Mercury Retrograde July 7th

Shadows abound this week. The moon moves between the earth and the Sun this afternoon, creating a portal into emotional strengths and shadows. Additionally, we are moving through the shadow of communicative Mercury as it slows to go retrograde on Sunday, July 7th. 

Rather than dread, let’s bring curiosity to this extraordinary cosmic light show and wonder what we can do with this energy. Maybe even imagine that these shadows have the potential to give us a place to rest from the fast and furious energy that has been pushing hard at us for most of 2019. An eclipse, after all, is a quiet, elegant and slow process that pulls our attention toward the quieter, more elegant and slower possibilities for our soul’s evolution.

* Watchword: Be careful . . . as this combination of eclipsed emotion-generating Cancer with the retrograde-shadowed Mercury brain can offer a new level of emotional mindfulness  or  it can lead to emotional bombs tossed about due to a lack of awareness of what’s generating these emotions and of how they’re being used to manipulate—a potentially old habit looking for some rehab.

As much as I believe that nearly everyone I know is taking the high road through all the challenges the Universe has been generating, here are some tips from the eclipsed moon, pulling no punches and asking us to take on some rather exacting examinations of our behavior, even if some of the following occur only very rarely.

* Forgetting how to let the emotion wash one clean so that the weather pattern can lift and allow for clarity around what brought on the deluge of feeling. Nothing wrong with feeling things deeply as long as we don’t get attached to the feeling of being downtrodden, an excuse to stay small.

* Using emotions passive-aggressively to try to make someone else feel small or less powerful.

* Telling yourself that you don’t have a right to that feeling. You have a right to all your feelings. But what to do with them? Read on.

An emotion rises.

   * The reaction would be to lob the feeling at someone else; make it their fault you feel abandoned or maligned.

   * The response would be to stop a minute and examine the feeling with your quiet mind so that you begin to understand the emotion’s origin and, following that, slowly begin anew to understand how to respond to this feeling rising in you. From that place of clarity, you can decide to move away from the thing that is causing you emotional discomfort or pain. You don’t have to blame another as much as use your intuition to feel where you are safe and where you might steer clear. The thing is to handle these feelings without dragging another into your emotional work. It’s all yours. You could be in a room with an entire family of people acting out and, still, you always have a choice as to how you want to process your feelings; do you want to respond or react? Sometimes the response is as simple as backing away, no matter how much sludge might still be in the air.