ASTROLOGY - Surviving Retrogrades

"RETROGRADE"

I canʻt recall the last time that I thought of any retrograde season as being more than something that I just wanted to understand a little more. The thing that I did NOT understand was why people would get scared of doing certain things during certain times of the year.

And of course, until about five years ago I was also someone who would do everything that I could to avoid doing certain things. The funny part was that I had no idea why. I thought, for real, that retrogrades were something to fear, and for years I feared them.

Yet unlike people who would just throw that out there, that "retrograde was upon us" and would proceed to state things in the strangest kind of weird, almost over the top "mystical" language and later finding out that all of those theatrics, for a whole lot of people, were done more for effect than much else.

The effect that it had and still seems to have for plenty of people is that people need to be afraid when planets go retrograde. This is the most ridiculous thing to me, because really, the planets are not doing anything to hurt you. It is instead the things that you are not outwardly aware of, things that you believed kept you safe from having to change one, or maybe many, things (beliefs, habits, behaviors, shit that sucks), that you have used to soothe yourself.

These are the things that make you act like a jackass, sometimes on purpose, just for effect. What you are not aware of is that your little act of jack assery just proved me, and lots of other people like me, to be correct (again).

Yes.

Act.

Instead of being worried about being uncomfortable for a few weeks, instead of being worried about the things that you think you cannot control you ought to start thinking about your own damned self and about the themes that are present during certain planetary retrogrades.

Pay attention to what YOU are doing, and never mind what anyone else is doing or saying. Pay attention to YOUR response and ask yourself why YOU are having that response. Instead of fearing what happens, every year, beginning in the middle of May, embrace it. Allow what you have been avoiding for probably a long set of years to just...happen. It does not make you less yourself. It makes you know that for a long time, there was something keeping you from knowing why you did things the way that you did them.

It was so that you would be able to stay safe, not from others, but from the truth. The truth might suck, but, it also, literally, lets us out of that feeling of being stuck on pause somehow, having the same reactions but not knowing why. Retrogrades make it so that we know why, or least bother to figure out why. Not because someone else told us that we ought to, but because we are tired of not knowing what lies on the other side of actually letting things unfold, even if they hurt.

That they hurt might not be the ripping of your heart out of your chest, so to speak, as much as it will be the pain of hurting from the removal of the infection that was spreading into your Spirit and making it hard for you to Know Your actual Self.

Once we take responsibility for all of our self, things become lots easier to deal with. Things like telling people that you donʻt have time and you not bothering to let everyone know but your closest people that you just need to deal with you today. Things like letting those same people who you love so very much also know that you are okay again, perhaps even better...but, you cannot get there without first knowing that in large part, we are who kept us right there in that place that hurt so much.

Itʻs okay - we did not know any better. Itʻs okay to let it go. Not because I said it would be. Because it is.

We are so eager a species to want to place blame on things outside of our own control - and this is the part of being human that makes us human...that we have the ability to reason. Unfortunately, most humans tend to reason that if something is wrong, it was someone else who made it that way.

Retrogrades make us uncomfortable, or, bring about the truth of a matter, or, adjust things to a point where a decision towards growth and change needs to be made, or else at the same time next year, we might actually feel that way again and it will continue to grow in intensity until something has changed.

And every year there is a retrograde.

It starts in May, is usually the Annual Mercury retrograde in Gemini (and then again months later in another sign. This year, the retrograde in September is in Libra, meaning a slow down in certain kinds of communication with certain people in our lives). You will notice a whole lot posted online about the annual Mercury Retrograde

It is nothing to fear.

Retrogrades can actually serve us if we know to always look back to the previous years, right at the start of "retrograde season" every year (May) so that you can see how much you have grown and in what area of life.

You can also expect for things to NOT happen overnight - the planets take a long time to change signs. You are a human being who took nine months to germinate into an actual person. It took you a long time to get to this point to put your eyes on these words, meaning that somehow, you needed to read them right damned now.

It took you a bit of time to get to these specific words.

Whether you believe me or not, you manifested them coming into your awareness - that is the nature of humans. We are magnetic. So, your eyes on these words, I am sure you know, are not just out of thin air. BUT, it took you a little while to get here. It took you some time to become curious about why it is that every year, right around May, you read things about whatever a planetary retrograde is.

Right about now is midway through the yearly retrograde season. There are probably a whole lot of different thoughts in your head right now and one of them might be "this bitch is crazy" and another might be "hmmm...yeah, weird shit DOES happen every year, right around mid May..." but ALL OF THEM have caused some sort of chemical shift in your physical body. This happens when you are given another way of thinking.

A lot of us are willing to pay a whole lot of money to figure out HOW to think another way.

Well, silly, no one can teach you how to think another way FOR you - we can only tell you about reasons why, at certain times of the year, you might be thinking one way or another, because things are crazy at those times of the year, and you never know why, or, at least you know or recognize the pattern of the insanity and now you have a good enough reason WHY shit hits the fan....and all of it on the level of feeling, more than anywhere else.

Your manifestations using the planets are going to move according to the planets and not according to your belief in the idea that manifestation is equated with instant gratification. Meaning that you have to have patience to unjack-up everything that was jacked up PRIOR to your reading these words.

We all know that change begins with a thought, and all this time you were believing that you would need to be afraid of something (a planet - waaaay the hell far away from ALL of us).

You do not realize you have more control over than you have been led to believe. Once you begin to believe that we are ON a planet that is AMONG several OTHER PLANETS and that we are GOING TO BE affected by the GRAVITY PRODUCED BY THINGS OUT OF OUR OWN HUMAN CONTROL....yeesh !

I do NOT know why that is SO DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND AS BEING CORRECT.

If we are affected by the Sun, and we are, a lot of us, worried about black holes and asteroids, then why in the very hell can those same things NOT produce magnetism to actually have something to do with the way that we are feeling at any given time of the year, or month or week or whatever?

If you cannot have an open mind about these things, then please do not expect change. There is nothing harder to understand than humans who forget that ALL OF US are a PART OF this Universe, and NOT APART FROM IT...meaning that we are all somehow affected by it.

You do not have to believe that.

Seriously.

You can continue to think that Astrology is some sort of heebie jeebie thing that Witches do at certain times of the month and during certain phases of the moon.

And well, yeah - that does happen but...instant gratification is NOT the forte of retrograde season.

More than anything else, people do not like change because it takes time (and if you are sort of an ass anyway, you really donʻt like change). Retrograde season lasts about half the year when you squish together all of the time that the planets are retrograde...meaning it is always time to figure out how to deal with ourselves.

Which is best learned during retrograde season.

The reason people are scared of it, sort of, is because they are scared of change and growth. It is why people have made it the monster in the cosmic closet for what seems like lifetimes already - because we humans do not like being uncomfortable. It makes us uncomfortable to know that we are each not perfect. Retrogrades remind us of this and communication with others gives us evidence of where it is that we still have work to do.

The real reason people hate retrograde is because people hate change.

No.

Really.

All throughout a lot of the things written about retrograde it is easy to find a lot about how to avoid things rather than change and grow.

Retrogrades suck, make no mistake about it, but we are not supposed to avoid change, namely when we are asking for things to get better for ourselves. We have a fixed image as to what that is supposed to look like. We want relief right this moment but, we do not want to figure out why we feel like we need relief, need something taken out of our lives.

Hey man, even people who read Astrology for their living have things to change about ourselves. We are the first ones to feel those things coming along and showing us what they are. They come about in the form of a response or a reaction - and usually, we are triggered.

It is the trigger that tells us there is something wrong...or, actually, our reaction (or response to it) that tells the story. We never really know in that moment why we react like we do, but we know that there is pain there and that the reaction tells the story. The pain might be from something that we have already worked out, or that we think we are already completely healed from. It is during retrograde, depending upon what part of our lives (which house, essentially) and of course planet and sign, that we find out where it is that the pain is still there and needing to be healed.

We find out that there are things that outwardly we have been exhibiting the behaviors of being healed, but, on the inside we might be in so much pain that during retrograde season we might finally be brave enough and strong enough to finally say goodbye to those things that have, possibly for years, haunted us and made our lives seem like hell, when in reality, it is the memory which is stored in the body that makes it feel like that initial pain, the first moment you came to know a hurt that just would not let you go, because you did not know that you did not fully let it go.

Retrogrades are scary because they mean there are things that have to be resolved and we know that we are going to be feeling things in the areas of our lives that we have no idea how to deal with them. This makes us afraid to go through them and feel them all the way, the way that they ought to be.

If we do not feel it, we cannot ever be freed of it. Pain is the indicator that healing is needed.

Sometimes it is just a simple thought that a person has never thought before that shifts the imbalance, if only in the thoughts, for one moment.

Yet in that moment, in that shift, they learned something - for one moment, they learned how to shift that thought and in that moment they were able to come right back into this moment, into Now....where the past does not exist anywhere else but in a memory.

And yeah haha hell yeah...I have been fortunate enough, damned lucky - to hell with fortunate...I have been very lucky to have been able to watch these things happen for many people.

All they needed to do was feel it...all of it.

Every bit of what they did not want to feel when they felt it, and every time that they shoved those feelings way down into a place where it was thought to never be seen again, like all those times when we were kids and dumped the bleach into the clean towels and then ran outside - that is the same thing.

We know that it needs to be made right. We just do not know how to do that other than go through it.

Finally just damned well go through it and get it over with.

It takes patience and practice but, that is what retrogrades give to us...time to do that.