual, and emotional resiliency to be present with mess and danger and fear and hope and optimism and creativity—all of it, all of it, all of it—when we have that capacity, it's easier to build coalitions with other people, to be able to be in relationship to other people. It's easier to face the realities that you find yourself in.

And that is my greatest hope for you today and every day, is to be able to face the realities you find yourself in, because by being able to be honest with yourself about what's real in this moment, you can best cope. And as you strive and you struggle to cope with whatever is active in the world or inside of you, you gotta be prepared—you're going to fail. Now, you may also very much succeed. But part of life is failure. If you try, if you truly try in life at anything on any level, you'll fail. That's part of it. And I know that there are going to be some people who are like optimism junkies who are just like, "No, it's not about failure. It's about succeeding. Maybe you fail. I don't fail." Listen. Failure is not bad. Failure is simply you tried and it didn't work. Fucking up is a part of learning. Fucking off is a part of learning.

If you're open to learning, then every stage of learning is valid and needed. So that includes the stage of learning where you're absolutely confused and the stage of learning where you're making mistake after mistake after mistake and the stage of learning where you don't want to and the stage of learning where you're like, "I'm a genius," the stage of learning where you finally get it, and then the stage of learning where you've had it for a while and then you're like, "Oh, but there's so much more." They're all equal. One is not more valid, useful, instructive, or important than the other.

And so, as you cultivate the willingness and the ability to be where you are, to create things as they are, and to navigate from this place—this place, the present—you can have more impact, whether it's in your own self-care journey, navigating situations and dynamics in your life and in the world, or in our collective ongoing struggle towards justice, liberty, and safety for all.

Now, we're going to get into this week's astrology. There are two very important transits that are happening this week, and that's all she wrote. So let's dive right on in. So the first exact transit of this week is on Sunday, April 27th, at 12:31 p.m. Pacific Time. At this time, the Sun and Moon are both at 7 degrees and 46 minutes of Taurus. And whenever the Sun and Moon are at the exact same degrees of a zodiac sign, we have a New Moon. And here we have a New Moon in Taurus.

This, technically speaking—now, before I proceed, we are not technical. We are human. We are messy. So we want to keep in mind "technically speaking" is not the end of the story. So, technically speaking, this is a really spectacular time for planting seeds. New Moons are about beginnings. They're setting of intention. New Moons are powerful times in the Lunar cycle that happen every damn month, and they are opportunities to be really intentional about how you are aligning yourself both with your will and with your heart. And whatever it is that we do or don't do in a New Moon tends to show up in a more dramatic, demanding, and uncomfortable way in the Full Moon. So you do your homework with the New Moon—makes it easier with the Full Moon.

So this New Moon in Taurus is technically an excellent time for setting intentions, calling in conditions, calling in creation, calling in energy. The "but" in this situation is the Mars/Pluto opposition. So Mars and Pluto are no longer exactly opposite. That happened last week for the last time. They're still opposite each other, and they are forming a T-square to the New Moon. Mars is at just over 4 degrees of Leo. Pluto is at almost 4 degrees of Aquarius. And they are both squaring the Sun and Moon at almost 8 degrees of Taurus.

This brings into the conversation that Mars/Pluto opposition. What this means in practical terms is that the power struggle, the drive to succeed or to achieve, the passion, the intensity, the defensiveness, the resentfulness of the Mars/Pluto opposition are, thanks to the New Moon, in an evolutionary state where you can feel where you're at with those energies. So, last week—and honestly this week, but last week, when the transit was exact, you may have been embroiled in some sort of power struggles. You may have been exhausted. You may have been feeling all manner of intense Pluto/Mars opposite things. That's not the only transit that was happening, but okay.

Now that the New Moon is here, you have the opportunity to release—because of Pluto's presence—to release the intense feelings, narratives, habits, situations that you know don't serve you. So this is not a Full Moon. Full Moons are endings. They're times for release, technically speaking. But this New Moon is the opportunity for you to emotionally, internally set the intention that you are stepping into a new way of being, a new way of holding an old pain.

So what is an ending other than the closure of something? And once we close something, we inevitably begin something new. Endings and beginnings—they're so powerfully different in how we experience them, in their meanings, and also, they're kind of heads and tails of the same coin. When we have a New Moon with Pluto so heavy in it, what we can feel is our capacity to set intentions in response or with clarity about how we're holding the ending. And because Venus is so busy right now—right? Venus is sitting really close to Saturn, really close to Neptune. It's sextile to Uranus. And Venus, if you didn't know, is the ruling planet to Taurus.

And so, because of all of this, the assignment is to cultivate greater clarity, embodiment, and acceptance of your values and to do it in ways that are appreciably different. And that difference may be something that is challenging for you. It may be something that is beautiful and something that you really are excited about letting in. It doesn't have to be bad or good. And honestly, from a spiritual perspective, there kind of is no bad or good. There's just experiences. There's just energy. It doesn't have to be "bad or good." It's simply about change.

Pluto is about transformation and transmutation. Mars is about the body, passions, which includes anger and ambition, excitement, and engagement. And so the transformation of the ego, of the things you are down to do and the motivation under which you are down to do the damn things—or not—are all pointing themselves towards this moment of seed planting, manifestation, intention setting. The more clear you are about what you value, what is of actual material importance to you, and what you're willing to do for it, with it, about it, the better use you'll be making of this New Moon in Taurus.

One of the tricky things about Taurean energies is that they're related to security and stability. That's why they're also associated with stubbornness, because when we prioritize security and stability—like personal comfort, personal ease, personal safety—over all else or over many other things, we can get kind of stuck, right? We can get kind of stuck. We can also cultivate a life that is rich with pleasure and value and presence. It just kind of depends.

And so, with a New Moon in Taurus, what we're likely to be confronted with—and "confronted" is maybe not the perfect word, but okay—is our own relationship to personal security and personal safety, personal comfort. In these dangerous and exceptional times, there's a lot of risks to our personal safety and comfort. How you respond to that, how you hold that, is a reflection on you. The risks themselves are not a reflection on you whatsoever, but how you hold it is. And with this New Moon, we have a kind of unique and, I think, particularly helpful opportunity to let go of defensiveness, toxic individualism, egoism, entitlement, in ways that are really transformative.

With this New Moon in Taurus, because of the Mars/Pluto opposition and the activity of Venus, there is this opportunity to interrogate and investigate your shit. Part of what that can be about is how you experience, uphold, defend systemic ills, systemic harm in the world, whether that's through inheritance, through your behavior, through your lack of behavior. This is a time where you can be diplomatic enough, caring enough, with yourself to experience the pain of healing. And that's the truth of the matter, is that healing requires pain, unfortunately. I don't make the rules.

And the truth is sometimes healing isn't painful at all. It really isn't. But in the context of acknowledging systemic issues and your complacency or participation in them, that is painful. It feels awful. And yet the only way to heal it is to feel it. So, whether what comes up for you this New Moon is really just about your personal life, your personal evolution, your relationships—whatever—this is a time for feeling the messiness, the complexity, of how you're holding the truth of your own values because Taurus, as a child of Venus, is so much about alignment. It's so much about authenticity.

Can you be authentic with yourself about the ways in which you have fucked-up beliefs or you have fucked-up behavior? Most people, when they know there's something wrong with them, move into some form of defensiveness. And that defensiveness may show up as self-harm or being really critical and upset with others, but these are defense mechanisms that exist to defend you from feeling bad in a particular way. Feeling bad about things that are not in alignment with you is good. It's healthy. It's healing. And it's the only way where we can progress forward to create better selves on an individual level and a better world on a collective level.

When you grow, when you change, even if you are growing and changing in the direction of your greatest clarity, even when you are creating nothing but improvements in your life, it's a leap of faith. And when humans experience leaps of faith, it inevitably engages our unconscious coping mechanisms, as many things do.

This New Moon in Taurus is an opportunity for you to be intentional about the foundations you are setting in yourself and in relationship to others. And this is a deeply relational New Moon, of course, again, because it's Taurus, child of Venus. This is meant to be uncomfortable. It's meant to be awkward. But uncomfortable, awkward, even bad or scary—these are just feelings. It's just energy in motion.

If you don't get too attached to each moment that you're feeling your feelings, then you can have enough space inside of yourself to be curious about your feelings. Through that curiosity, there is this expansive dynamic of possibility that emerges. And this is a huge part of what empowers you to evolve and change and become the person you truly want to be, become more aligned. It is also the space in which we can envision different futures, different ways that we can work together for each other, with each other. And we desperately need that shit right now.

But the truth is, whether we're looking at your personal relationship with the person you're dating or your relationship to collective conditions and activism, the same principle applies. If you are acting in ways that are disassociated from yourself, that are not authentic and honest, then eventually you will burn out because humans only have a finite amount of energy. And when you are fueling yourself from a place of disalignment, then you burn out. And you burn out whether you're successful or not, because being successful off of the foundation of being disingenuous is fucking exhausting, and not being successful after you abandon yourself is demoralizing.

Now, I know authenticity is a lot harder for some people than others. Some of that is about nature, and some of that is about the conditions you find yourself in. It's not always possible to be authentic. But whether or not it's possible or safe to be authentic in a moment around other people doesn't mean you need to abandon yourself and lie to yourself or malign yourself when you're making a compromise for your own ease of life or whatever it is. So, again, it's how you do what you do, not just what you do.

One more thing I'll say about this New Moon—New Moons are a great time for setting intentions, manifestation. Be clear about this: do not set intentions or try to manifest anything about other people, even if—and maybe even especially if—you believe it's for their own good. If you're going to be working with energy this New Moon, know that it is very Plutonian, and therefore, focus on your own homework.

The best thing to do in terms of manifestation or energy work is work on your own motivations. Work on your own internal conditions that predicate external conditions. That's the best and cleanest use of this energy. And if you can, no matter what you're doing with this Lunar energy, strive to notice how you feel what you feel in your body. Strive to notice it.

On my Patreon last week, I did a live where we talked about whether or how you can feel the energy of planets in your body, in the moment. And what came up during this live was that a lot of people were using these very analytic descriptions, and they were descriptions that were not of feelings; they were of the things that we think about, and the feelings were underneath it. That kind of reminded me of how important it is to drop in and notice what your emotions are because what your emotions are are generally really different than the story you're telling yourself about your feelings.

Okay. Now, that all said, let's go to the next and last exact transit of this week. On Friday, May 2nd, at exactly 10:07 a.m. Pacific Time, Venus meets Neptune. Venus will be at 1 degree of Aries and 9 minutes, and so will Neptune. Now, this transit may sound familiar to you—I kind of hope it does—because it happened on February 1st and March 27th of 2025. And here we are, May 2nd; it's happening for its third time. Now, the reason why it's happening three times instead of just once is because Venus was Retrograde, and we're just about out of the Retroshade.

If you want to have a sense, without even hearing me speak, about what the Venus conjunction to Neptune is about, just look at what was going on in your life and the world on or around February 1st and on or around March 27th. Now, this being the third exact hit of this transit tells us it is the closure to this cycle. And this cycle is a really confusing, anxiety-provoking, and important one. This transit can find you putting people on a pedestal or having a fantasy story that you tell yourself about yourself, another person, the world in some way. It can be a really disassociative or escapist transit.

But again, we're at the closure of this cycle with three exact hits to the transit. And so you may be experiencing some evidence about some reality in your relationships, or for you, this transit may be kind of like peak idealizing. As I've been saying every hit of this transit, this transit can trigger the parasocial relationship where you're really fixated on people that you don't actually know, but more importantly, those people are not aware of who you are. And so it's not a back -and-forth relationship.

This transit activates the struggle that we have been feeling for a long time now, pretty much all of 2025, around our values versus our ideals. When Venus and Neptune sit on top of each other, our values and our ideals can kind of influence each other in a way that creates confusion or in a way that fosters inspiration. It just kind of depends on how it hits you.

And within that, you have the opportunity this Venus conjunction to Neptune to get more embodied because now we've gone from Venus conjunction to Neptune in Pisces, which is what it was the last two hits, to—now it's in Aries, right? So now we have the opportunity to get more embodied about values and ideals, to really check in with, "Okay. What was happening in the realm of imagination, and what is happening in the realm of inaction, of acting?" because that's a meaningful difference between Piscean energies and Aries energies.

This transit itself is a time where you may be kind of tired or exhausted, feeling particularly anxious within your relationships, feeling particularly romantic, and catching yourself fantasizing or maybe even kind of losing time, just checking out, maybe watching a screen for too long or whatever. It's a great transit for touching grass. It's a great transit for immersing yourself in nature or the arts.

But truly, at its core, what Venus conjunction to Neptune is trying to teach you is how to stay open and connected to empathy, compassion, care, universal love, which is really different than personal love in your relationship to others, whether that's in one-on-one relationships—that's more—Venus is more about personal love, while Neptune is impersonal love—whether it's in your relationships, whether it's in how you engage with money, actually, because Venus is related to money. It's your personal finances, so how you spend your money, where you spend your money, who you spend it on, and even being able to have empathy and compassion and care for people that bug the shit out of you, that you have beef with, that you struggle with.

I believe it was Martin Schulman—an astrologer, Martin Schulman—who I read the concept of personal versus impersonal love from. That Venusian personal love is the people that you're in individual relationships with. Impersonal love is that Neptunian love of, "Everyone on the planet is my cousin, and I love all cats"—that kind of a thing.

And so, when we have these two planets that govern really different forms of love, it can either find you really fucking confused about how you feel, what you feel, and why for people—again, either groups of people or specific individuals—or it can find you infusing your personal relationships with the idealism, love, and care, maybe even selflessness, that Neptune can bring, or infusing your fantasies and your ideals with practical, grounded values that are realistic for who you are, where you are, when you are, what you are.

Venus conjunction to Neptune is a powerful transit that can pass you by because it inspires anxiety. And a lot of people get exhausted from anxiety. This is a high-burnout transit in a high-burnout time. And so, again, what I want to ground you into is bringing your intention to this transit. And again, noticing what's happening in your body, now that everything's in fucking Aries, is really going to help you. Aries is related to embodiment and activation. And so how can you embody your ideals and values? How can you tap into your agency to activate based on what is actually most important to you?

We always have choice. We don't always have an easy choice. We don't always have a comfortable choice. We don't always have a good choice. But we always have a choice. What choices have you been making this year? Are they in alignment with your values? How can you adapt them? And again, as I was speaking about in the context of the New Moon, feeling into the ways in which you are not doing what you think you "should" be doing sucks. It feels bad. That kind of feeling bad is not an emotion to avoid. It's actually really good to be curious about the bad feelings we have so that we can better understand what's underneath them, what's motivating them.

Venus conjunction to Neptune—it's a bit loopy of a transit, and Neptune in Aries moves a lot faster than Neptune in Pisces did. And now that we're starting to have transits to Neptune in Aries, we're all going to experience and see how quick things can move. So my concerns about the rights of women, Queers, gender-nonconforming folks, Trans folks—under this transit, they're great. They're great.

And so I'm going to be paying attention to the news, and I encourage you to do the same and actively engage in acts of resistance to tyranny, misogyny, and transphobia. In exceptional times as these, or in super regular-degular, boring times—which we are not in—we can use astrology as a way to stress ourselves out, freak ourselves out, or we can use it as a way to kind of have a sense of what the weather is going to be and prepare.

Use this and all other astrological information that you get or spiritual predictions that you get as simply a weather report. Have you ever checked the weather? It's not about it giving you precision 100 percent of the time. It's about being able to know what to prepare for. It's supposed to rain today. Okay. So you can kind of prepare for rain. Whether it rains or not, okay, you were prepared.

All to say living in anxiety over what could happen—not a good use of astrology, not a good use of your energy. Having a sense of what could happen and actively engaging and finding ways to resist if that's what's necessary, participate if that's what's necessary, take a step back if that's what's necessary—whatever it is, you want to use astrology as a way to help you navigate this life—which is a complicated thing, this life—as opposed to using it as a tool for obsession or trying to get ahead of reality. We don't want to do that.

Okay. And that's the whole forecast for this week. As always, I want to thank you so much for joining me here on Ghost. And in a world that is evolving and changing very quickly, I wish you adaptability and openness and the willingness and preference to align yourself with your values whether it's easy or not, whether it's conclusive or not, and whether anyone's looking or not.

All right. I'll talk to you in just a couple of days. Buh-bye.