I posted the other day about Venus Retrograde and how that’s affecting us. It’s just one piece of the puzzle though.

* Saturn has been retrograde since mid-March, and will station direct at the beginning of August.
* Pluto has been retrograde since mid-April.
* Neptune and Chiron both went retrograde last month.
* Uranus goes retrograde on Sunday.

Retrogrades in general bring the opportunity to choose between conscious navel-gazing (introspection, really) and experiencing your internal process from a less positive viewpoint, sometimes referred to as a cranial-rectal inversion. Enlightenment or ostrich, your choice. Living in a free will Universe is always so entertaining…

Let’s break this down into its individual parts first.

Saturn is about hard work, rules, commitment, focus, and is related to time (in the sense of “take your…”). Since March, you have had the opportunity to re-evaluate how you do things that require dedication and stick-to-it-iveness. Shut up, it’s totally a word. This should be approaching some sense of resolution, theoretically, since Saturn stations direct in about a week.

Beginning in April, you have likely been coming up against your shadow-self, looking at how you create & manifest, and seeing where you are (and aren’t) in alignment with yourself.

Then Neptune got in on the action in June, followed rapidly by Chiron. Neptune is about imagination, idealism, and spirituality. He can also highlight issues of addiction, obsession, and self-harm. Bastard. In retrograde, your ideals, your spirituality, and your psychological/spiritual health can be called into question. How your actions and your ideals line up may be highlighted. Certainly we’ve seen a lot of opportunity to change how we relate to and honor The Other, and perhaps have gotten to examine some of our core ideas about ourselves.

Chiron is the shaman, the wounded healer; he stands between worlds, and bridges the gap between radical change and following the rules. Ok, so it can be a big gap, for some people, but that gap is directly related to the idea that, once you know the rules, you can transcend discipline and create art. It’s also important to note that those two sides of the gap are Saturn and Uranus, who are both playing the retrograde game. Chiron in retrograde asks us to look at where we are stuck and where we try to circumvent the process, as well as our excuses and justifications. We may also be seeing where we lack commitment and balance, and where we avoid self care.

I talked about Venus earlier this week. Go back and read it, if you haven’t. I’ll wait…

Uranus, butt of every sophomoric astrology joke ever (including that one), is about breakthroughs and discoveries, and global shifts. In retrograde, we have the opportunity to assess how we as a population have arrived at recent Big Changes, what other changes are necessary, and how to make large scale shifts more solid or permanent.

Hopefully you’re still with me. I know astrology can be overwhelming sometimes, I’m trying to keep this accessible.Jargon helps no one but the ego.

I’m going to shift gears for just a moment and mention numerology. Metaphysical whiplash is fun, right? 2015 is an important, weighty year, because it’s a Universal (for everyone and the planet in general) 7. Seven is a Divine number that references, for me, the principle of “as above, so below; as within, so without.”  That means we have the opportunity to peer into the inner workings of things, to see How Things Work (whether those things are our psyche or the world), and having done that, to use our knowledge to effect change. When you know how the machine works, you can adjust or even change what it does. See Chiron, above.

So, when you toss all this information in the bug jar and shake, what do you get? A metric tonne of introspection, evaluation, and assessment, for one. Opportunities for personal and global change. The Universe highlighting where things are broken. And, most importantly, the call to transcend the model, to step into our role as true Co-Creators, the Elohim. Going back to one of my original points of this post, if we’re not down for evolving, that’s our choice, but everyone else may notice that you, the emperor of your Universe, are having a wardrobe malfunction.

I know that this is the point at which I usually offer up a bunch of tools for surfing the energies, but I’m getting, rather loudly, that you need to digest the implications of all of this right now. I expect to be writing a Tools & Practice follow up post in the next few days.