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 May 4th through the 10th of 2025. And I want to take a moment to actually talk about something that's going to happen in about a week, which is Saturn moving into Aries. Now, the last time Saturn was in Aries was about 28, 29 years ago. Saturn has been in Pisces for the last two and a half years.

And there's a lot of very important things about this move of Saturn into the zodiac sign of Aries, and that's true, of course, for Saturn moving into literally any zodiac sign. It is an important shift in the collective. It's an important shift in your life. It's going to light up different parts of your birth chart in different ways on an individual level, and on a collective level, it represents really important shifts in societies across the world and across the board.

But something extra special is happening, which is that Saturn is meeting Neptune in the zodiac sign of Aries. Saturn and Neptune are in the same sign every approximately 36 years. So the last time they were in the same sign as each other was in '89. What's significantly more rare is when Saturn and Neptune meet in Aries because Neptune takes 165 years to move through the zodiac, and Saturn takes about 29 years to move through the zodiac.

So things need to align in a very special and unique way for them to land in any sign together and sit on top of each other at the same time. There's 30 degrees in each sign. And so let's say Neptune is at 15 degrees or 20 degrees of a zodiac sign, and Saturn just enters into it. Then they're not likely to meet up and conjoin. If you're new to astrology, a conjunction, or when planets conjoin, it means that they are sitting on top of each other by zodiac degree and not just by sign.

So Saturn and Neptune meeting up in Aries hasn't happened since 1703, okay? That's a very fucking long time. There's a great deal to say about the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune in Aries, and I promise you we will talk about it a lot more. But in this moment, I just want to acknowledge Saturn in Aries. Astrology is freaking fascinating. It allows us to understand history and thereby the current social and political climate and circumstances in a really nuanced and kind of unique way. It also empowers us to understand what's getting activated in you, in your chart, in your life. Why are you feeling the way you're feeling, and what resources can you tap into—whether it's in your psyche or in the world—to support you through it? Astrology is fucking amazing that way.

There's lots of ways, however, that astrology can be a problematic tool, just like anything else. And one of those ways is if you use it to fast-forward past the present as a way to try to keep yourself safe in the present. So I want to just kind of ground you in this moment, even though there's a lot of things that are very tempting to think about that are happening several months out from now or several years out from now.

In this moment, we are on the precipice of Saturn entering into Aries. And when that occurs, things are going to start to move a lot faster. Now, according to me, things have been moving pretty fucking fast already since Pluto entered into Aquarius, since Neptune entered into Aries. This will only become more true after Saturn joins Neptune in Aries on May 24th, which is when it's officially happening, so in a couple of weeks from now.

So Saturn is associated with traditional hierarchies, like patriarchy and the hierarchy and structure and kind of institutional power of religion. Saturn is your sense of reality, like on a 3D level. Saturn is about society and responsibility and accountability. Aries is a cardinal air sign. It governs action and engagement. It governs policing and military and combat. It governs passion and engagement and motivation. There is an i in Aries. Aries is all about "me." It's a "me first" kind of energy and is related to maleness, the energy of maleness.

And because of these exceptional and dangerous times that we are living in where I don't know about you, but day after day, I consume the news, and honestly, there are some wins. There are some wins. There are some wins, and they fill me up with hope. They reaffirm my activism and engagement and acting from a place of humanitarian consciousness and care is so important. And also, I am daily just overwhelmed by the chaotic onslaught of bad news, so many terrible things happening in the United States and around the world. They're divisive. Things are authentically scary, and it's so chaotic it's hard to keep up. And that's kind of the point because it creates this moral crisis for people who care. "What can I pay attention to? How long can I stay engaged? How much can I stay engaged?" The chaos is the point. The chaos is the point because it's depleting and demoralizing.

So, for me, what that really affirms is how important it is to continue to care, to find a way to stay informed and engaged. Saturn and Neptune in Aries can create highly individualistic circumstances where individuals feel that they must fight on their own for themselves and themselves alone. And this makes it really easy for fascistic and tyrannical forces to win. So I want to point you towards collaboration and community because we are absolutely stronger together.

Erica Chenoweth, who is—is or was, I don't know—a political scientist at Harvard studied this and found that nonviolent campaigns, nonviolent efforts, were twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And when 3.5 percent of the population actively participate in protests, serious political change occurs—3.5 percent. That's it. 3.5 percent. Such a small percentage. It's a lot of people if we're talking about a place like the United States. It's a lot of people to get to come together and collaborate and work together, but it's only 3.5 percent.

It's important to remember that when we come together, we do make change. And we don't make it quickly or overnight most of the time—sometimes, but not most of the time. And it's exhausting. It's exhausting. One of the good things about Saturn moving into Aries with Neptune is that it does give more heat, more passion, more intensity with which to engage in long, enduring fights, which is what we're in for human rights.

There are a lot of things as an astrologer that I have seen coming or I see coming. But amongst all those things is the wild unpredictability and, within that, the huge potential of what comes next. We are in a really chaotic season astrologically, and that chaos brings with it the opportunity to create worlds, to reshape structures, to grow and evolve both on a personal level but also within communities and societies. Like I said, this is not going to happen overnight. And most people are pretty easily exhausted because we're living our lives trying to get day-to-day shit done, plus dealing with whatever transits you have in your personal life, and then engaging in the world. And that's a lot. It's a lot. It's exhausting.

But this is an important time to consider not just your values—but please consider your values—but also, what is sustainable for you? What is your nature? What are your circumstances? Is it once-a-month activity? Is it teeny, tiny things every damn day? What is it that is your way, your path? Because the violent and incredibly cruel actions of ICE, the efforts to bring back conversion therapy, the campaign to malign vaccinations and public health research, just to name a few, are grotesque. And they are happening now.

And week by week, it is exhausting to stay present and associated and engaged, especially if you're not an activist or an organizer, since before the 47th president took power. But this is a time that needs you. We all need to be engaged, and we all need to act in ways that reflect care. Things are moving fast now, and they will move faster week by week, month by month, this year. That's what's happening.

So finding ways of pacing yourself, finding ways of kindly, compassionately engaging with the firestorm of complicated and hard-to-metabolize emotions, is part of the assignment of being an adult who's alive right now. These are challenging times, and if you're feeling fucked up and challenged, that means you're paying attention. It sucks, but also, good on you. It's good to feel pain when you touch a hot stove. It's good to feel fucked up by fucked-up times. I mean, it doesn't feel good, but it's healthy.

This period that we are living through is testing you on an individual level and your ability, your tools, for staying present with really hard emotions. And it's not something that you can magic, and it's not something that you can sustain faking. It requires that you do the work of tolerating staying present with, nurturing, and coping with challenging feelings.

And so I invite you to the practice. It's messy, it's hard, and it's beautiful and it's human. And it helps you to stay connected to your own humanity and to center it in how you move through the world both on a very personal level and also in regards to our social and collective conditions, in regards to how you care for people who are more vulnerable than you. So do what you need to do to stay aligned with your values and to tap into the power and resiliency of your heart. That, my friend, is courage.

Okay. Let's get into this week's astrology. The first exact transit that's happening this week is on Monday, May 5th, at 10:21 a.m. Pacific Time. At that time, Mercury will be at 22 degrees of Aries and 20 minutes forming an exact sextile to Jupiter at the same degrees of Gemini. Mercury sextile to Jupiter is a lovely transit. Mercury is the details, and Jupiter is the big picture. And a sextile is a dynamic spark of connection and energy.

So it's a good time for making plans, revisiting plans, sorting out the details of your plans, because you are able to both hold the big picture and what's important to you in the arc of things as well as the little day-to-day details that are needed to either achieve the big picture or to keep the big picture consistent with what you want.

Mercury sextile to Jupiter is excellent for learning something new, expanding your horizons, communicating—all kinds of really exciting things, including socializing. It's a great transit for connecting with people, listening to them, sharing with them, having fun, having adventures. The best use of this transit—according to me in this moment, anyways—is to tap into the expansiveness of it. The reason why it's so expansive is because Mercury is your mind and Jupiter is kind of everything all at once. And so you can learn a lot during this transit.

If you're like, " I don't know what to do today," or on and around this date you have an opportunity to take a class, tap into some teaching from someone, or to learn from someone's experience, this is the time to do it. This transit doesn't give you focus per se, but it gives you openness, and it helps you to kind of metabolize and make sense of what you're hearing. If you have an occasion to speak in public or to share something or to teach something, this transit is going to be a friend to you as well.

So this is a really great transit for anyone who needs to make plans or tighten up plans. I know I already said it, but it does deserve repeating because a lot of people right now are trying to figure out what the hell to do and how to do it. And again, this transit will help you to make sense of that. And if you're doing something simple like searching on a search engine on the internet, it may help you to be connected to the right kinds of resources.

And speaking of the internet, if there was ever a time to practice good online hygiene, this is it, my friends. Turn on that VPN. Check out those privacy settings. Shit's moving fast in the world online, and in a surveillance state—thanks, Pluto in Aquarius—we need to take extra pains to maintain some level of anonymity or privacy online wherever we can, however we can.

One last thing I'll tell you about this transit is if you want to make friends, this transit is really helpful. It's great for making friends. So talk to people. Put yourself out there. Be open to somebody if they reach out to you and you're a little shy or you're a little busy or whatever. Just connect with people. This transit indicates that it's a great time for making new friends, professional contacts, all that kind of good stuff.

Now, that brings us to Tuesday, May 6th. And on that day, we don't have one; we have two exact transits. First, Venus forms an exact sextile to Pluto. Venus will be at 3 degrees and 49 minutes of Aries forming, again, a sextile to Pluto at the same degrees of Aquarius. And this will be exact at 2:31 p.m. Pacific Time. And so, again, we have fire sextiling air. And it's worth noting because, astrologically, we are in a new era.

When we are dealing with so much fire and air, things move fast. They move fast. And for some people, that's kind of exciting, and it's their speed. And for other people, it's really overwhelming. And in different parts of your life and in different moments, it's going to be a different thing. However it hits you and whatever value judgments you may have about fast or slow or whatever, it's a shift in energy, and it's a recent shift, and it's a deep shift, so worth noting.

Okay. So Venus sextile Pluto is happening 2:31 p.m., and then, later that night at 6:48 p.m. Pacific Time, Mercury and Chiron meet up. They will both be at 24 degrees of Aries and 25 minutes. These are very different transits from each other. So let's start with the Venus sextile to Pluto.

Very differently than Mercury sextile Jupiter—which, by the way, we're still feeling on this day—Venus sextile Pluto is excellent for socializing. It's excellent for connecting with people, for having love sparks. And I want to be clear, when I say love, I don't only mean romance or sexual vibes. I do mean love like a love spark with an animal can occur, or you may feel a sense of love and care for yourself. Love is love, right? It's a big-ass thing.

Venus sextile to Pluto is a great time for experiencing a catalyst for care and love, which I think is really beautiful. This transit can intensify and deepen your feelings. And those feelings may be about a person, about yourself, about your values system or something that is activated within your values system. For some people, it can make you a little fixated on shopping or getting things or making things, which is neither good nor bad. It's just how this transit can show up.

The kind of essential energy that we're working with here—Venus is like and love. It's diplomacy and getting along. But it's also what you value, so whether it's the people, the feelings, the stuff, the ethos or ethics that you value. And then there's Pluto, which is about depth, transformation, evolution, healing, and even destruction.

When these two planets are hanging out in a sextile dynamic, there is the spark of loving transformation, depth and intensity to what you care about, a profundity in your relationship to creation. It's a beautiful transit. And if you're having a particularly hard time, these transits—both the Mercury and the Venus one—are so helpful because they can connect or reconnect you to what is really important, not just the little details but the big picture of what's important, and can help you to, in a meaningful way, make some progress in that direction, which is really powerful.

Now, another thing that can happen is you can have a really fun time flirting with this transit. Venus sextile Pluto, especially if it's hitting your chart directly—so if you have anything at around three, four degrees of a cardinal sign or a fixed sign or a fire sign or an air sign, then you're more likely to feel this pretty directly. Venus sextile Pluto is very much—yeah, it's sassy. It's playful. It can be quite sexy. It's a spark of vibes. If you feel the vibes, that is exciting, and it can even be really deep and meaningful. So be open to playing, to experiencing and exploring things and dynamics that spark emotion inside of you, spark meaning inside of you.

If you are engaged in a kind of deeper healing journey right now, if you are working through shame or resentments—Pluto stuff—Venus sextile to Pluto can actually help to ease your way and make progress without it being the most painful thing in the world. So, definitely, this is a good time to tap into whatever therapies you're working with that are helping you along that way. And this is especially important because of the other exact transit that's happening on this day.

The two transits I've just told you about overlap with the more challenging transit of the Mercury conjunction to Chiron in Aries. So, again, I want you to notice there's a whole lot of fucking Aries energy in the mix. I started off this conversation today on Ghost talking to you about Saturn's imminent move into fucking Aries. We have Neptune in Aries. And this week, Mercury and Venus are both in Aries. It's a lot of fire energy.

And Aries is inherently a passionate, motivated, impatient, really focused on the self kind of energy. And that is inherently related to ego energy. If you've heard me say it once, you'll hear me say it a million times: the ego is not a bad thing. The ego is not a thing to be vilified. Ego energy is a very normal part of human energy. The key is to be consciously engaged with your ego so that it's not too small or too big.

Now, Mercury conjunction to Chiron is an intense transit, and it's deep. And this should surprise no one because Chiron is the asteroid associated with your core wounds. Chiron in Aries is related to embodiment of your core wounds. So, when Mercury sits on top of Chiron in Aries, your thoughts are likely to turn to that topic. This can be really profound, especially because we do have two very supportive transits that will empower you to consider the big picture and the details and to go deep in a loving and caring way. So that's fucking gorgeous, right?

And we can apply this in a really personal way, which is how I'm about to talk about it, but also to collective conditions. If you're an organizer, if you are involved in some sort of humanitarian efforts or activism, this is a great time for confronting painful realities and coming up with a plan or a vision forward. This can be applied personally or collectively.

But sticking with the personal, this transit can be a time where you are able to understand—that understanding, it's your mind; it's Mercury—how your wounds, the most painful parts of your origin story, can be a catalyst for growth, for healing, but not just for healing yourself, but for engaging with the world in a powerful way. When you think about it, every superhero in a movie, in a fantasy movie—they have an origin story, and they're all really painful, right? That's because, a lot of times, our trauma and our pain forces us to work harder, to dive deeper. And I don't want to romanticize that, because it's not romantic. However, it is kind of true.

How have your most painful experiences in childhood, in your early development, actually catalyzed you to tap into potential that you wouldn't otherwise? That's a fair question to ask yourself, not to excuse the trauma you may have endured or the bad actions of adults around you when you were little, but to understand that you have potential, that you always have a choice around how you will hold pain and what you will do with it.

Now, all you need to do is look around the world to know that a lot of people, when they experience trauma or pain, take that trauma and that pain and push it all into a big-ass ball and shove it down inside of themselves or throw it at other people. And that can create resentments and cruelty and defensiveness and entitlement in ways that are really harmful on an individual level, but also to the people around you. That's a thing that humans do. And if that's a thing that you are doing or you have done, you always have agency. You can choose. You can change. You can evolve. But it's hard. It's hard.

Transits like this one, Mercury conjunction to Chiron—they help. And they don't help by magically fixing it. They help by empowering you to come to greater awareness and consciousness by activating and triggering you around ideas or experiences that hurt. And this is the fucking thing. When you're triggered is when you have the opportunity to reenact harm to yourself and/or others or to catch yourself in that pattern and make a different choice—maybe a teeny, tiny little bit of a different choice, maybe a bigly different choice, but a different choice. And it's hard.

When you get triggered, if you're like most people, you react, and you react out of your survival mechanisms. You react out of the coping mechanisms you developed when you were little, when you didn't have a whole lot of information. And maybe you didn't have a whole lot of support. And when you catch yourself in conflict enacting harmful patterns, you might not actually catch it until after you've been doing it for a week or a month or a year.

And once you discover you have been acting out in reaction to trauma and unconsciously reiterating your fears about yourself and the world—once you become aware of it, you can make a new choice. You can choose to retell the story to yourself, to shift how you support yourself. You can choose to communicate in new ways, to listen to people differently. You can always choose to evolve. And it's not a one-and-done choice. Evolution is a path. It's not a destination.

And when a transit like this one—Mercury conjunction to Chiron—occurs, you are called to reflect, to go deep, to feel the impact of your beliefs, of your relationships—Mercury  governs both—and to heal, not in spite of your wounds, but in embracing your wounds. All your parts are your parts. Finding a way to be empathetic and kind and patient with yourself creates a foundation inside of yourself that is much easier to build upon than abandoning yourself, judging yourself, punishing yourself. And then it becomes a lot easier to show other people authentic grace—not at your own expense, but true grace—because you know how to show it to yourself.

Mercury conjunction to Chiron is likely to deepen your thinking and deepen your connections and conversations with people, which may mean you're having a whatever/nothing conversation with somebody, and they may something in just the right way to trigger you. And you might catch yourself having a really activated thought process or tone of voice or way of typing back at someone—whatever it is. Within that, you have the chance to notice how your wounding shows up when you're triggered. And if you can notice without judgment, which requires—and this is the key. It requires the willingness and ability to stay present with the emotions.

And here's the thing. You've probably heard me say this before if you listen to the midweek episodes, the readings. What most humans do when we feel sad or bad or ashamed or embarrassed or whatever it is is we push away emotions. We push away from our challenging emotions. And as we push away, what we are unintentionally doing is abandoning ourselves. We are reiterating harm to our insides, and that perpetuates a cycle where you're evading and avoiding processing your feelings. And that makes it hard for real change and evolution and healing to occur.

Practice staying present with emotions that you don't know how to process. That's the best advice I can give you. Practice staying present with challenging emotions, and I'm not saying all the livelong day. I'm saying if someone says something to you, and you're like, "Why, I oughta," then maybe just take a beat. You know what I mean? Maybe it's 30 seconds. Maybe it's four minutes. Maybe it's an hour. But take a beat. Stay with the emotion. Don't grab your phone and doom scroll. Don't hop on the group text. Just stay with the emotions for a little longer than your habits would have you. I know it sounds small, but it is truly life-changing to do that as a pattern, as a habit, because what happens is you deepen your capacity to be there for yourself, which has this wonderful unintended consequence of deepening your capacity to show up in healthy ways with and for others.

Mercury conjunction to Chiron will call you to explore and process and reflect on heavy shit. It might be really clearly heavy shit, or it might just be that you're triggered and activated. Be mindful of your patterns. Don't worry about what other people are doing and why they're doing it or why they aren't doing it. Be mindful of your patterns this day, but really this whole week. How you listen, how you communicate—those are only a reflection on you. So notice those things with some patience and kindness. Just notice.

So you can see how this transit, Mercury conjunction to Chiron, is intense. It's a lot. But we have really supportive transits happening around it to ease your way and to make the best possible use of it. And that's it for the exact planetary transits for this week. Now, next week, we have some pretty intense shifts. My guess is that this week, even though there's only a few transits happening, a lot's going to happen. We're going to see major shifts, and it's going to be intense and, I'm guessing, pretty explosive.

And so I want to just kind of, again, center you in the practice of being intentional with how you engage with the world and with yourself, to center empathy and compassion and peace in all that you do. And I am recording this before I've taught my forgiveness class, but I've been of course steeped in this class and in this content of exploring forgiveness on multiple levels and how it can be integrated, what use it can have to protect your peace so that you can live in alignment with your values and your humanity in how you treat yourself, in how you treat others, and how you participate in the world in these deeply important and transformational times.

So, this week, I want to wish you peace, understanding that peace is a path and a practice. It's not a destination. And it takes a great deal of courage to choose it.

Now, very briefly, a rundown of the transits. On the 5th, Mercury forms a sextile to Jupiter. On the 6th, Venus forms a sextile to Pluto, and Mercury conjoins Chiron.

If you would like a visual to follow along with the weekly podcast, then you can go ahead and check out and subscribe to Astrology for Days over at astrologyfordays.com. It's my astrologers' pro tool, and it just basically tracks the transits and has a section where you can track your notes, so whether it's your personal observations, your predictions, my predictions, whatever it is. You can find the link in show notes, so you can check that out for you if you are a visual learner.

And as always, I'm very active over on my Patreon, and I invite you to join us there because we are having conversations and going deep and getting woo, and I'm into it. And you may be, too. Links to everything, as always, in show notes.

Talk to you in just a couple of days.