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 look at the astrology of August 24th through the 30th of 2025, and there's a lot going on, per usual. But I just want to gently—ever so gently—remind you that the way that astrology works is the same way that everything works. It's not just about the details or the thing immediately in front of you or active within you in this single moment.

Astrology speaks to cycles—cycles of development, cycles of experience, cycles of resistance, cycles of participation, etc., etc. It speaks to cycles. And these cycles—they build on themselves. And so you might not be thinking right now, in August of 2025, about how a few years ago, I was incessantly talking about infrastructure and protecting journalists. That was consistent with the astrology of that period when I was talking about it incessantly.

The consequences of how we handled that period, the infrastructure you created in your life, the infrastructure we created in our societies and within our governments, the ways in which we did or did not protect journalism as a whole and journalists in general and specifically—these cycles play out and unfold and play out and unfold. And then, eventually, what happens with astrology is something specific occurs to trigger it, and then we talk about it again.

What I'm trying to get at, see, is that we want to use astrology—or at least I want to use astrology and I want to encourage you to use astrology—as a way to understand where you're at in a particular cycle or in a given cycle, whether that's about relating to your finances or understanding childhood trauma or finding your place in this messy and complicated world. I want to encourage you to use this not as a way to fixate on specific points or specific predictions or transits or moments, but instead to understand that you are an organism. You are a life, and within you exists a damn universe. And you live on this living, breathing planet with all these other people. We are all here. We are all participating. If you're stuck, if you've been doing nothing but digging in your heels for years, that's still your participation. You are still actively engaged, even when and if you're stuck.

These are harrowing times in many ways. And that doesn't mean that you're not having great days and that you're not thriving in certain ways, but it would be too easy to turn to astrology and predictions of all kinds from all kinds of people who predict, from pollsters to historians to people more in my field, more astrologers and psychics—it would be easy to turn to us to look for an answer: "Tell me what's going to happen. Tell me how it's going to feel. Tell me what I should do."

And the truth of the matter is you gotta do what you gotta do. Also, you are a person, and there are cycles of development that you are participating in, that you are a part of. And within that, you're on a journey. You yourself are accountable to who you choose to be, for how you choose to participate, for the choices you make. And you do not exist in a vacuum. You exist in this larger world where there are ongoing cycles of development—that there are other people, that there are systems in place and wheels turning.

And so don't get superstitious with astrology. Don't get too locked into any one way of things being. You may hear scary predictions, and that makes sense because we're in a scary time. Whether or not a thing is true is—time will tell to a certain extent, right? But how you engage with your fears, how you engage with your survival mechanisms, how you navigate what you feel and how different things—whether they're real or imagined, present, past, or future—how those things play out inside of your system is something that you actually have agency around, that I want to point your attention to, because we're not meant to use spirituality as a way to evade struggle, strife, pain, or problems. That's not realistic. That is spiritual bypassing.

Instead, we use spirituality, astrology—all of these things—as a way to develop better resources within our individual selves so that we can show up for ourselves with others, for others, and within our communities and the world at-large. You're a spiritual being. You're having a material experience. And this material experience is a human experience, and humans live in groups and societies. We are all interconnected. We are all accountable to each other.

So I want to invite you to remember to breathe, to understand this moment that we are in. It is transformational, it is triggering, and it is meant to invoke community-mindedness. But if you are striving to engage with and for community without also tending to your insides, your triggers, your survival mechanisms, then you will eventually act out in ways that show your ass instead of your heart. And no shame to your ass. You know what I mean? We're all going to show our ass sometimes.

I want to invite you to tend to your heart, not instead of showing up with the world and for the world, but as a foundational act to being able to navigate hard things with integrity and in ways that reflect what's happening in the moment instead of only your triggers and that reflect what you really believe, what you're convicted around, instead of your survival mechanisms, which were generally created when you were very young and are not as complex and nuanced as your adult self would like them to be or need them to be.

That all said, let's dive headfirst into this week's astrology. So the first exact transit of the week is happening on Sunday, August 24th, at exactly 12:15 a.m. Pacific Time. We've got the Sun at 1 degree of Virgo and 24 minutes forming an exact square to Uranus at 1 degree of Gemini and 24 minutes. So we have this very mutable square between the Sun and Uranus.

So the first thing to know about this transit is we were feeling it on Saturday, so you already have the vibes going even if you're listening to this the moment I drop the episode. Sun square to Uranus is a disruptive transit. Uranus governs the unpredictable. It's a revolutionary, innovative, eccentric set of energies. When we have transits to or from Uranus, the thing you know is you don't know. It is unpredictable in nature.

And so, as a result of that, whenever we have transits to or from Uranus, you gotta know, "Okay. I have to be adaptable. This is my moment to expand my perspective, expand my approach," because Uranus wants to teach you how to engage in new ways, how to evolve and how to grow. And it's just—Uranus is like lightning. It's like earthquakes. It rattles things. It shakes them up. Now, the Sun is, of course, your identity. It's your sense of self. It's that part of you that wants to be seen or that is seen.

When the Sun and Uranus are in this kind of conflictual moment as they are right now, you can expect the unexpected. You can expect disruptions. So, for some people, that's going to mean your nervous system is really activated. You might feel just a hard time focusing, a hard time staying on one topic. You might feel anxious. So this is not a Neptunian anxiety, where you feel like you're falling apart and you don't have bones. Instead, it's a nervous tension form of anxiety. It's being hyper-fixated on too many things all at once. That's Uranus for you. Depending on how this hits your chart, it might even impact your sleep because, again, it's an overstimulating moment.

This transit suggests change. And because it's Uranus and because it's a square, it's like a damn hard turn kind of change, like you didn't see what was on the other side of the corner because you couldn't see it until you were there, but here we are—"Oops. Okay. This is a whole new thing" kind of change. And you are not meant to resist change, especially not the Uranian moment that we're in—instead, to adapt, to show up, to check in with, "Okay. What's up with me? Where am I really in regards to whatever is happening right now, and how can I show up in a way that's authentic and aligned? How can I show up in a way that honors what's important in the situation to me, in the world, contextually, what have you?" versus, "How can I hold on tight and fight to keep things the same?"

Here's a spoiler: things aren't going to stay the same. Things are not staying the same. You cannot go back. You can be here in the present. You can move forward. But going back—that's not really a thing. So what is this moment inviting you to consider? How might you change? How might you show up? Sun square to Uranus requires innovation, experimentation, even revolution and rebellion. So, in the context of social and political movements, this is a time for people coming together to fight for the rights of their communities or our communities.

This transit can trigger rogue entities acting in ways that were not in the script, that are unpredictable, and that are inherently conflictual because Uranus does not govern war, but it does govern rebellion and revolution. And so we may see revolutionary energies. Now, the question is always, whose revolution will we see? Whose revolution will take center stage? Because to imagine that my values or your values are the center of the universe, to imagine that my values or your values are going to be reflected in the astrology in the way that we would like to see it—it doesn't really work like that.

But what I can say is that in life, there are moves and there are countermoves.  If you are capable—if we are capable—of identifying what's happening in the moment and effectively resourcing ourselves, each other, so that we can engage in ways that facilitate progress, well, then we are using the very best of this Sun square to Uranus energy. And if, instead, we are reactive and we pick fights and we are irritable and distractable, then we are not making the best of this energy. And we all know that in 2025, there are endless routes towards distractibility.

If you're going to get mad or wrapped up and fixated and obsessive on something, pick your fixations with intention. This is a time that is really powerful for facilitating change, progress—not just change. Progress. But as we know, even freedom isn't free. Everything requires some measure of labor, intentionality, effort, learning and unlearning, collaboration, and compromise. This transit indicates rapid change, rapid developments.

And it isn't a transit that is encouraging you to stay at home and ponder. It's encouraging you instead to jump in and be a part of things, be a part of your relationships, be a part of resistance movements, be a part of the world. But to do so in a way that is aligned and reflective of what you truly believe and who you really are and what you want to see in the world takes self-awareness. And again, that self-awareness requires not just your intellectual presence but your emotional adaptability. And emotional adaptability is the hardest thing, especially when you're scared. It's a lot to juggle. It's a lot to consider. But that's what we can expect from this Sun square to Uranus.

One last thing I'll say about this transit—the Sun is very early Virgo, and we know that Virgo can be perfectionistic. But we also know that Virgo can be discerning. So do not allow perfect to be the enemy of good. Strive to actively discern your situation. Discernment requires that you are actively perceiving things and that you are critical in your thinking. And when I say critical, I don't mean tearing shit down and pointing to everything that's bad and wrong. That's easy. What's really hard is building shit up. Saying, "You're wrong. You're bad. This is terrible"—easy. It's so easy.

Uranus requires progress, innovation, considering what's possible, and even how we can, step by step or leap by leap, co-create what's possible. So this Sun in Virgo moment is an opportunity to be critical in your thinking where you're assessing in real time what's realistic instead of being idealistic in a way that is not rooted in or connected to this present moment, the path that brought us here, and where we're at on the path. But Virgo, Virgo Sun—that's helpful. Tap into that energy. Notice where it is in your birth chart. Tap into that energy this Sun square to Uranus moment, okay? Okay.

Now, that brings us to Monday, August 25th, where at 5:56 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus will be at 0 degrees of Leo and 25 minutes, and it will be forming a trine to Saturn at the same degrees of Aries. Now, quick little context moment—that means Saturn is just about to retrograde back into Pisces. That's a conversation for another day. So Venus trine to Saturn is a lovely transit. It fortifies your relationship to your values. Contextually to the Sun square to Uranus—fucking fabulous, right? Super helpful.

Venus is your values, and Saturn is your goals. Venus is diplomacy, and Saturn is constructive and about conservation. It can lean us towards conservatism, but it's not inherently about conservatism. It's about conservation—fine line but profound difference. When Venus forms a trine to Saturn, you can more easily identify what your values are and how and whether your actions, your behaviors—not just this day or this week but over time because Saturn, like all the slow-moving planets, are related to patterns—whether or not your actions reflect your values.

Venus trine Saturn helps you to act and relate to others and yourself and the things that are important to you in ways that reflect alignment, your values, your ethics. This is a good time to consider where your finances are, like is your money being spent in ways that support the creation or co-creation of a world you want to live in or not, and where and how can you make adaptations? Venus trine to Saturn is a good time to let someone you love know you love them, to connect with people in efforts to create or support, over time, your relationships.

This is a good time to show up for yourself, for others—and I mean others like one-on-one relationships but also people that are in your world, that are a part of your life—to show up with actions. And sometimes those actions are a text that is a heart, and sometimes it's about getting someone's groceries for them or whatever. I mean, there's a bazillion ways to show up for people. Even if your capacity is really small, there are ways that you can let people know that you appreciate them. Think about how nice it feels when somebody lets you know that you're on their mind, that they care about you, that they value you. It feels really nice. And you just never know when you might say something kind or do something kind for someone and it just is exactly what they needed, and it turns their shit around.

Things are hard right now, and I cannot overstate the value of building relationships that are supportive and values-based. It makes life easier. It makes life better. This might apply to your interpersonal one-on-one relationships. This might apply to your relationship to your own self-worth and self-esteem. This might apply to your relationship to work or to money. Because of these two planets, it could be applied in any of these places.

Venus trine to Saturn is a good time to make an investment. Make sure whatever or whoever you are investing in is a reflection of your most deeply held values and not a reflection of your fears or just simply your desire for safety and security.

Now, that brings us to Tuesday. It's a busy day in the stars. Tuesday, August 26th, we've got not one but three transits from Venus to not one but three outer planets. And of course, it's overlapping with the Venus trine to Saturn. Now, at 1:58 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus, at 1 degree of Leo and 25 minutes, forms an exact sextile to Uranus at the same degrees of Gemini. Just over an hour later, Venus will be at 1 degree of Leo and 29 minutes forming an exact trine to Neptune at 1 degree of Aries and 29 minutes. That's at 3:18 p.m.

Then, later that night, 10:54 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus is at 1 degree of Leo and 52 minutes sitting exactly opposite to Pluto at the same degrees of Aquarius. Now, Pluto is the only outer planet that's not on the verge of retrograding back into the anaretic degrees of its previous sign. Pluto is on the verge of making its own really big moves. So, before I unpack the details of these three transits, we want to keep our head clear. Venus is the common piece in all these transits, right?

So Venus represents your close and intimate relationships. It's sense-based care. So, in astrology, people will often focus on the romantic and sensual component to Venus. That's not exactly my fixation. I want us to cultivate a life that is embracing of love and sex and sensuality but not over-fixated upon it. Venus is related to your values and the value you hold in yourself. It's your self-esteem, your self-worth. And it's related to beauty and money. Again, it's things we place a lot of value on as individuals as well as as a collective. And this is, of course, different across different kinds of communities and different societies. But whatever it is that you value is likely to be centered during a Venus transit. So have that in your little noodle.

So Venus sextile to Uranus is another lovely transit, just like the Venus trine to Saturn and the Venus trine to Neptune. Venus sextile to Uranus creates this dynamic spark of inspiration where you are capable of engaging with possibility and progress and freedom and authenticity in ways that kind of come quick and feel right. Venus sextile Uranus, of course, especially if it's hitting your chart directly, is a great transit for connecting, whether that's with people, with your values, with resources. This transit supports you in the co-creation of something better—progress, right? We're talking about Uranus, so we're talking about progress.

This is a time to try new things and to explore. Opportunities may come your way kind of spontaneously, and with Uranus, it's often kind of easy come, easy go. So, when opportunity comes, my little Capricorn head always says that it's a test. It's a test of how well you know yourself and what's right for you, your situation, the timing, etc., because opportunity requires your accurate assessment of whether or not it's a good opportunity for you, and for you at this time, because not all good opportunities are good opportunities for you, and not all things that are technically great opportunities are right for this moment.

In life, you will have many opportunities. And part of your job as a human person navigating choices and your freedoms is to assess whether it's in alignment, whether the timing is right. Venus sextile Uranus is a transit that will often mean the timing is right. Now, contextually, there's other shit going on, so that's not what I'm saying. But this transit can bring about positive opportunities for progress. I invite you to be open to them.

Now, the next exact transit is that Venus trine to Neptune. May internet astrology promise you perfect love, fantasy, portals, spiritual experiences, romantic experiences that expand your world and fix your broken heart? Yes. Is that true? No. Let's just get that out of the way. Venus trine Neptune is another lovely transit. Venus is your values, and Neptune is your ideals. When they are in this lovely, flowing, supportive relationship, as a Venus trine to Neptune is, then you may be able to perceive and participate in the co-creation of a path forward that is reaching towards your ideals without compromising your values.

It may make you feel so connected to someone or something. It may make you feel like you're willing to give up something important, to devote yourself to someone or something. Venus trine to Neptune is super romantic. And you may feel all kinds of feelings for a person or, again, for an ideal, for a concept. You may want to pour yourself into some sort of project that you're inspired by or into a crush that you just got super overwhelmed with.

This transit can intensify your connection to empathy and compassion and humanity. It can empower you to be willing and able to really not just intellectually understand but to feel the interconnectedness of all beings and all things. It's a beautiful fucking transit, and the fact that it's overlapping with that Venus trine to Saturn means that it's got that grounding that Saturn brings that Neptune often needs. The fact that it's overlapping with the Venus sextile to Uranus means that it's being egged on because Venus and Neptune—they can both kind of recline to reflect, but Uranus and Saturn—especially Uranus contextually here—they kind of give you these sparks of energy to mobilize, to be curious, to engage.

This is a transit for love, and I don't mean love as a passive feeling, but love as a catalyzing, motivational force. Love is something that emanates from the inside and you can direct outside of yourself. Actions motivated by love can be so powerful. Values that are inspired by love don't only do good for the world, but they make you feel so much better in your own skin, especially over the course of cycles and time.

This transit can make you feel a little escapist or just way too happy to just zone out. That's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's just a thing to be aware of because these three transits that I just told you about, and then the one I'm about to tell you about, do want your engagement. They are powerful opportunities. And so zoning out, disassociating, escaping—it's just not well starred. Do it another day. I'm not saying don't ever do it, just maybe not today, maybe not at the start of this week.

Connection-building, relationship-building, values-building—these things are all really well starred. And I'm using the word "building," which is a very Saturnian word. And that's partially because I can't help myself—I'm a triple Capricorn—but also because the building blocks here are so perfect. They're so powerful. So get engaged. Tap into your values and your heart.

And now let me tell you about the third exact transit of the day, which is a real fucking tone change, so bear with me. As I said, 10:54 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus is exactly opposite Pluto. So Venus opposite Pluto is a hard transit. Pluto is your survival mechanisms. If you've been listening to this podcast or my work in general for long enough, you know that I believe that our survival mechanisms are our strongest but not necessarily our wisest impulses. That is Pluto for you.

It is important to understand, in the context of Pluto, that your trauma doesn't make you wise. Your trauma makes you traumatized. How you engage with, respond to, process, and move through your trauma can help you to facilitate and co-create wisdom. But trauma on its own is trauma. It's pain. When we are dealing with a Venus opposite to Pluto, your survival mechanisms are going to be activated. So that might be because something bad happens, something that really threatens your survival happens, or it may be because something happens that triggers your fears and coping mechanisms around bad things that once happened to you or your concerns about bad things that might happen in the future. It is really fucking important that you are able to assess the difference between those things.

And so this is, again, where I return to how important it is to be able to stay present with hard emotions so that you can understand what they're really letting you know and you can respond to them in ways that make you safer instead of keep you in old cycles and compel you to believe that you are entitled to acting out either against yourself or others, missing opportunities for growth and healing.

During a Venus opposition to Pluto, you may encounter power struggles with other people. And this may be your fault. You may be the problem. It may be the other person's fault. They may be the problem. And most likely, everybody is at fault because everybody is imperfect and triggered and doing their best and struggling. In these incredibly harrowing times—I mean, just quick check-in here—it's been half a decade that we have been dealing with COVID and COVID denialism and the health ramifications of this airborne pandemic that persists in making people sick and the bizarre politicization of this airborne disease that is a mass disabling event. We are half a decade into it. How do you think that's affected you consciously and unconsciously? How has that affected your kids, your friends, your coworkers, people in your community at-large?

Generally, it's too much to process day by day. Shit gets shoved into our subconscious. We astrology nerds have been talking about civil war in the United States for years because of the Pluto Return of the United States. Now, more and more people are identifying that this is happening in real time. Now, how do you process that? Where do you put the emotions? Where do you put the fears? I don't know. I genuinely don't know.

But I do know this: there are countless things that you're going through. A lot of them are directly influenced by our collective conditions—the economy, the environment, and all the things. They're impacting you. They're impacting how you feel, what you want, what you do. They're impacting other people, how they feel, what they want, what they do. And sometimes the way that comes together between individuals, communities, systems is really fucking chaotic. Sometimes it's not; sometimes it is.

When Venus sits opposite to Pluto, the shit that you have shoved into your unconscious, the things you don't really know how to deal with, your survival mechanisms, your defenses, your resentments, your pettiness, gets triggered and can often get projected out onto a person. Or that can happen to you or at you, or you are bearing witness to it happening in relationships around you.

Now, as I just said, we have all these other Venus transits that are incredibly supportive. So we are not without resources. But Pluto is intense. It governs intensity. Pluto governs shit, like literally poop, but also, it governs shit. Pick your battles with intention. Make sure the people or things you fight or fight for are a reflection of your values and not just your survival mechanisms.

Pluto governs your obsessions, your fixations, your defensiveness, your insecurities. There's a lot of different planets that govern insecurity in different ways, but this is like, "Do I have any worth as a human being? Do I even want to be here?" Pluto is all or nothing, life and death—pretty heavy shit. Most people do not have the capacity to process those kinds of feelings in real time, day to day. And so we act out. We act weird. We act in ways that are not super authentic because what's super authentic is too hard to hold. And that, as you can imagine, creates problems—problems inside of ourselves but also problems interpersonally with other people. And this transit is going to activate all of that shit.

Because Pluto is related to power and power struggles, we may see abuses of power, in particular in regards to women's rights. And of course, we keep in mind that in a patriarchal world or a patriarchal society, women's rights and Queer rights and Genderqueer rights are all woven together. We may see some sort of big shift in the economy or some sort of big happening in the economy in a way that really affects people, not just corporations or the market. But Pluto is related to what you have but might not have access to, whereas Venus is related to what you have in hand, second-house/eighth-house shit.

This may be a transit where you need to take accountability for the boundaries that you hold, or not. In power struggles, sometimes you just need to fucking fight, and sometimes you need to be the change you want to see, to embody a boundary. You don't have to do it perfectly. We have been talking about boundaries on this podcast for a long time, but I will reiterate something I said very recently, which is rules are something that you enforce on others. You tell people, "This is the rule. This is what you must do." Boundaries are something that you self-manage. "This is what I will participate in, and that is not something I will participate in."

Power is not inherently a bad thing. Abuse of power is, and abuses of power show up in a lot of different ways in a lot of different contexts. This is a transit that will trigger power imbalances, abuses of power, your feelings of empowerment or powerlessness. And you are not meant to hide under your blanket in your house as a way to deal with it—instead, to understand that Pluto is a part of the zodiac, right? We're astrology nerds. Pluto is a part of you. It is a part of me. It is part of our relationships. It is a part of our society. And it's a part that can get really fucking out of hand. But it's a part of you. It's a part of me. It's a part of us. So how are you going to engage with it?

Don't hide from this shit. You can't hide from this shit. Instead, try to show up for it and to show up for it in ways that are not a betrayal of your own values, that do not require you to ignore or disregard or diminish the value in other people, no matter who those people are. This transit may be a powerful opportunity for you to excavate ableism from inside of you, racism from inside of you, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism from inside of you. This is an opportunity for you to experience your own triggers and biases and survival mechanisms and to strive to better understand them, to realign your values system in ways that reflect what you've learned and who you want to be and not just reactiveness, defensiveness, assumptions.

It's hard to unlearn things. It's hard to take accountability for the ways in which your takes have been not so great or your behavior has been problematic. When we go through a Venus opposition to Pluto, there's often a confrontation that asks you to really assess that. "What is my take here? What are my actions? Do I need to change my perspective? Have I been wrong?" It's so easy to focus on what other people are doing and whether or not they're wrong. And you know what? Sometimes that's the thing to do. But if your healing process is all about what other people did wrong, if our movements are just about what's wrong in the world and not about understanding what justice actually is, what liberty actually is, if we don't move through the messiness of our individual shit, it is that much harder to effectively truly move through our collective shit.

And Venus opposite Pluto, and in particular this Venus opposite Pluto, is an opportunity to do just that. But it requires bravery. It requires getting messy. It requires being honest with yourself and with others, and doing these things with healthy boundaries and balanced self-worth. And the truth is nobody's perfect. So you want to start where you're at and use a harm reduction model for navigating the next best steps instead of being perfectionistic in such a way that you're only looking for the best step. Sometimes your next best step is deeply fucking imperfect. Start from where you're at because it's the only way to authentically get where you want to go.

Okay. On Thursday, the 28th of August, at exactly 5:09 p.m. Pacific Time, Uranus will be at 1 degree of Gemini and 26 minutes, and Neptune will be at the same degrees of Aries. Saturn is really close by. It's not an exact transit, but it's really close by because Saturn and Neptune are hugging each other close.

Uranus sextile to Neptune is a really important transit. They're both related to progress, innovation, and possibility. And a sextile is expansive. It's a spark of energy. It's supportive. The issue with these two planets, though—even though this is a really lovely transit—is they're related to systems because they're the outer planets, so they're generational planets. And the generational planets are related to our systems that are in place in a really deep way. So, on an individual level, we're talking about things that are in your epigenetics, things that are in your family line that are in deep, woven into your childhood lived experience and reflected in your parents and/or caregivers when you were little.

And on a more social level, it's related to the systems that our societies are organized by and around. And so, when systems—whether it's internally in an individual, in a project, or in society—are functioning really well, sometimes you are really unhappy. Things go fucking sideways in a way that nobody wants because if we look at the way we've set things up, we've set them up for pain or for suffering or for the continued oppression of a certain group of people or certain groups of people. Certainly, in the United States, there is this rise of white Christian nationalism. That rise comes from the very founders of this country. That rise doesn't come out of the last decade of politics—certainly not the last decade of politics alone. They come from the very systems that this nation have been founded on and how it's functioned the whole time.

Uranus sextile to Neptune activates a spark that can light a fire of progress. That progress may be spiritual, certainly on an individual level. It may be humanitarian, both individually and collectively. And it may be in regards to the separation between something like—I don't know—church and state. There's a lot going on astrologically. This transit is one that helps each and every one of us, as individuals and as a collective—Uranus, collective—to care about each other, care about our future, care about the planet, and to consider what personal sacrifices we can make to devote ourselves to the co-creation of something better.

This transit can be a time where you tap into spiritual work, and that's great. I don't encourage you to lose your grounding or leave this reality or your body in order to do it, because of the function of Pluto at this time and because of the proximity of Saturn and Neptune. I want to invite you to be in your body, be here now, in part so that you can really understand what here and now is, in part because that's how you're best resourced. I am a huge fan of having a spirituality and doing spiritual work that is rooted in reality. And what is reality? I mean, that's a conversation for another day. But I do believe that our spirituality is meant to help facilitate how we live in alignment and not be a vacation from reality.

Now, that's the astrology of this week. But before I read through the transits one more time for you, I want to talk to you about something very briefly—and I'll talk to you about it more in depth over time—that is not my typical focus with astrology. And it's an out-of-bound planet. Now, if you want to learn what out-of-bound planets are, that's, again, a conversation we can have later. This is already a really long episode.

But I want to acknowledge that at the end of August, Pluto goes out of bounds. Now, this does not happen frequently. And because of how slowly Pluto moves—the last time Pluto was in Aquarius was about 248 years ago, right? A long fucking time ago. So, every time Pluto does something, it is always big fucking deal. Pluto out of bounds—the last time it happened, loosely speaking, was World War II. So it was kind of a big moment. And it hasn't happened since.

But here we are. Pluto is going out of bounds at the end of August, and it will remain out of bounds for about a decade. And then it won't happen again for thousands of years. What? Oh my God. She said thousands of years. Yes, I did. So it's a big, big astrological shift. It's momentous. That's Pluto for you. It's momentous. And again, I promise to talk about it more in depth later. But I want to communicate something that I think is really important, especially for people who intentionally or unintentionally use astrology to freak themselves out or people who have a lot of astrology predictions in their social media feed.

When you look around you at the events that are happening in the world, you can know that this is a momentous moment. You can know that we're at a tipping point. There are indicators everywhere that we've reached a turning point, and Pluto moving out of bounds in Aquarius is another clear articulation of that. Pluto governs transformation that is deep and from the bottom up. It governs our shadows individually and as a collective. And its power is nuclear. Literally, it governs nuclear energy.

Pluto is related to purging and death and destruction. It is related to rebirth, and it is related to healing. There are no half measures when it comes to Pluto. Even the easiest path forward with Pluto requires depth and profundity. Pluto out of bounds is a rare occurrence, and the fact that it's happening for the next decade tells us what we already know: that we are at this tipping point—environmentally, socially, collectively, and therefore individually. When Pluto goes out of bounds, just like when any planet goes out of bounds, it functions in a really wild, off-the-rails kind of way. It is confronting, personally and collectively confronting.

And we must engage with our hidden depths and our deepest feelings. Your survival mechanisms is what I'm talking about. The changes that you're perceiving inside of you—the ones that are hard to name, the ones that you can't stop thinking about—the shifts that you're noticing in the world around you from abuses of power to genocide to a mass disabling event, the xenophobia, the racism, the judgment, defense of the cruelty—all this shit—they require incredible honesty and bravery to confront and to work on and work with. They're happening. They're real. Pluto out of bounds speaks to how they are real; they are happening.

And as we acknowledge what's happening in the world, our own shit within it, you're likely to be really triggered. You're meant to be triggered. I'm triggered. You're triggered. We're all triggered, and then we're triggering each other. It's a lot. And sometimes that is about real harm, and sometimes that is about fear of harm. Either way, this is a really activating time. And I don't want you to research Pluto out of bounds. I don't want you to hear anything I or anyone else says about Pluto out of bounds and feel a sense of collapse. I don't want you to feel disempowered.

This is only validating what you already can easily see is happening. Pluto requires transformation. It is the phoenix. It is the flames. And it is what rises from its ashes. That exists inside of the human condition. It exists in the world. It exists in nature. In the context of living through fascism, we know that we are not meant to comply in advance. In order to disrupt fascism, we must be able to tolerate our fears deeply enough that we're able to stay present when we're terrified and to make choices that don't only reflect survival mechanisms but also what is true and what is most needed from the situation as it is, and that is hard. It's exceptionally hard.

People with power can abuse power. People with power love abusing power. Okay. Fine. But how we enable that, how we comply, or conversely, how we radically, meaningfully come together with each other, for each other, how we tolerate difference and build connection—that's our power as a collective. And Pluto out of bounds in Aquarius is an astrological event that articulates the immediacy and the importance of community care, of coming together, of building together, and for your and my willingness to do hard things, to understand that there's not only one way forward.

I know on the internet, we like to tell each other, "This is the only way," "The only way is to vote this way," "The only way is to not vote," "The only way is to vote that way." There are many ways. We must not be carceral and punishing to ourselves and others in reaction to carceral and punishing systems that are trying to hurt us, because then they win on a lot of levels.

One of the things that I believe it is your individual job to navigate as a consumer of astrology content is what your boundaries need to be. Does that kind of information empower you to be more present and to make better choices? Does it empower your curiosity? Or does it freak you out and shut you down? If it does the latter, then it's good to heave healthy boundaries around what kind of astrology content you consume, whether or not prediction is useful for you.

And also, I want to encourage you to be brave. And as an astrologer who's sharing astrological predictions, I am always thinking about the utility of sharing my predictions or my understanding of what's happening astrologically. I want it to be useful, but we must understand that what's useful for me might not be useful for you.

So, this week and every week, I want to encourage you to be brave, to tolerate your emotions, and also to assess for yourself what's healthy, what's constructive, what you can engage with in a healthy way, and where you find that you can't be healthy and something's not in alignment, what actions do you need to take? What boundaries do you need to set?

Okay. As promised, I'm going to run through the transits one more time. On August 24th, the Sun forms an exact square to Uranus. On the 25th, Venus forms an exact trine to Saturn. On August 26th, Venus forms an exact sextile to Uranus, and Venus forms an exact trine to Uranus, and Venus forms an exact opposition to Pluto—fucking Venus doing too much shit this week. On the 28th, Uranus forms a sextile to Neptune. And at the end of this week, Pluto goes out of bounds. And that's what's up.

As always, I want to thank you for joining me here for Ghost of a Podcast. I invite you to join me over on Patreon, where we're having a lot of conversations about animal communication and astrology and emotional capacity and all kinds of other spiritual and real-life shit. And I also encourage you to send me your questions to be considered for the podcast so that you can get a reading with me here on Ghost.

I hope you're taking really good care of yourself and others this week and every week, and I'll talk to you in just a couple of days. Bye.