Mercury is about to go retrograde on the 17th in Pisces and is now in the shadow phase in Aquarius so it’s a good time to begin reflecting from an Aquarius place. Mercury retrograde is all about reflecting on who you have been, understanding why and how you have impacted others. It’s a time to understand by looking into the past. Sure, communication gets a bit wonky, computers mess up, and travel plans may find complications but that’s just the side effect of this powerful cycle we go through three times every year. Powerful because Mercury helps us gain easy access to inner awareness and meaning.

Seeing the big picture of how your personal story is also a collective and archetypal story is the Aquarius shadow phase protocol. We all go through similar experiences at the universal root but we express the universal in a very individual way. Everyone wants love, security, happiness, and freedom. Everyone goes through loss and gain, pain and pleasure, life and death in very archetypal ways. Our little life stories are also collective classic tales. As an Aquarius friend of mine always says when speaking of her personal life, “it’s a story as old as time.” What part of the universal story are you living in?

I am living in the universal tale of building resilience with my life’s purpose. I am living the collective story of learning how to surrender and “relinquish the fruit” through self-restraint with my autoimmune disease. I am in a classic dark night of the soul story as I grieve my mother and family system. I am in the collective story of standing in my personal power to create a life aligned with my true self. I have the privilege to live in thriving stories and I do not take my privilege for granted. Not everyone has the opportunity to live aligned with their inner truth.

I see from a zoomed out perspective that the loss and discomfort I experience daily is building me into a the new me who is still forming, which is the classic story of self rebirth.  I call out to joy and more light hearted times as the dark night turns into the grey night as I make my way back into the daylight. I see how I have avoided love with stories that aren’t true for me anymore but now appear as masks covering a deeper fear of intimacy that I open myself to experiencing, which is the universal story of heart healing.  This is my Aquarian shadow analysis I share to give an example.

Moving into the full retrograde in Pisces…it is time to dive into the sea and feel. Pisces is the unconscious where most of self actually lives even though ego likes to think it’s much bigger. In truth ego is a tiny chihuahua and the unconscious is a vast sea of who we are filled with dormant potential at all times. Pisces is the nebulous feeling of oneness and connection. Pisces is compassion and unconditional love. In shadow, Pisces is the escape and avoidance of feeling through addiction and dissociation.

With Pisces, you either feel your truth or you escape feeling your truth. Pisces truth is rooted in love and speaks from a place of wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge mixed with love and experience. When you have wisdom you understand yourself, your loved ones, and life in light and dark and can make peace with life’s vicissitudes and losses. You can let go and accept what is. Pisces at its best is the serenity prayer: Universe (God, Goddess, Nature, Spirit, Being, etc) grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As we dive into the unconscious sea of feeling it’s like searching for the treasure chest buried on the ocean floor. You cannot will the treasure chest into being. You must swim and feel and follow your intuition and see what happens and trust the strange non-linear process.

Ego must relinquish control and arrogance and be willing to meet the truth of the soul that says, “this is what I need, this is who I am, this is what I truly long for, this is who I truly love, this is what really hurts, this is what needs to be released and forgiven, this is what’s leaving, this is what must be done,” on and on. The treasure is found when ego is ready to find it. The wisdom is gained when the heart is ready to receive it.

If you want to brave the adventure and use this retrograde fully, make an intention, say an invocation, do a ritual, it can be playful and spontaneous or elaborate and thoughtfully crafted. Say in your own words, “Universe, Mercury, Pisces, true self take me into the sea of my being and show me the way, reveal the wisdom I need to see, help me to let go and embrace the new.”

Pisces is also about endings. Completion. Wholeness. What is ending in your life or needs to end? A way of being? A way you have identified with yourself (I am like this, I am like that)? A relationship? A phase of life? A job? A habit? This retrograde will show you all you need to understand in your heart.

The water signs (Scorpio, Pisces, Cancer) represent the realm of feeling and heart. Heart is the core translator of true self or soul. Heart reveals to us what we need to know through feelings.

There is a difference between feelings and emotions. Reacting to the constant borage of stimulation and relating in the external world is emotion. Going within to access your intuition and foundational sense of truth is feeling. To feel we must go within. To go within me must pull back from emotionally reacting to every little thing, person, and circumstance. Mercury retrograde asks us to take a break from the external emoting and to dive into the inner depths and feel the feelings living inside that don’t care about success or failure.

True self feelings, wisdom, and longings do not care about results. Only ego cares about outcomes. Results and outcomes are important too, ego is a necessary aspect of self but ego should not be driving the self. Soul should be driving the self. And to get soul into the driver’s seat we need to go within to discover soul’s longings, feelings, and wisdom continually because we are always changing. Nothing is static. This is why we retrograde on the regular. To go within and catch up with true self so we can stay aligned with who we are and live from a place of inner truth.

This alignment is fulfillment at its best. True self seeks to experience for the sake of experience and does not need the security of successful outcomes. For instance, your soul may want to experience deep intimacy with a romantic partner. Where as ego wants to make sure that the partnership lasts forever because ego needs validation of being loved and the security of not being alone; soul seeks only the experience of intimacy whether it lasts a lifetime or has an end.

True self is not fearful of loss or failure but actually embraces loss and failure as a tools for growth. During this retrograde we have the opportunity to let go of ego’s constant need for results, security, and validation in order to go deeper and discover the latest sense of true self and soul longings that are asking for expression out in the world. It is up to ego to bring latent aspects of self out of dormancy and to give permission for new life to take form. Pisces Mercury Retrograde Blessings to you all.