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This week begins slowness, reflection, healing, clarity and being with our emotions. With the Sun and Mercury in Cancer and Neptune going retrograde, there is a revealing aspect of the days that brings an enlightening understanding of truth and reality.
Mercury in Cancer
Mercury represents the mind, communication, intellect, and learning. As a fast-moving planet, it generally doesn’t spend much 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 birth sign of Gemini, Mercury has breathed new life into our minds and thought patterns, drawing us into our intellectual curiosities and thrills. It has been a very mental time, a busy chapter for our thoughts and imaginations.
However, when Mercury enters Cancer, it welcomes a depth of awareness that requires us to slowly settle into presence. A water sign, Cancer represents our emotional experience. It is nourishing and healing, intuitive and sensitive. As Mercury navigates the waters of Cancer from June 26 to July 11, we are invited to look within, consider our personal and emotional experience, connect and communicate with our loved ones, and express what is ready to be expressed. It is a chapter of healing music, conversations, writing, sharing and listening. It is a time of emotional journeys and healing of family and ancestral patterns. It is presence in conversations that connect and nurture. It is listening to the voice that lives in the depths and opening a dialogue to nurture it and let it nurture you.
retrograde neptune
The movement of the planets and stars cannot be separated from the worlds that live within us. Planets exist as archetypes, as invitations, colors, hues, tones, and ways of being. Their movements in the cosmos change something within us, be it subtle or overt, silent or loud. When these celestial bodies take a moment to pause, exhale, and begin their seemingly backward retrograde motion, we too are invited to pause, exhale, and travel within.
Neptune is an outer planet, sitting on the edge of what we already know and what we have yet to discover. Governing the indefinable, it is a planet that takes us to the invisible, to the realm of the imagination. Neptune is abstract, subtle, compassionate, and intuitive. It is the blurring of the boundaries between the Self and All That Is. Neptune is the flow we experience within creative expression. It is the loss of ourselves, of our identity and of our direction through singing. It is the unity experienced in meditation and the way one yoga pose somehow blends into the next, indistinguishable as to where one begins and the other ends.
While in retrograde from June 30 to December 6, Neptune brings a lifting of the fog. It gives clarity so that we can review the reality of the path that we have been traveling and the relationship that we have been building with ourselves, our creativity, our purpose and our perception of the spirit and the truth. As Neptune’s dream state retraces his steps, the veil is lifted where what we once could not see now becomes visible, where what we perceive as truth is revealed as something else.
your invitation
Cancer invites you to the depths of your emotional waters. It draws you down, in, and back, recalling your younger years, family dynamics, and ancestral patterns embedded deep within your being. As we allow this downstream Cancer to guide us inward, Neptune holds up mirrors of clarity. It shows the illusions we have held onto that have shaped our views and changed our experience of reality. It clarifies the patterns under which we have been operating.
Neptune represents the realm of existence where all is one. However, while he is retrograde, he invites you into the full awareness of the human experience, where there is a healthy and empowering separation and sense of “I”. It is a time to lean into clarity, develop your sense of individual identity, and reflect on truth, spiritual beliefs, and loving discernment. Retrograde Neptune initiates deep internal changes, while Cancer acts as the nurturing and nurturing security to sustain us at all times.
Neptune retrogrades for the next six months, though Mercury in Cancer lasts only two beautiful weeks. Allow the gifts of overlapping time to seep deep within. There is great healing, insight, connection, and contentment to be found within.
Learn more about the influence of astrology on your life, including astrological events, Moon, Sun and Moon cycles and rising signs, how journaling can help you connect with current influences, and more with Jordane dizzy in Girl and her Moon.
About our partner
jordan marie is the founder of girl and her moon, a platform and community that explores the 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 day, to be the mirror for you to see all that you really are, you in all your infinite abilities, in full expansion, in infinite opportunities and love.