Cultivating serenity when things go backwards

Retrogrades of planets that come before the Kuiper belt are a fact of life. Mercury, Venus, and Mars go retrograde and things get weird. It just happens. You can be mad about it (normal and healthy but not wildly productive), or you can be on the lookout for what's not working and not press too hard on that thing.

Things to consider:

• The shadow of the retrograde. Let's say we're about to go through a Mercury retrograde. Mercury goes forward, backward, and then forward again. The territory that Mercury will cover on the first forward pass creates a shadow, and wherever this area is in your chart is the area in which things will be *revisited.* Once Mercury begins to cover new territory after the "forward again" period, things either resolve themselves, a new avenue opens, or you realize what you were trying to do was futile and discard it. Astro-seek has a handy list of shadow periods.

• The inferior conjunction time: the day when the sun and the retrograding planet meet. This is a seed time for new ideas that you should definitely write down and should definitely not act on until the retrograde concludes.

• Retrogrades are a time of re-doing. Do not attempt bold new ideas during retrogrades, because I guarantee you, you'll have to re-do everything once this time is over. And never, ever get a new haircut during Venus retrograde.

• Whether the thing that's retrograde is your ruling planet, meaning the planet that rules the sign on your ascendant. This is relevant to people whose rising signs are Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Virgo, Libra, or Scorpio.

Mercury is a work indicator for me. In the previous Mercury retrograde, a big project I was planning got cancelled or postponed. I wasn't sure which, I was just told "this isn't happening." Was it annoying? Yes. Did I take it in stride? Kind of. Did it get put back on the table literally the day Mercury left its shadow? Also yes. Did I then have to re-do everything I did before the retrograde and then subsequently un-did during the retrograde? Yes again. Was everyone else involved more upset about it than I was? Yes, because I knew what energy was causing it. Also during that retrograde a consultant I've worked with for 3 years quit and I had to find a new one on short notice and white-knuckle the project, praying it worked out. Which it did, albeit slowly, because Mercury, and therefore work, was slow.

Last Mars retrograde, I had hip pain out of nowhere that seriously slowed me down. I was working out daily before the retrograde and during, not so much. There were other transits involved in my chart that were probably contributing factors, but once the retrograde was over, the pain went away and the workouts resumed. It was a long-ass 60 days of going slow. The deal I made with myself was if it didn't resolve itself post-retrograde I would seek medical input, and yes, that is sometimes how I live my life and make decisions. Judge me if you want.

Before I knew astrology, my life was significantly more chaotic during the retrogrades of Venus and Mars (Mercury not so much). Venus retrogrades reliably brought up relationship crises (I had several spectacular breakups that only a literal fireworks show could have further dramatized) and Mars retrogrades always saw me in stupid situations that my anger about the stupidity made worse. My best example is this: when Mars was retrograde in Libra (the sign of relationships) my (now) ex-husband tore his ACL playing soccer. He had torn the same ACL seven years previously playing soccer, and the injury actually happened the exact same way the second time. Then he told me how bad a caretaker I'd been the first time around (rage!), since that's obviously the way to get better care: insult your wife out of the gate--and then he spent the next few months sleeping on the living room floor because he couldn't do stairs. We were both incredibly victimized and whiny about the whole thing. I had to re-do the same pre- and post-surgery dance as the last time. Then I'd set him up to be comfortable while I was at work, go to work, go home at lunch to check on him, go back to work, then go home and attend to him at the end of the day. My ex is generally an affable guy but painkillers made him a monster, and the entire experience was an exercise in not murdering my then-significant other. Mars was retrograde for him, too: he had been on borrowed time with his soccer playing following the first injury and his surgeon told me that the cartilage situation after the second injury was such that he could never run again. Soccer had been his life. Yikes.

Again, that retrograde was in Libra, and when I think about all of the things that resulted in the end of that marriage, this was a turning point, because it was a wake up call to me that I wasn't in a partnership: I was just expected to be of service. Anything I wanted or needed from him was on hold for weeks if not months. I was pissed off about that and I acted out, which solved nothing. Once Mars was forward in the sky, the husband was walking again, but the relationship was way more damaged than it had been before, so in hindsight that time was the beginning of the end. It's a small consolation to look at both of our charts, because there's basically no world in which it wasn't going to end, but it still sucks.

It's hard to talk about my marriage without sounding like I'm pointing a finger at my ex, by the way. I'm not. He has a lot of great qualities but we weren't great together. We were actually born only 4 days apart, and our challenges were so similar that we tended to pull each other back into bad patterns (this is really, really, really common astrologically for twins and people born mere days apart, because encountering a repeat of your own energy isn't neutral, it's compounding for either good or ill). That's not his fault and it's not mine, either.

Had I known astrology back then I would have known how long I'd have to contain my murderous rage, but, as with most things, hindsight is 20/20.

Yours in using energy to your advantage,J