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This is Kathy Biehl of EmpowermentUnlimited.net with Astro-Insight for the week of January 9th, 2023. This week is pleasant enough, but it’s a bit misleading. Let’s start with the pleasant part. Venus and Mars are getting along. Venus, our social director in “Let’s be friends” Aquarius is in the easy flow of a trine to Mars, the ruler of our drive, in Gemini. This will facilitate communication, talking with pals, breezy conversations, lovers treating each other as friends, which can be a good thing, the masculine and the feminine impulses within each of us flowing nicely, getting along, people out in the world getting along, and very likely a lot of group activity, hanging out in packs, doing things with your pals. Watch for differences in undercurrents, in tone, in how your friends talk, in how groups communicate with each other. Something is leveling up. Being friends, being pals doesn’t necessarily mean being insignificant or being trivial.
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You could be experiencing a profound awareness of how important certain circles are to you and experiencing actually different communication in those circles. Now, for the misleading part: This is not deliberately misleading, but there’s a shift in energy in the middle of the week that will be very easy to mistake for “all systems go,” but it’s not. Mars, the planet that rules our drive, stations direct. Mars has been retrograde since right around Halloween, providing many opportunities to renegotiate old agreements, to get more information about situations that you thought you understood or that required clarifying or that just benefited from clarifying, lots of additional information coming out, but not necessarily in a way that it could be acted on yet. And as Mars stations direct, it’s still not time to act on it. Several reasons, actually, three big ones. The first is any direct station comes with a bit of a lag time, a sense of time slowing just a bit. It will take a few days for Mars to really be moving forward and for us to notice significant differences. Most important reason: Mercury is still retrograde. Mars is in the sign ruled by Mercury, Gemini. Mercury has been retrograde since right about New Year’s Eve, and it’s crawling
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Backward in Capricorn, very mundane, goal oriented, structurally oriented turf. Also pretty slow territory, ruled by Saturn, which doesn’t wanna rush. Mars wants to go, go, go. Mercury says, mm, no, not just yet. So scale back your expectations. Avoid any temptation to push yourself. No shoving, no running, not until Mercury stations direct on the 18th and then gradually crawls forward himself. As I said in the January forecast, it’s not gonna really be until the Aquarius New Moon on the 21st that we feel like the year has finally started. Why rush it? You have a cosmic excuse to continue to take things slowly. There will be moments soon enough when you will yearn for exactly that. Take your time, watch the details, conserve your energy, and while Mars is hovering in its direct station, and you can take this approach all week long, treat whatever is happening around you as being suspended in time. The sense of slowness, the feeling that you’ll wanna rush, but something is keeping you from doing that, gives you the benefit of watching what is really going on around you.
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It will be as if there are bits of paper falling and swirling in front of us so slowly that we may be able to actually make out the writing on them. You can have a real fun, cinematic experience of this if you just let your imagination go with it, which leads directly into the third reason why it’s probably not gonna be a really quick week, and that is a sextile between the Sun and Neptune, Neptune, the most unhooked from earthly experience of all of the influences in the sky. Neptune is the planet of illusion, of dreams, of connection to the divine, of inspiration, of escapism, of glamor and illusion. And this outreach between the Sun and Neptune gives us an opening for getting insight from something other than a rational source. Call it divine intervention, angelic intervention, even simply creative inspiration that is available to all
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of us. As Mars is making its turnaround, it cushions us, it puts our minds and our beings in fluffy clouds, stuffs our skulls with cotton so that we may not be thinking all that clearly. Anyway, all of which adds up to: Have a good time this week. Enjoy your friends. Enjoy talking with people. Enjoy your circles. Give yourself some time. Notice what is hanging in the air in front of you as the week goes on, and ask for inspiration. Ask for dreams. Ask for compassion and forgiveness and gentleness. Ask to be shown the highest potential in situations, the highest potential in other people, and ask the same when you’re looking in the mirror, brushing your teeth. You could get ideas and insights. Inspiration could very well come to you that you wouldn’t be able to hear if you were rushing around, and that you won’t be able to hear when you are rushing around, which we will all be doing soon enough.
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Homing thought of the week:: not so fast.
Song of the week. Very old, very short, absolutely appropriate. Venus and Mars by Paul McCartney and Wings, and
The image of the week is bending down and tying your shoes before going out for a run.
You’ll find more about this in my forecast for the month of January, which is up at my site, EmpowermentUnlimited.net, where you can sign it for my mailing list and book a session with me. I’m Kathy Biehl, a professional astrologer with more than 30 years experience. I have a Mercury retrograde survivors guide at OMTimes.com. I host the show Celestial Compass on OMTimes Radio on the first and third Monday of every month. I oversee lively conversation on Facebook at Empowerment Unlimited and the group the Astro-Insight Lounge. I have lots of bonus content at patreon.com/kathybiehl, and I’m deeply grateful to the people who support my work there. I’m on Instagram at @kabiehl, and on YouTube at the Professional Aquarian Channel. Talk to you next week.