Retrogrades: a Cosmic Invitation to Recalibration
and why 2025's first quarter of frustrating and slow astrology is actually a gift to step into the big changes of the year with a stronger sense of clarity, direction, and alignment
If there’s one word to describe the astrology of 2025, it’s change. Earlier in January we saw the nodal axis shift from the Aries-Libra axis to the Pisces Virgo axis, heralding our attention fully towards the series of Virgo-Pisces eclipses that will take center stage this year as we leave the Aries-Libra eclipses that we’ve been moving through over the past two years in the rear view mirror. 2025 brings us into our first uninterrupted year of Pluto in Aquarius, and within that lies the preliminary shifts of Neptune into Aries (for the first time since the 1870’s) and Uranus into Gemini (for the first time since the 1940’s). In fact, this is the first time all three outer planets have shifted signs within a year of each other since 1737. Saturn, who changes signs every 2.5-3 years, makes its shift from Pisces to Aries, bringing our greater malefic into its own sign of fall, and our annual shift of Jupiter this year brings our greater benefic out of its sign of detriment and into its sign of exaltation, so even the slightly less rare movement of our social planets have particularly noteworthy signatures about them.
In essence, we’re seeing major shifts in all of our slower moving planets and points, the celestial signifiers of greater trends, cycles, and movements of the collective. Of course, this will draw our attention to new themes and areas of our life on an individual level, but most notably, this signals big-picture shifts and new eras, currents, and trends on a collective level.
There’s certainly a lot of hype around this year’s astrology and it’s really no wonder why. Change is certainly intimidating and difficult, and this year’s astrology is definitely asking us to dive into the unknown, which requires a certain level of trust and relinquishment in and of itself. However, within these shifts and the processes they provoke, we’re ultimately being ushered into new pathways and storylines, and the challenge lies in meeting those crossroads and unknown trails with a sense of grounded rootedness in who we are, what we stand for, what our values are, what drives us, and how we translate all of that from our own inner world into the world around us…so certainly it’s no cosmic coincidence that we are kicking this year off with a vortex of retrogrades by all of our personal planets, is it?
Starting the year off with Mars retrograde has been far from easy—it’s created a sense of stalling liminality, like trying to run in a dream; a questioning of why and how we were previously doing what we’ve been doing, a struggle to tap into the motivation to push forward, or even knowing how to push forward if we wanted to. In addition, warning are around of avian flus, surges of covid, and other illnesses rippling through the collective. It feels like everyone I know has dealt with some kind of debilitating cold or acute illness tapping their vitality at some point or another since January. The Mars retrograde struggle is one I’ve seen threaded through every person I talk to and interact with, whether they’re aware of (and blaming it on) the astrology or not.
The good news is we’re just a little over a week away from Mars’s direct station. The bad (but doesn’t have to be bad!) news is that after just a week long reprieve from that retrograde we head straight into Venus retrograde, and incapsulated within that underworld journey lies the entirety of our first Mercury retrograde of 2025 (not to mention our very first eclipse season of the year, but I think I’ll have to save that one for another day).
Venus’s retrograde carries us all the way into April, which ultimately points towards the entire first quarter of the calendar year being characterized by our most personal cosmic currents running against the grain, a disruption of what we understand as our status quo, and the demand for A LOT of introspection. Sure, it’s frustrating, kind of exhausting, and very annoying, but always, kind of, maybe…a gift?
While it’s not the most unusual for all of our personal planet retrogrades to happen in the same year (especially since it’s a given that we’ll move through about three Mercury retrogrades in any given calendar year), the fact that they’re so stacked on top of one another doesn’t exactly happen all the time. Our personal planets—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—point towards the mechanisms of our inner worlds that animate our personalities. In our birth charts they signal our impulses, personal preferences, our motivations, and how that translates into how we move through, communicate, and interact with the world around us. These planets come together to create a unique blend that expresses itself as our personality. As these planets move in transit, meaning their movement through the skies in real time as they journey through the zodiac, they activate certain parts of our natal chart, drawing our attention to our personal relationship with certain areas of our life based on their sign and house positioning and the contact they make with our own personal placements.
Most of the time this motion is forward and direct, but an integral part of their natural rhythm is the dreaded retrograde motion that prompts the demand to re-evaluate, reassess, and revisit parts of ourself that either lie unknowingly dormant, or that we have intentionally chosen to neglect in favor of dealing with the day to day motions our capitalistic society demands of us. While this is kind of business-as-usual motion is a necessary coping mechanism of survival, the emphasis on constant forward motion in our society can provoke restlessness of soul and spirit deep within us. Retrogrades are the very processes that ask us to double back and take a closer look at those inner urges that are longingly tugging at us, and importantly, prompt us to consider how we can integrate them into our day to day in a way that moves us forward along our life path feeling aligned—letting the desires and longing of the soul animate the pursuits of our spirit.
The world of pop astrology and watering down transits into 2-minute videos that emphasize grabbing your attention above all else has taught us to move through these retrogrades with one goal—just making it to the other side. However, when we contextualize these retrogrades into greater cycles, as well as into our own lives and birth charts, we’re being given an opportunity to re-awaken those parts of ourself that lie dormant in our day to day; those very parts of ourself that often hold the most magic, that animate our being and ask us to bridge the space between soul and spirit in order to not just walk along our life’s path, but to tend to it, forge it, and cultivate it as our own. You know capitalism hates to see it.
With Mars as the planet of passion and drive, Venus as the planet of values and cohesion, and Mercury of intellect, ideas, and communication, and all three falling retrograde right at the top of a year stuffed to the brim with shifts and change (and with that, the potential for new opportunities), the first quarter of 2025 is asking us to retreat deep into ourselves and as what alignment truly looks and feels like. Where has our passion and zest for life waned and needs reigniting in a way that feels nurturing and sustaining? Where can we better root ourselves in our own values, or even reassess them all together, in a way that allows those values to guide our own story forward towards our own integral role within the collective for the world we dream of? How can we reawaken and re-inspire the ideas we hold around what’s possible and how to construct them by speaking them into being?
These are ultimately the questions that the astrology of 2025’s first quarter are asking us. They’re daunting questions, to be sure. They’re questions whose answers might result in an uncomfortable uprooting and re-situating within our day to day lives, or even in our own ideas of who we are and why we do what we do. But they’re questions that will ultimately connect us to the possibility that lies in the astrology of the rest of the year. They’re questions that seek to bring us into alignment with ourselves and our life’s path so that we can actively orient ourselves into the revolutionary collective change we wish to see. Together, these three retrogrades are posing two major questions: Are you allowing the pursuit of your spirit to be animated by the desires of your soul? And what does it look like to live that out each and every day?
Join me in an exploration of the potential and greater role that this uniquely frictional astrology is playing in the bigger picture of this year. I’m hosting a workshop on Saturday, February 22, at 11 AM eastern where we’ll explore all things retrogrades.
In Retrogrades: A Cosmic Invitation to Recalibration we’ll cultivate a greater understanding of retrogrades by contextualizing them into greater planetary cycles in order to create a more holistic understanding of the importance of retrogrades, and we’ll look at the mythic and symbolic ways we can use retrogrades to deepen our understanding of our own stories.
Together we’ll look at our current convergent moment cosmic counter-movement and how to best move with it instead of against it, and particularly how this moment is ultimately in service of bringing us into a new chapter of life with a feeling of clarity, confidence, and motivation when it comes to actively cultivating our own paths forward.
This workshop will be recorded for future viewing and revisiting. While we will be talking about our current astrology, all of the information covered will have timeless applicability to every future retrograde experience you meet.
I’m keeping this workshop accessibly priced at just $9.99 as a little love letter of support to all right now, and my paid subscribers here on Substack are invited to join for free (keep an eye out in your inbox for the link getting sent out later this week). Find more information and secure your spot through the button down below!
