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 thankfully have a much less eventful set of transits, which is to say we have one exact transit. But there's other leading news to talk about in the stars, and that is that we are at the dawn of Eclipse Season. We have had our July 29th Full Moon, and now it is Eclipse Season. We are building up to the first Eclipse that will happen on August 12th. Listen to me before you go looking up what it means.

Eclipses are really important in astrology, and that means that they're really important to you. They're important to how you feel. They're important to the world at-large. Eclipses are Lunar transits, which means they are meant to be felt. The mistake a lot of us make with astrology is that we try to use it like a cheat code, like a way to figure out what's going to happen next so that we can plan for it and prepare for it.

In other words, we try to avoid discomfort and pain by knowing what comes next. And you know what? Sometimes that works. And a lot of times, it doesn't, because even if you cheat—you get ahead of a lesson, as it were—the next time that lesson comes around, if you haven't actually learned the material, you're going to struggle.

And so, when it comes to Lunar transits, I can assure you of this. You are meant to emotionally feel, emotionally reflect, emotionally gestate and digest, emotionally evolve, grow, mature. That's the work. That's the assignment, okay? We are not meant to intellectualize, even analyze, as a way to evolve with Lunar issues.

The Moon is the Moon is the Moon. The Moon is your feelings. It's your innermost personal life. It's your childhood and your memories. It's how you feel on a reflexive level. It's the family you've created and the family you were born into, for better or for worse. The Moon is how you digest things. It is not the story you tell. It is not your psychology, although it is linked to these things. It is not something you can figure your way in or out of. Of course, your mind and analytics are really important. They're deeply important.

But astrology, you should know, is inherently Uranian. It kind of is a sign to Uranus, the planet. And you know what else is a sign to Uranus the planet and is deeply Uranian? Technology. And astrology—similar, although very different, to technology—can be misused, can be this really wonderful tool that is actually used to perpetrate harm, excuse bad behavior, intellectualize, and moralize instead of evolve and heal.

You can use this tool in any way you like. But I want to encourage you always, and especially now in this very emotional Eclipse Season, to understand that how you cope, how you feel, how you show up, how you respond, how you engage—that's happening in the here and now. And that is Eclipse Season. And it has a meaningful impact on what comes next. Eclipses impact the next six months as opposed to the next month. So a New Moon or a Full Moon affects you for the next month. A Solar Eclipse and a Lunar Eclipse affects you for the next six. It is supercharged in its effects.

Now, that doesn't mean start trying to get ahead of it. This information ideally is going to make you feel like, "Oh, wow. Okay. Prioritizing how I'm emotionally coping is really important. Prioritizing how I feel is actually really important right now and will impact me and my life and the things I am personally close to and care about for at least six months." Shit. That's motivating. Is it motivating?

The problem is a lot of people really confuse understanding, analyzing, narrating, with feeling, digesting, reflecting, evolving. The Mercurial or Uranian approach would be to get a makeup mirror that has ten times magnification and then look at every pore on your face and pop things and worry about this line and that thing.

And the Moon would be to find a body of water that is still enough that you can see your reflection in it and to gaze upon that reflection. It is a very different form of looking at yourself. It is less concerned with every little pore and every fine line, and it is more concerned with the feeling that is evoked, the general shape, which is permeable. Now, this metaphor I've used may or may not reflect a lived experience you have with a makeup mirror times ten. But you see where I'm going, hopefully. Hopefully, this makes sense to you.

This is the time for being present with emotions. Eclipses both obscure things—so not everything is visible; not everything is possible to be perceived during an Eclipse Season—and also, things get revealed. You can become aware of things that you really weren't aware of before. Things come to light.

The point of this is not for you to figure it out. And I know a lot of astrologers like to get very analytic around Eclipses and talk about all the dates that they happened before. And there is a value in that. There is a real value in that. That is not how I work with Eclipses, and I'll tell you why. It's because doing that will put you in your analyzer, and it will have you in fear, in reaction. "Oh shit. The last time this happened, that was really hard for me. What does it mean this time?" or, "Oh, that wasn't a big deal. I don't have to worry about it." Right? It'll put you in your analyzer. It'll put you in this scarcity-based mindset.

That's not how we work with Eclipses when we're working with them in a human-centered way. You probably know that I'm a humanistic astrologer, and using astrology in a human-centered way means recognizing what is the human-centered lesson of the Moon. It is, 100 percent of the time, your feelings, your emotions. So that's the assignment. Stay with them. Does it sound too simple? We often mistake simple for unimportant or not deep. Simple is often the deepest, the most important thing you can tend to, you can understand. Don't underestimate simple.

Now, we will talk more about the first Eclipse next week because next week is the first Eclipse. My human-centered approach to serving you astrology that helps you live the best possible life you can live is to advise you to keep on bringing your attention back to your feelings, to your personal life. How are you actually showing up in the here and now? Not what did you do last time. That's in the past. You're living in the past, man. And you know what? Living in the past—there's a value to reflecting on the past, but what I'm trying to get at here is, in this moment, how are you showing up? Are you justifying bad behavior because shitty things happened to you in the past? Okay.

Regardless of what happened to you in the past, what you're doing now is you now. It is how you are feeding your life. It is how you are tending to yourself. It is how you're showing up in the world, with others, for the things you care about and for yourself, which is hopefully a thing you care about. So practice noticing how you feel, noticing how you're emotionally engaging, and adapting, adjusting, evolving as needed.

Now, one other thing I want to point to before we get into the specifics of this week's astrology, which is something I spent the last couple weeks talking about a ton, which is these outer-planet transits. Now, this week, Jupiter is moving fast. In the month of August, it's going to go from 7 degrees to 13 degrees. It's moving fast, okay?

So Jupiter's pulled back, but Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are all really close to each other. They're all still transiting each other in the ways we've been talking about in the last few weeks. Uranus is at 5 degrees of Gemini. Neptune and Pluto are both at 4 degrees of their respective signs. Neptune is in Aries, and Pluto is in Aquarius.

And so what we have is the continuation of these larger transits. And you have the opportunity, if you're an astrology student or an astrologer, to notice what is happening in the lives of the people around you in your life. How are these "benefic," quote unquote, transits, these easy sextile/trine  transits, affecting you? For many people, it's going to be lovely. And yet, for other people—many other people—it's really a challenging time where your patterns and your coping mechanisms are really flowing. And when you have maladjusted coping mechanisms—which most of us do, if not all of us—then when those things enter into a lot of flow, things can kind of go sideways on you.

You also want to pay attention to what is happening in the world. Do you see leagues and leagues of progress in a way that you identify progress? If not, where is the progress? By whose definition? There is value in understanding that, because, as I've touched on in recent weeks on the podcast and over on my Patreon, when an astrologer makes a prediction—things are going to be good/things are going to be bad for the world—if you don't first know what their politics are, what their values are, what their morals are, what their beliefs around any number of sociological conditions are, then it's hard to know what the hell they mean when they say good or bad.

And it's really important to know that because an astrologer is really good at making predictions or a psychic is really good at seeing trends, that doesn't mean that they share your values system. We don't want to lose our common sense when we're using astrology. So this is a great time to notice what's happening in the world and to connect it to the astrology that you're learning here and, if you consume other astrology content or you're a student of astrology, notice what's happening in the world and understand it in the context of the astrology. There's a great deal of power in that.

And of course, we know knowledge is power. How we use our knowledge, our power—this is what defines us, our choices, our values, and reflects our politics, which—if you think politics is separate from spirituality, I mean—couldn't disagree more. If you think politics are separate from astrology, again, that is historically inaccurate. That is technically just inaccurate. Everything is connected. Everything is connected. We can use our tools in any number of ways. And if we are choosing to use the tool of astrology in a human-centered way, well, then we must center our humanity, which is reflected in social and political conditions. You know what I'm saying.

Okay. My friends, let's talk about the astrology of this week. It's really simple. On Thursday, August 6th, at exactly 7:44 p.m., we've got a Sun trine to Saturn. We've got the Sun at 14 degrees of Leo and 38 minutes sitting exactly trine to Saturn at the same degrees of Aries. This is a lovely, solidifying, stabilizing transit.  The Sun is your will and your vitality, and Saturn stabilizes. It makes things secure and strong. It is maturity. It is wisdom.

This is a great time to put lessons into practice. Keep in mind that when it comes to Eclipses, they are Lunar transits. They're Moon transits. But it requires the Sun. A Solar Eclipse is a Sun/Moon conjunction, and a Lunar Eclipse is a Sun/Moon opposition. So the Sun is incredibly important when it comes to Eclipses. This Sun trine to Saturn is stabilizing. It empowers you to see where you are at realistically, practically, right now. And if you don't like what you see, great. Adapt. Change. Evolve. And if that feels too hard to do, that's actually okay, too.

But the key is to be able to acknowledge and accept instead of lie to yourself or deny, to be able to say to yourself, "Okay. I can see that the way I'm showing up or I'm handling this thing isn't making me happy, and it isn't effective. And I don't know how to change yet. I know I need to change, and I don't know how to change yet." That is a powerful stance. It is. It doesn't feel great, but it is a foundation upon which one can build, whereas saying, "Well, it's not my fault. Well, it's impossible for me to change. Why should I have to change? Nobody else is changing"—that is a crumbly foundation upon which nothing that is sustainable will be built, nothing that makes you happy.

So, really, Saturn wants you to be accountable. Saturn wants you to be responsible. Saturn wants you to be wise and mature. And the Sun trine Saturn supports that, supports that in a really beautiful way. And so understand that it takes the Moon, it takes the Sun—in other words, it takes your feelings and it takes your authentic presence. And these things are hard. They're simple, and they are hard. And they are your assignment this week.

And so, if I was to give you a TL;DR for this horoscope, it would be show up as you are with empathy. That's it. Now, we are going deep into all of these topics over on my Patreon. I've been dropping some stuff on the free page as well as tons of content on the paid tiers. I've, of course, dropped the latest bonus episode of Ghost of a Podcast over on my Patreon, and you can get it wherever you can subscribe on the podcast platforms—you know, the buttons you press?

If you haven't, by the way, pressed the button to subscribe to Ghost of a Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, it really does help independent podcasts like this one. And if you would like to ask me questions about anything I say in any of the episodes, if you want to learn more deeply with me, go ahead and join me over on Patreon. That's where I'm having those conversations, and I love to have them.

Also, if you would like to use the same transit-tracking tool that I use, it's an astrologer's pro tool, so it's good for astrology students and professional astrologers. It just tracks the transit. It has an ephemeris in it and a note-taking tool. And you can go ahead and subscribe to that over at astrologyfordays.com. It's also linked on my website, where you can find transcripts to all past episodes. You can find classes. I've got lots of classes available, articles. I even have a little magic 8 ball-style app embedded on the homepage of my website. You can just go and look at stuff. It's fun. It's cute.

And listen. Hey. Hey. I hope you take really good care of yourself. I hope you can find the energy with which to be kind and gentle with yourself and others. And I will talk to you in just a couple of days. Bye.