Tawny Estrella
Mar 10, 20225 min
I don't do posts on every planetary transit, but this one in particular feels important to explore today. Mercury, the planet that represents communication, mental patterns, thought, and reasoning, transits through the sign of Pisces from March 9 - March 27 before moving into Aries.
We are still in Pisces season and have multiple planets currently transiting through this final sign of the zodiac, with Mercury now joining the sun, Jupiter, and Neptune in Pisces. Both Venus and Mars will enter Pisces in April as well.
So what does this mean? A lot of different things come to mind for me.
First of all, our communication will take on more of a Piscean energy and tone at this time. This means things are getting especially intuitive, dreamy, emotional, and spiritually-minded in terms of how we think, speak, and communicate with one another.
On the bright side, this can make us more empathetic, more compassionate, and more able to express and honor our emotions and the emotions of others. On the shadow side, this can fuel extreme moodiness, emotional reactivity, knee-jerk arguments, charged interactions, and escapist tendencies.
During this transit, it's important that we do not allow our emotions to fully steer our ship. Rather, they can be used as one factor to inform the course we take. This means being aware of our own tendencies, wounds, and internal patterns that can sometimes lead us toward delusional thinking or unhealthy coping mechanisms.
As a Pisces sun myself, I've noticed these patterns in myself (especially the tendency toward avoidance, numbing, and escapism) when I'm not at my best internally.
Our emotions, especially when they arise strongly and suddenly in reaction to something, are often communicating more about our internal wounds and triggers than the present reality of a situation.
Don't get me wrong — our feelings are always, always valid. This does not mean they are always conveying factual information.
Strong emotions often have old stories attached to them. While the emotion is real and valuable, the story it brings up may not always be true.
For example, let’s say someone doesn’t call you back when you really want them to. Whatever feeling comes up for you is valid and deserves to be felt and honored fully within you.
A million stories could come up in response to this one instance, depending on your internal wounds and life experience. The mind and body will quickly find the most poignant comparison and fill in all the blanks from this place if we allow them to.
We could think, “I knew they wouldn’t call me back. No one ever does what they say they will. People never show up for me.”
We could think, “Clearly they’re super irresponsible. What a mess. Who says they’re going to call and just doesn’t call? How can I ever trust their word? ”
We could think, “They have so many better things to do than to talk to me. I’m just not important enough to them. I knew I didn't matter to them. They really must not care about me.”
In this scenario, we really don’t know the reality of the situation. A million things could be happening on the other side of that phone. Someone else’s actions, though they may deeply affect us, are never truly about us in the first place.
And while it’s important to pay attention to people’s behavior and take it seriously, this “filling in the blank” behavior can be incredibly damaging and misleading to us and our relationships. It can be one of the ways we play out self-fulfilling prophecies and reenact our wounds over and over again.
These stories are incredibly sticky. This means that once we start replaying a story in our mind, we can get caught in that recurring loop until we interrupt it. And the next time we feel that way, we will likely play the same story out all over again.
Emotions are not “sticky” unless we continue to avoid feeling them. Emotions really want us to just sink into them in the moment so they don’t have to stick around any longer than they’re meant to. Emotions inherently WANT to move. They pass incredibly quickly when we release our resistance to the feeling (including the story attached to it) and simply give them room.
When we sit with an emotion and allow it to fully run its course rather than acting on it impulsively, we allow its deeper layers to reveal themselves. From here, we can use this emotion as a valuable and critical source of information in combination with any other factors that may present themselves. We also can see and notice things that may directly contradict previous stories or beliefs we’ve held, which is a vital piece in helping us expand and heal.
When we act on the emotion in order to avoid it or shut it down before letting it run its course, we miss out on both the healing it brings and the information it was trying to convey.
You see, acting quickly on an emotion is not the same thing as honoring and feeling that emotion — though it may sometimes feel that way. It is making quite the opposite statement, in fact. While it can feel "good" momentarily to act immediately on a strong emotion, it can be a way of distracting ourselves from, “fixing”, or avoiding the emotion instead of simply sitting with it.
As the wavy seas of Pisces hit us on multiple levels of our being, we are meant to flow with the tides as best as we can.
It will not be perfect. It is not meant to be.
By nature, Pisces energy is messy, chaotic, wild, untamable. It is nothing and everything at once. It is as deep and constantly changing as the sea.
While we think of water as soft and flowing, it is also deeply powerful and ushers in incredible change. Just like the rocks that are smoothed and eroded by the constant presence of water, we are being transformed by these energies in ways we have yet to understand.
We and our relationships greatly benefit from a heavy dose of flexibility and compassion. This is always true, and is especially true in the current moment.
As we're all swimming in the same collective sea together and riding this energetic wave, it’s important to flow with the emotions that come up within you, and allow others to do the same.
Allow yourself to be messy, changing, and uncertain. Allow others to be too when they need to.
This does not mean settling, lowering your standards, or tolerating harm. This means centering your inherent self-worth and honoring your boundaries while allowing the flow of feelings to exist in whatever form they come in the moment (and doing the same for others whenever you’re able to).
While this tide can feel overwhelming, heavy, or emotional at times, this typically happens when we are trying to resist or control it. Everything changes when we allow ourselves to ride the waves and flow with the tides.
We don’t try to control the movement of the ocean. This is an impossible task and a losing battle that can leave us feeling beaten down, drained, broken, and exhausted. Instead, we embrace the ocean’s changeable, powerful, incredible beauty. We respect and admire its constant movement. We don’t fight it. We let go of trying to change it. We accept it as it is.
In this beautiful Pisces sea we’re swimming in, this is what we're being asked to cultivate. Instead of resisting the overwhelming current, get yourself a surfboard and enjoy the ride.
Tawny