retrograde realizations

on my mercury retrograde process, and the joy of self-discovery

What the Water Gave Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938

Hi friends <3

Over the weekend, we had our mid-retrograde Mercury cazimi. This is a moment that happens during every Mercury retrograde where the planet of communication and storytelling and marketplaces and technology meets up with the sun, and, as the sun burns off its haze, offers us a moment of clarity amidst the retrograde fog.

I’ve said this before and will surely say it again, but at this point I have a pretty good sense of my usual Merc retro rollercoaster: The first week and a half/couple weeks are confusing and feel like a big void of answers and ideas and reason. Old stories come up, old wounds flare, old patterns reemerge, and it doesn’t make sense to me why. Then the cazimi comes and acts as a sort of turning point: I get some clarity, and the last half of the retrograde is about integrating that clarity before I can truly move forward again.

I’ve felt like I was in a better place leading up to this retrograde than the last one, but the last two weeks — and the Virgo eclipse in particular — have brought up insecurities, self-hatred, too much-ness, not enough-ness, ‘everyone will leave me,’ need to do it right energies in my field.

It was easy for me, at first, to feel like I was not in as good a place as I thought I was because these things were coming up. But I’ve started to see that these things can emerge because I’m doing well. It’s not actually backsliding; it’s excavating a new level.

My teacher Adam Elenbaas gave a beautiful talk about last week’s Virgo eclipse where he talked about his addiction to opioids as a young man. He often thought of his addiction, he said, of coming from this “bad” part of himself — but as he came to see it more clearly, he realized it was much more connected to the part of him that judged some part of him as bad.

This Mercury cazimi brought me some of that same clarity in my own psyche. I sometimes think of these deep insecurities and fears I have as coming from some part of me that’s bad or wrong or broken and I’m having a moment of seeing how much of the suffering actually comes from this part of me judging something as wrong to begin with. When I reckon with that part of me, I can start to unravel the insecurities and fears in a real way.

This is not the first time I’ve had this realization, but spiritual work, in my experience, requires rediscovering these sorts of awarenesses again and again in new ways and from new angles. Part of this, I think, is because ridding ourselves of any sort of self-hatred is probably impossible in this lifetime. My great teacher Ally Bogard talks about how the insecurities and the judgements never really go away entirely, but with this work they start to feel less grippy, like old velcro losing its cling.

This time, the realization — and the slight release of the grip — came to me via the Strength tarot card, which I pulled last week: In her beautiful book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes of the Strength card symbolizing as “different kind of power, not the ego’s will but the inner Strength to confront yourself calmly and without fear.”

Rider-Waite’s Strength card

It’s a card that asks us to look at our fears and our shadows and our addictions and our dark scary bits with love, without judgement, and to in turn begin to heal them, to better ourselves not through shame and discipline but gentle devotion.

“The mysteries can be brought out because we have found the Strength to face them,” Pollack writes. “Strength opens up the personality like Pandora opening her box. It does so, however, with a sense of peace, a love of life itself, and a great confidence in the final result. Unless we truly believe that the process of self-discovery is a joyous one we will never follow it through.” (Emphasis mine.)

I laughed when I got to that last line, because despite the fact that I treat Seventy-Eight Degrees like the Bible, it is the only line in the entire book I have highlighted, but when I went to read her entry about Strength, I had forgotten that was where the line came from. In perfect Mercury retrograde fashion, there I was again, taking it in as if it were the first time.

And I felt the truth of it again: This retrograde process, though sometimes difficult, is a joyous one, because if we’re willing to engage with it in an open and honest way, we will come to know ourselves more deeply.

We have ten days left of Mercury retrograde, and this post-cazimi bit of it always starts to feel a little lighter to me, but it can also be tricky to integrate and tie up threads and sit with new ideas and feelings and sensibilities. I can know intellectually that I’m all good, that I’m safe, that I’m engaging in a joyous process, but integrating that knowing into my body is another question.

Some of what I need at this point is to go to really body-based work — stretching, qigong, sauna, dancing. Some of it is talking, muddling through the difficulties of communicating these things, and some of it is listening, taking in earnestly what my loved ones and teachers are experiencing and finding in their own processes.

This week, on Friday, Mercury retrograde will conjoin with Mars in Pisces. On the collective level, I think we’re inevitably going to see escalations of violent rhetoric globally. On the personal level, I think it’s a moment where we’re going to be asked to integrate some of our Mercury retrograde lessons: In a heated moment, can we communicate with love? Our task is to respond rather than react.

OK, I love you all. I hope this peek into my retrograde process is helpful in yours. I’d love to hear how you’re all doing and what you’re finding out there. Be kind, stay playful, drink enough water. The spring equinox is just around the corner!

XO,
A