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.

Hello, and welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. This week, we're looking at the astrology of April 5th through the 11th, and there's not too many exact transits. So let's just take a moment to check in with a couple of things.

The first is that when you get something like the horoscope that I give you, where I'm looking at the exact transits of the week, what we know is that we're looking at the energies that are active and traceable in your lived experience and in the lived experiences of individuals and the collective.

When there are less exact transits, it's not like nothing is happening. It's more that—let me try to explain it this way. It's kind of like you're in a crowded café or a crowded bar, and when there's an exact transit happening, you're engaging with people specifically in that café. You're having interactions, or you're able to hear and see interactions that other people are having. And it's loud.

When there's not anything loud and active happening in front of you or with you, then everything else that's happening in that café gets louder. There's more space for you to experience it. So that's when we are more likely to experience, both individually and as a collective, the larger themes at play, like the Saturn/Neptune conjunction, like Pluto out of bounds, like Pluto sextile to Saturn and Uranus sextile to Neptune. We start to feel these larger transits more actively. Also, the transits that are impacting you personally in your birth chart may get a little bit more demanding, active, or loud so that you engage with the lessons and energies at play.

So I wanted to give you that perspective about how astrology works and how astrology affects you. We are undeniably living through really challenging times. We are undeniably at the precipice of a large set of systemic and global changes. And it's a really stressful time. When we think about war and climate collapse and old diseases becoming new, when we think about the environmental and social catastrophe that AI promises to be, I mean, and so many other global shifts that are occurring, it's really hard to know how to plan for the future, how to stay emotionally present.

And listen. Listen. I know that some of you don't like to think about negative things. You don't like to sully your vibes with negative things. You don't like to be stressed and upset. And you know what? Being stressed and upset sucks. I am with you on that. But I do believe that the way that we, as concerned people, as responsible people, as sensitive, empathetic people, can live in integrity, can live in alignment—it requires that we know what's happening in the world, and it requires that we are honest with ourselves about how it feels.

It's not low vibe to feel bad. It just isn't. It's low vibe to live out of accord with the present moment. And it's really hard to stay in the present moment when the present moment is frightening and disorienting and destabilizing. And you may have really lovely things happening in your life right now. You may be personally thriving. And if that is the case, I send off sweet little balloons and fireworks and stuff like that for you because we all deserve to thrive and be happy.

And also, the world is in a state of duress. Even if you're not thinking about it a lot, it's likely to be impacting you energetically. And that impact may be felt by your relationships not being what they once were, your mental health feeling strange, or your sleep being fucked up. There's a lot of ways that collective conditions kind of trickle down into our lives.

And it is really important, from my perspective as a damn person, as a counselor, and absolutely as an astrologer and a psychic, to acknowledge the collective weight that we are all carrying that is actually impossible to carry in a healthy way. It's just not realistic to read news that tells you that we are risking nuclear events, literally, and world war, literally, that we are running out of fuel regardless of the stupid fucking reason, and we are running out of water, and to not have an existential sense of dread.

Learning how to cope, to stay present with feelings, with hard-to-metabolize feelings, learning how to cope with scary and uncertain realities, is a part of being a person. And it's a part I wish you didn't have to deal with, genuinely. But it is a part of being a person, and it's a part of being a person in 2026.

You are not alone in struggling with how to fucking cope. You are not alone in struggling personally, professionally, financially. You're not the only one who's having a hard time with sleep and all the other things, all the other ways that humans struggle.

I'm teaching this class on alignment, and at this time, as you're hearing this, the registration is closed. But as I've been steeping myself for the last few months in this curriculum, something that really keeps on coming up for me is how challenging it is to stay present for most of us at least some of the time.

There's this lie that persists in spiritual worlds where, if you feel present, then you'll be calm. Then you'll be happy. Presence is not inherently happy. It is hard to stay present with challenging feelings like fear or anger. But cultivating presence is foundational to cultivating acceptance. In order to accept something, again, you must be present first, but then recognize that acceptance is not consent. It's not capitulation. It's awareness.

And I want to just invite you to consider where you're at at this time with your awareness and your presence with collective events because they're affecting you. I don't know you personally, but I know that you are for sure affected by collective events because you're a person, and we're all affected by collective events. We are all affected by it, just like we're affected by the transits I'm about to break down for you.

We all have different windows of tolerance for stress and anxiety, uncertainty, news—all kinds of other things. But cultivating the awareness—"Okay. This is how much I can tolerate before I start to shut down or panic or whatever else"—that awareness is really valuable. But we don't want to cultivate awareness and stop there.

We then want to check in with, is where we're at, is our coping mechanism, something that we need to expand? Does it need to be a little bit more firm or a little less rigid? Again, the cultivation of awareness and of presence is a practice. And it's a practice that will empower you to cope with challenges, whether those challenges are anticipatory anxiety or immediate troubles in your life that you must deal with.

This is something that has taken me so many years to learn and I know is very, very challenging. But I'll say this. You are better protected and better resourced from reality, from here and now. If you abandon yourself as a coping mechanism, then when true challenges do emerge, whether they're mental health or material problems or whatever the hell else, it's much harder to tap in and address whatever's active.

I want to encourage you to really ask yourself this week, can you be present? And from the present, can you not rapidly shift your awareness of what's happening in this moment into a to-do list, into an action or something you justify or prove, but instead, can you just tolerate being present and hanging out with the feelings and the racing thoughts and the pressing whatevers? Can you hang out with it a little bit longer than you're comfortable with, expanding your window?

In doing this, you start to build a muscle, a muscle that we all need right now. The astrology of this week will be supportive for this kind of work, and it's necessary. I say to you as your astrologer it's necessary. So we're going to dive into this week's forecast.

And if you got some sort of FOMO when I mentioned my class, don't worry; after the series is completed—it's a five-week series starting on April 5th—I will either schedule the next installation and I'll do this series with another group of folks, or I'll make it available for sale on my website so you can access my alignment class there.

Let's dive into this week's horoscope. So, like I said, we are looking at the astrology of April 5th through the 11th of 2026. And the TL;DR for this week is, even as intense emotions that we're still feeling from that Venus square to Pluto that I talked about in last week's forecast rise to the surface, do your best to explore possibility without jumping to conclusions from the Sun square to Jupiter, and explore new opportunities, new approaches, even new motivations, thanks to the upcoming Mars sextile to Uranus. That's your TL;DR. Let's dive in.

Your first exact transit this week will be exact at 3:23 p.m. Pacific Time on April the 5th, which is Sunday. At that time, the Sun will be at 16 degrees of Aries and 8 minutes, forming an exact square to Jupiter at the same degrees of Cancer. So Sun square to Jupiter is an exciting transit. It can bring about a lot of really fun and expansive things, and there's some pitfalls to look out for.

So the Sun is your identity and your sense of self. It's your vitality. It's not your ego, but it's your will. And Jupiter is all about expansion and growth. It's associated with luck and optimism. And technically speaking, that luck may even come from your optimism when Jupiter is involved. This transit can coincide with growth. It can coincide with experiences that you're able to learn from, that you're able to mobilize from. And that mobility is not necessarily about action. It might be about an expanded perspective or forgiveness or release of some kind.

The best parts of Jupiter are about inhabiting possibility, staying connected to the growth associated with experience, and generosity. And so, when the Sun and Jupiter form a square, we have the opportunity to learn from experience, to expand your perspective in such a way that it empowers you to be more real, be more whole.

This transit can make you feel good, make you feel adaptable, make you feel excited. And also, it can have you proselytizing, trying to shove your perspective down other people's throats. It can put you in a frame of mind where, if everything doesn't happen quickly and as you want it, you can get butthurt, basically.

The Sun square to Jupiter is a transit that can inspire you to do too much—to spend too much money, to overcommit yourself, to spend too much energy on a thing that actually doesn't require or deserve all that damn energy. The thing about Jupiter is it tests your sense of proportion. And if you don't have a healthy relationship to proportion, that's when you overdo it/underdo it, take too much/take too little, give too much/give too little.

And so a transit like this is a good temperature check. And it's a temperature check for your relationship to expansion and extension. If you find yourself overdoing it, that's good information for you to have. If you find yourself underdoing it, similarly excellent information for you to have.

This transit can be associated with spirituality or philosophy. Because of Jupiter's expansiveness, it empowers you to really be moved by ideas, philosophies, spiritual ideas—whatever it may be—that help you to grow. A couple things to know. Things might be busy on and around this date, and that busyness is not inherently good or bad but, again, a test of your capacity to know what you can take on in a healthy way, where your limits are, but also, it's a test of your willingness and ability to have fun and to explore and to try new things.

For the extreme religious right that is burgeoning, certainly in the United States and in many other places in the world, this transit is one I'm going to be looking out for because it can coincide with intense religiosity and the conviction that "My way is the only way, and I'm going to force you to see it my way" kind of thing. Make sure you're not doing it, even if you believe you're right. Holding space for other people having different perspectives, different lived experiences, is really valuable.

And that brings us to Wednesday, April the 8th. At exactly 9:11 a.m. Pacific Time, we will have an exact Mars sextile to Uranus, with Mars at 29 degrees of Pisces and 7 minutes forming a sextile to Uranus at the same degrees of Taurus.

The Mars sextile to Uranus is a super different transit than the Sun square to Jupiter, but it has a lot of crossover. And that crossover is really about experience. Mars sextile Uranus is a transit that can inspire you to want to experiment, to try new things, to innovate. So Mars is what you do. It's your motivation. It's how you do it. And Uranus is innovation, experimentation, eccentricity.

Therefore, this transit can kind of shake up your experiences, empower you to try new things, consider things from a different perspective. The Mars sextile to Uranus can empower you to feel inspired to innovate a new way of approaching things. This is a great time for first dates because this transit can intensify and bring chemistry. It can open you up to flirting or vibing with someone in ways that are different than how you typically do and just basically being open because Mars is the vibe bringer. Mars is chemistry. Mars is sex. Mars is—you know, it's the planet that governs fornication, not that all dates lead to fornication. However, Mars brings the vibes.

This is a great transit if you have a project that you've been working on or trying to mobilize on but you've been somehow stuck. This is a great transit for tapping in. Mars in Pisces, especially at its anaretic degree of 29, is really an aspect that can tap you into more, so your inspiration, your interconnectedness, creativity, while Uranus in Taurus empowers you to connect on a material level to what you value.

This is a wonderful transit for checking in with what you're doing with your life so that you can align not only what you're doing with what's authentic to you and your values system but also so that you can be willing to try new ways of engaging and approaching things because Mars isn't just what you do; it's the motivations underpinning those actions. And Uranus isn't just experimentation and innovation; it's connected to your larger senses. It's connected to your nervous system. This is a great transit for trying new ways of tending to your nervous system through the body, the meat suit—Mars.

The combo platter of these two transits is quite lovely because they both speak to experience, innovation, generosity, and adaptability, which we need and we love to see. And those are the only two exact transits of this week. Here's the "but." On Sunday, the 12th, so for next week's forecast, we have an exact conjunction between Mars and Neptune. We're going to be feeling this transit pretty much from the 8th onwards.

Mars conjunction to Neptune—I promise I'll talk about it more next week as well, but the Mars conjunction to Neptune is a very challenging transit, from my perspective. Mars is the ego, and Neptune is the disillusionment planet. It takes the material and strong nature of Mars, and it just pokes all these holes in it. It dissolves it. Therefore, this transit can find you feeling really demoralized, exhausted, and missing all your spoons, unfortunately.

This transit is unfortunately one that has been on my mind for some time because of how it can really activate religious extremism, and in particular because of Mars's placement here, its patrilineal religious extremism. And Mars also is related to combat and war. And so holy wars, battles enacted specifically for a religious end or some sort of spiritual end, can be articulated through this transit.

So we want to pay attention to what's happening in the world. We want to do this so that we can be aware that you are—if you're feeling sensitive/you're feeling sensitive to something, you can protect yourself, the people around you, your community, to the best of your ability. And if you are feeling off, you can share that with other people. You can tap into possibility and resources to better connect you and protect you and the people and things you care about.

There's not always something to do. Mars loves to do something. But we can bolster and strengthen ourselves, other people, our circumstances, and our communities. We can. It just can take extra effort, and in particular, this Mars conjunction to Neptune may make you feel like, "Oh, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do. I am a victim in this situation, and there's literally—I am without options." And while that may be true, it's probably not. And you can always adapt your attitude.

Now, I want to hold space for feeling helpless and hopeless, because those are feelings people feel and I feel sometimes, and they are a part of living. And also, we want to take as much responsibility as we can for our own welfare and strive to take care of ourselves because that is a foundational step to showing up with and for others. Sometimes showing up for yourself is knowing how to ask for help and knowing who to ask for help. And sometimes it's something else.

But as we feel the influence of that Mars/Neptune conjunction, it's likely to just feel really overwhelming. And you might need extra sleep, and you might need to drink more water. You might just need to take better care of your body—Mars—as a foundation for caring for your mental health, your spiritual health, and your energetic boundaries, which are an important thing to be cultivating this month in general and this week and next week in particular. Okay?

And if you're like, "I don't even know where to begin," it's something I have a lot of content around over on my Patreon. You can join the conversation over there. And I don't want this to sound too hippie-ish, but also, you could just hang out with a tree. You could hang out with a tree. Literally hang out with a tree.

Hang out with a tree and connect to not just the parts you can see, the parts you can touch, but also its roots system. Listen to trees. They have a lot to teach us about weathering storms, about surviving through time. It can help you to learn how to ground, how to shield, how to acknowledge and foster your connection with people, with others, and not just with other people that you talk to but the energetic connections that we share and hold with each other as a collective. Trees have so much to teach us about all that.

So quick run through. On the 5th, the Sun and Jupiter form a square. On the 8th, we've got our Mars sextile to Uranus in exactitude, but that's also the day we start to feel the Mars conjunction to Neptune, which won't be exact until next week.

As always, I want to thank you so much for joining me here on Ghost of a Podcast. I invite you to send me a question through the contact form on my website if you would like to get a reading with me here on the podcast. And make sure to tune in to this week's upcoming reading, where I talk to more than one goat. And that's the only spoiler I will give you. There are many goats.

All right. Take really good care of yourself and others, and I will talk to you in just a couple of days. Bye.