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 going to look at the astrology of the week ahead, as always, but there are ten exact transits this week. So I'm going to do my best to create usable summaries for you so that you can really make sense of it without getting too overwhelmed by all the details.

Now, listen. It's the middle of the month, right? It's mid-May. And there is so much happening in the world. There's so much happening domestically that is meaningfully important. There's so much happening globally, and there's so much happening with the climate. There's a lot to care about. There's a lot to feel hopeless and scared about, and there's a lot to feel hopeful about.

But I want to speak to something that we've been talking about over on my Patreon this past week and I've talked about, probably, here before. It's the difference between hope and determination, or maybe not the difference between those two things, but listen. If you are feeling overwhelmed, if you're experiencing burnout or empathy fatigue when looking at conditions in the world and just not knowing how to navigate it, how to feel okay about what's happening, I want to invite you to consider, instead of seeking hope, try to seek determination.

Determination is a commitment and a willingness to stay with it, even when it's hard, because when it comes down to it, we as a collective really struggle with staying emotionally present when things are hard—we as individuals and as a collective. We tend to struggle with situations in which we don't see any evidence of improvement; we don't get a double-tap, like where we don't get affirmation.

But in the journey of living ethically, living in ways that are spiritually aligned, we're really called to do what's right because it's right and not because we are seeing clear affirmations of our efforts. I want to encourage you this week to really consider your relationship to burnout, empathy fatigue—whatever it is that might be active inside of you—and creatively, honestly, and directly consider what you need to change, what you could change, how a shift in your approach, how a shift in your perspective, might strengthen you and better empower you to stay with it because we are living through exceptional times. And they require you. They require not just that you care but that you express that care through action. So something to think about, something to consider.

Let's dive into this week's forecast. We're looking at the week of May 17th through the 23rd of 2026. And my quick summary TL;DR for this week's horoscope is to review your values and be open to change. Be open to changing your mind and adapting your behavior or your orientation. This week's astrology invites values-based change. This is because there are important shifts or changes happening this week, and the more thoughtful you are, the more adaptable you are willing to be, the better you listen, the better it will go.

Okay. Let's start with the 17th, Sunday. Now, on the 17th, we are still feeling that Mars/Chiron conjunction. Now, it's separating, which could mean it's feeling weaker. For some of you, it won't feel that way. It's just—it's how the cookie crumbles. So we're still feeling that intensity and that activation of the Mars/Chiron conjunction.

On the 17th, Sunday, at 11:04 a.m. Pacific Time, Venus forms an exact sextile to Chiron. Now, this is actually a really lovely transit involving Chiron. Chiron, as we know, is the wounded healer. And so, whenever we're dealing with Chiron, we're dealing with self-worth issues, insecurity, your inherent wounding and struggles with yourself. And Venus is related to self-worth. It is related to your relationships, your values system.

This sextile—and a sextile, for those who don't know, is a 60-degree angle. This sextile—it really empowers you to connect to your values in the places that are most vulnerable inside of you. So lovely, right? Now, we're feeling that Mars/Chiron activation, so it won't be that hard to tap into your vulnerabilities. You're likely to be able to recognize, "Oh shit. This is a place where I struggle, and it's been active inside of me. I've been aware of it. I've been thinking about it or feeling it recently."

Now, the Venus sextile to Chiron really empowers you to have heart-to-hearts with other people, to check in with your values and your needs, and to be willing to really receive love, whether it's from other people, from yourself, from nature, from the Universe, and to give love, to recognize what actual love is. Venus sextile to Chiron—there's no downside of this transit. It is really powerful for any kind of healing or self-care work.

Now, on the same day, at exactly 5:10 p.m. Pacific Time, Mercury will be at 1 degree of Gemini and 15 minutes, forming an exact conjunction to Uranus in Gemini. So we have our first exact transit to Uranus in Gemini. Behold, it is new energies. And Mercury conjunction to Uranus is unpredictable. Mercury is your mind; Uranus is your nervous system. So you can imagine that this transit triggers nervous system dysregulation or activation, nervous tension, excitement, adaptability, curiosity.

This transit is unpredictable. So you may be dealing with tension. You may be dealing with confusion or overstimulation. And you could just as easily be feeling really curious and really open and learning new things and making connections. This transit tends to coincide with a busy day because you're connecting with lots of ideas, lots of people. There's DMs. There's texts. There's calls. There's emails, etc. It's not good; it's not bad. It's busy. And it requires adaptability. It requires flexibility.

Now, we have Mercury and Uranus in a mutable air sign. And so there's a real consideration of doing too much, taking on too much, and then dropping some balls. Is that the worst thing in the world? I don't know. It depends on the balls. But it's something to be aware of.

Because of the overlap with this Uranus/Mercury mashup and Mars conjunction to Chiron, Venus sextile to Chiron, you have great potential for changing your mind. You have great potential for learning something new, for opening up and having a conversation that needs to be had, and not in the way you've had it before, but a whole, entire new way. It's a great combo platter of transits if you don't get so in your head that you lose track of your heart and you lose track of the humanity of a situation.

Now, that brings us to Monday, the 18th. And on this day, Mars moves into Taurus, leaving Aries, and Venus moves into Cancer, leaving Gemini. So we have a real shift from air and fire to earth and water. This is a tonal, temperamental shift. Some of you will really notice it, and some of you not so much. But it definitely is something to pay attention to and your social connections. And it is certainly an invitation for you to notice what's happening emotionally and in your body and to slow down just a little bit.

Now, on this day, at exactly 9:05 p.m., we have a Mercury sextile to Neptune. This is with Mercury at 3 degrees and 47 minutes of Gemini forming a sextile to Neptune at the same degrees of Aries. This transit is lovely. When Mercury forms a sextile to Neptune, what happens is you have a more empathetic frame of mind.

This is a great transit for working through any kind of issue you're having where you're mad at somebody. If you're struggling to cultivate forgiveness for yourself, for somebody else, or cultivate empathy, this transit is your friend. It's a great transit for spiritual work. It's a great transit for being in nature and making art. And the reason why is because Neptune connects you to all living things, and Mercury is your mind. It's your capacity to make connections, friendships, to listen—really listen—and to find levels and ways of communicating. So lovely transit. You may experience a kind of boop, a little increase to your intuition. And if so, you certainly want to pay attention to it.

The other transit that's overlapping with this one is exact at 10:37 p.m. Pacific Time. We have Venus at exactly 0 degrees of Cancer and 14 minutes, forming an exact sextile to Mars at the same degrees of Taurus. So Venus and Mars enter these new signs, and they're instantly talking to each other. Now, Venus is flirting, and Mars is hooking up. Venus is sensual, and Mars is sexual.

Another way of thinking about this is Venus is diplomatic and compromising, and Mars is assertive and motivation. And so this can be a great time for flirtation, hooking up with people, dating, making friends, getting engaged in projects or other collaborative, human-based connections. This is a great transit for socializing, for playing and being creative.

When you pair that with the sensitivity and care of the Mercury/Neptune transit and the kind of chaotic but exciting Mercury/Uranus transit, lots of great things can happen. This astrology seriously can just sweep you up. It could just be like a gentle wind and restless thoughts. Or if you tap in, it can be really restorative and creative for you. You don't have to be an artist to be creative and make stuff. You don't need to be in a relationship to flirt or feel good about yourself and your sexuality and your body.

I want to encourage you this week to explore what play is to you. What are ways that you enjoy playing, having fun, alone with yourself and with other people? Because in challenging times, it's really important that we still prioritize and embrace play and creativity and nature and spirituality because these are the things that fill you up and sustain the path.

And that brings us to the 19th. On Tuesday, May 19th, at exactly 3:52 p.m. Pacific Time, Mercury forms a trine to Pluto. This deepens your thinking. It deepens your connections with other people. It's a lovely transit. Again, overlapping with all these other transits—not a single bad word to say. This is a great, supportive transit for deepening your understanding, having meaningful conversations, for really connecting with people on a deep level.

This transit supports you in any kind of healing work. It supports you in any kind of research that you're doing or anything that requires mental concentration, deep listening, or the willingness and ability to kind of sort through big ideas and to find something of meaning or something to help you transform. Pluto is the great transformer. This is a lovely, supportive transit, and we'll be very much experiencing it on the 20th when we enter into Gemini season.

So I don't really focus on the Solar seasons, but I will say that, again, we're in this seasonal shift. And seasonal shifts are always a really great time to tap in. There's a reason why we do spring cleaning. It's not really about cleaning. It's about touching the things in your home, the things that are in your stewardship. It's about really seeing them and touching them and checking in with them. Are they still serving you? Are they cluttering up your energy and your life? Is this a time to move things around? This week's astrology certainly points to energetic or material spring cleaning and its great utility.

We're at Thursday, May 21st, and this is where we have a really challenging transit this week. At exactly 11:32 p.m. Pacific Time, Venus forms a square to Neptune. So Venus will be at 3 degrees of Cancer and 51 minutes, forming an exact square to Neptune in Aries. Now, this is not one of my favorite transits—no lie.

So Venus square to Neptune is really a challenging transit. It kicks up anxiety and insecurity, because fucking Neptune. And so you may be feeling anxious about your place with other people—in other words, your relationships—like what value you hold, what's really happening. This transit can lead to paranoia. It can lead to insecurity or self-worth issues around your appearance, your connections with other people, or even your finances, like how you're handling your finances, what you think other people feel or think about what you've got, how you look, how you use what you've got—that kind of shit.

On a deeper level, this transit really tests your values system. The reason why all of these stressy things come up is, on some level, to test your relationship to their value. Sometimes we fucking fixate on things that we don't actually value, that when we think about it are not that important. But in the moment, we get caught up in the emotion, and it feels really, really important.

So understand that, in a meaningful way, if you're fixated on something, if you're anxious about something, there's a cause to ask yourself, "Do I actually value this thing? Is this thing giving me a sense of purpose? Is this thing actually important to me? My feelings are valid, but is the fixation that my feelings are pointed towards—is that actually it?" That can be really helpful.

This is a rough time for delusions and projections, which means you may find yourself really off on a fucking tangent about something. If you are confronted with some sort of information by a person on the internet—whatever—that seems just really fantastical—it seems really dramatic—do your due diligence before you go flying off about it, okay? In this world of disinformation and misinformation where we can't trust what we're seeing with AI, it's really important that you learn how to take a beat, that you don't just believe it, but instead think about it. "What is this? What is the resource? Is this real? Is this not real?"

In regards to your relationships with other people, whether they're parasocial relationships or they're relationships that go both ways, there is a risk that you put people on a pedestal, that you get really idealistic, that you get really insecure, fixated, all that kind of stuff. So you can see how it's a really challenging transit. It requires boundaries.

Now, you know I talk a lot about boundaries, and I just want to say the reason why boundaries are so hard is because they require you to have self-reference, to refer back to yourself. And so many of us struggle with referring back to our own selves because we don't have the confidence and the grounded or more centered sense of self. A transit like this really tests that.

This is, in part, why it's a shitty time for party drugs. It's a shitty time for consciousness-raising drugs because this is a transit that actually wants you to fortify/strengthen your boundaries—your energy boundaries, your emotional boundaries, your mental boundaries, and even potentially your material boundaries. And so you don't want to do anything that's going to make that harder to do.

This is also not a great time for fasting. You're meant to fortify your system, not deny your system. So make sure you're feeding your little meat suit, putting the gas in the engine, as it were. This transit is also not a great time for deep spiritual work because anytime we have a square to or from Neptune, we have too much energetic information coming in to reasonably make sense of it. And that's not a personal thing to who you are and your capacity to work with energy. It's just the energy of Neptune.

So this is a time for noticing how you feel, supporting yourself, recognizing your energy boundaries if you go woo like that, and working with them and on them. This transit is not a good time to tell someone you love them. It's not a good time to try to make things permanent or get clarity in your relationships. If you're feeling anxious about something, if you think it's really important to work something out in a relationship, great. Wait 72 hours at a fucking minimum.

Okay. That brings us to the 22nd of May. It's Friday. We're still feeling this Venus square to Neptune very, very much, thank you very much. We've been feeling it all week, to be honest. So there's this really lovely train of supportive transits, and then there's this Venus square to Neptune. It can make you feel like you're disintegrating a little. It can kick off feelings of burnout or demoralization. So you really—again, you want to watch out for this one.

But then, on Friday, the 22nd, we have two more transits. One of them is super helpful, and the other one—a little bit of a troublemaker. At 7:26 a.m. Pacific Time, the Sun and Uranus meet at 1 degrees of Gemini and 31 minutes. And now we have our second exact transit to Uranus since it's moved into Gemini. This transit is disruptive. Much like the Mercury conjunction to Uranus, it kicks up your nervous system. It kicks up the need to be adaptable. It kicks up curiosity and excitement. We love curiosity. We love excitement.

But it is a lot of energy, and this transit can absolutely be upsetting. It can be really just disruptive and difficult to navigate. That's the downside of it. This transit coincides with things not going to plan. So, if you're trying to do something, like if you're traveling, if you're doing something that requires things to go exactly to the minute as you expect, I don't know, man. Best of luck. That's not what this transit tends to bring.

It can often bring about, actually, technical difficulties. So you might have issues with your device or some other form of technology. And it's just kind of what it is. This transit wants you to be adaptable. So how can you show up and be annoyed and have things get all thrown all over the damn place and notice your responses, notice your reactions, notice what's happening, and try your best to adapt? It's not easy, especially because that Venus/Neptune square is kicking up so much anxiety.

So you may take personally something that has nothing to do with you that happens, that someone thinks or feels. It's important that you focus on what is in your own stewardship. Focus on your own fucking homework. Don't try to guess into how other people feel, what other people are thinking. That is not only a waste of your energy, but it can lead you down a very long path on a short [indiscernible 00:21:41], and it can make you feel like shit, see? And you're unlikely to be picking up on something that is really meaningful. You're more likely to be misunderstanding things. It's just the astrology of the moment. It's trying to get you to focus on yourself. And the exciting part of this transit is that it empowers you to change. It makes you interested in trying something new, taking risks, and playing it out differently than you did before, which is very well timed.

The Sun conjunction to Uranus can coincide with unexpected changes, which could coincide with accidents. So this transit does make a person accident prone simply because people are more impulsive. So, when you're navigating spaces with other humans who are also going through this transit, you may just want to be a little bit more on guard. You may be a great driver, but not everybody is, right? So just be cautious in charged environments as much as you can. And if you're doing something that you could get injured doing, be extra cautious because this transit is unpredictable.

And that brings us to the next and last exact transit of this week. And this one is not a rascal. It pulls no shenanigans. It is simply helpful. We have a Mercury sextile to Saturn with Mercury at 11 degrees of Gemini and 25 minutes, forming a sextile to Saturn at 11 degrees and 25 minutes of Aries. This transit is exact at 11:02 a.m. Pacific Time.

Now, I should just pause and say, if you want to be tracking the transits just like I do, you can subscribe to my astrology pro tool. It's what you're seeing on the screen with me if you're watching the video version. It's astrologyfordays.com., and it's just a transit-tracking tool that tells you where the planets are. It has an ephemeris in it, and you can take notes. So I'm a big fan of it. It's just making tracking the transits several steps easier. So, anyways, you can check that out over on astrologyfordays.com.

Okay. Back to Mercury sextile Saturn. This transit is very supportive. What it does is it stabilizes and grounds your thinking. We could use that, right? Especially with all this Uranus energy and with that Venus/Neptune square, which we're for sure still feeling, this grounds your thinking. It makes it easier to listen, to concentrate, to communicate. Lovely. Absolutely lovely.

This transit is typically a one where it's a good time to make plans, make decisions. It's certainly helpful for you if you need to do those things. Also, truly, like I said earlier, the Venus square to Neptune, the Sun conjunction to Uranus, are not great times to make permanent decisions, major decisions, because they're too unpredictable. And so, even though I still say give it 72 hours from the 21st or the 22nd—depends on what happens in your life—this transit helps you to sort through your ideas, to kind of figure out what you need to do in the very short term, which can be really helpful depending on what's going on in your life.

This transit is supportive for any kind of organizing, administrative, or editorial effort. The other two transits really, truly—they don't fucking help with that at all. They reverse help with that. But Mercury sextile Saturn truly helps with that. So, depending on how all this lands in your birth chart, you may really get benefit from that energy.

And that, my friends, is this week in the stars. I'm going to run through the transits one more time, but I want to just remind you that as always, you can get the transcript for this episode, done by a real human, not AI, over on my website at ghostofapodcast.com, where you can check out past episodes—read the transcript for all those, too. And I also have a free chart-drawing tool over there. I've got a shop page with a ton of classes and some Ghost of a Podcast swag. So you can check out all that kind of good stuff over there. And if you want to learn more with me, join me over on Patreon, where we get into the astrology of the moment. We get into a lot of woo, and I just drop as much supportive and educational content as I can.

Okay. So let's do our rundown. On the 17th, Venus forms an exact sextile to Chiron, and Mercury sits on top of Uranus. On the 18th, Mercury forms a sextile to Neptune. And Mars moves into Taurus, Venus moves into Cancer, and then they sextile each other from those two signs. On the 19th, Mercury trines Pluto, and then we enter into Gemini Season. Lovely connection, right? On the 21st, Venus forms a square to Neptune. And then, on the 22nd, we have that Sun conjunction to Uranus and Mercury sextile to Saturn.

And that's your week in the stars, my friends. I hope you take really good care of yourself and others. And tune in on Wednesday to listen to my midweek readings that I love to give to listeners on the show. So yeah, and if you would like a reading with me, of course, go ahead and send in your question through the contact form on my website.

All right. Talk to you soon. Bye.