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This week initiates slowness, reflection, healing, clarity, and being with our emotions. With the Sun and Mercury in Cancer and Neptune entering retrograde, there is a revealing aspect to the days that brings an illuminating realization of truth and reality.
Mercury in Cancer
Mercury represents the mind, communication, intellect, and learning. As a quick-moving planet, it generally doesn’t spend a lot of time in any particular sign, seemingly mimicking the speed and movement of our minds from one thought to the next.
Having spent the last few weeks in its home sign of Gemini, Mercury has been breathing new life into our minds and thought patterns, drawing us toward our curiosities and intellectual excitements. It’s been a highly mental time, a busy chapter for our thoughts and imaginings.
When Mercury enters Cancer, however, it welcomes a depth of awareness that requires us to slowly settle into presence. A water sign, Cancer represents our emotional experience. It is nurturing and healing, intuitive and sensitive. As Mercury wanders through Cancer’s waters from June 26 to July 11, we are invited to turn inward, consider our personal and emotional experience, connect and communicate with loved ones, and express what is ready to be expressed. It’s a chapter of healing music, conversations, writing, sharing, and listening. It’s a time of emotional journeys and healing familial and ancestral patterns. It’s presence in conversations that connect and nourish. It’s hearing the voice that lives deep within and opening a dialogue to nurture it and let it nurture you.
Neptune Retrograde
The movement of the planets and stars cannot be separated from the worlds that live within us. The planets exist as archetypes, as invitations, colors, shades, tones, and ways of being. Their movements in the cosmos shift something within us, whether subtle or overt, quiet or loud. When these celestial bodies take a moment to pause, breathe out, and begin their seemingly backward retrograde motion, we, too, are invited to pause, breathe out, and commute within.
Neptune is an outer planet, sitting along the edge of what we already know and what we have yet to discover. Ruling the undefinable, it is a planet that takes us into the unseen, into the realm of imagination. Neptune is abstract, subtle, compassionate, and intuitive. It is the blurring of boundaries between Self and All That Is. Neptune is the flow that we experience within creative expression. It is the loss of our self, our identity, and our bearings through song. It is the oneness experienced in meditation and the way one yoga pose somehow seamlessly merges into the next, indistinguishable as to where one starts and the other ends.
While in retrograde from June 30 to December 6, Neptune brings a lifting of the fog. It grants clarity so that we can review the reality of the path we have been walking and the relationship we have been building with ourselves, our creativity, our purpose, and our perception of spirit and truth. As Neptune’s dream state retraces its steps, there is a lifting of the veil where what we once couldn’t see now comes into plain sight, where what we perceived as truth reveals itself as something else.
Your Invitation
Cancer invites you deep into your emotional waters. It draws you downward, inward, and backward, retracing your younger years, familial dynamics, and ancestral patterns embedded deep within your being. As we allow this Cancerian downstream to steer us within, Neptune holds up mirrors of clarity. It shows the illusions we have been holding onto that have shaped our views and shifted our experience of reality. It clarifies the patterns under which we have been operating.
Neptune represents the realm of existence where all is one. While in retrograde, however, it invites you to full awareness of the human experience, where there is a healthy and empowering separation and sense of “I.” It’s a time to lean into clarity, develop your sense of individual identity, and reflect on truth, spiritual beliefs, and loving discernment. Neptune retrograde initiates deep inner shifts, while Cancer acts as the nurturing and loving safety to hold us throughout.
Neptune retrogrades for the next six months although Mercury in Cancer lasts only for two beautiful weeks. Allow the gifts of the overlapping time to seep deep within. There is great healing, intuition, connection, and fulfillment to be found within.
Learn more about the influence of astrology in your life, including astrological events the Moon cycles, your Sun and Moon and rising signs, how journaling can help you connect with the current influences, and more with Jordane Maree at Girl and her Moon.
About Our Contributor
Jordane Maree is the founder of Girl and Her Moon, a platform and community exploring Soul through the lens of astrology, tarot, and energy healing. She is a writer, intuitive astrologer, energy and soul guide, and host of Girl and Her Moon, The Podcast. She is inspired, every single day, to be the mirror for you to see all that you truly are, you in all your infinite abilities, in total expansion, in infinite opportunity and love.
