How to Thrive During Mercury Retrograde
Any planetary influence can be used to deepen personal growth - even mercury retrograde!
This particular retrograde has earned a somewhat infamous reputation over recent years. Historically, it’s wreaked havoc on communication, travel and technology and has become a popular scapegoat for reuniting with toxic exes, digging up the past and miscommunication at large.
While it’s true that this influence shows up most predominantly in delayed travel plans, resurfacing of relationships past, wonky technology and weird communication, it’s also the most powerful time to reflect, re-evaluate, release and re-engage.
This particular planetary energy invites us to go deeper – to reconnect to our intuition, authenticity and fluidity, and then to more clearly express our truth by releasing old attachments, beliefs and stories that are keeping us in small or unhealthy cycles.
A trickster taskmaster, mercury retrograde appears 3 to 4 times a year to make sure that we’re sure we’ve released what is necessary in order to move more gracefully into the next iteration of our lives.
All three 2021 mercury retrogrades fall in air signs which rule the mental domain so the time is really ripe to examine and evaluate thoughts and beliefs. It may be helpful to take an inventory of your core beliefs, writing them down and then going through one by one to identify if each is actually your belief or one that’s been passed down through your ancestral lineage or projected onto you by societal or familial pressures. The book, It Didn't Start With You is a wonderful resource for ancestral healing. Now is an optimal time to empower yourself by actively and consciously choosing your thoughts and beliefs!
Mindful shadow work and reflection will be helpful during these next three weeks – for a list of shadow work prompts, check this post. To lovingly release thoughts and beliefs that no longer serve, read more about cord cutting here. To release limiting beliefs and outdated patterns using PSYCH-K, send me an email at salt.starlight@gmail.com!
This year’s mercury retrogrades also place an emphasis on inner child work – what did you love to do when you were younger? What activities brought you pure bliss? How can you indulge in more of that childlike joy? This may mean making time to have dance parties or finger paint or go for a swim in the ocean, collect sea shells, do cartwheels, sing, draw, bake, read, write, skip, hop, ride a bike, go to a waterpark, explore nature or play in the rain!
Honoring our inner joy gives life a luscious juiciness and stimulates more flow and creativity - and summer just happens to provide the perfect backdrop to reconnect with the ease and playfulness our inner child craves. If you did not have an idyllic childhood, use this opportunity to reparent yourself and nurture yourself in the ways you always wanted to be cared for.
Additional Tips for Thriving During Mercury Retrogrades
- If traveling, give yourself plenty of extra time and pack a flexible mind (and good book or coloring book to keep you occupied).
- Don’t send texts or emails when agitated or upset - sleep on it first and then make sure to proofread any correspondence before sending.
- Create intentional space for stillness. This will allow any lightbulb a-ha moments and transformation to come more quickly and organically.
- Keep a journal. Even if you aren’t a regular journal-er, keeping a record of your thoughts and epiphanies during these few weeks can help bring clarity to patterns, habits and relationships.
- Limit screen time and exposure to EMFs.
- Reflect on the areas of your life that currently have resistance or challenges. What can you release to alleviate this resistance?
- Take accountability for your role in relationships.
- Say no to social obligations that don’t resonate.
- Work with crystals such as shungite to buffer EMF exposure, smoky quartz to connect you to your physical body, rainbow fluorite to help focus scattered mental energy, blue kyanite and clear quartz to balance energies, rose quartz for unconditional love and compassion, labradorite for enhanced intuition, nuummite and petrified wood for ancestral/familial work and lepidolite when you need a major dose of calm.
- Allowing yourself to flow and be fluid is easier if you have a safe container. During this year's mercury retrogrades, make sure you're firmly grounded so that you can experience safe expansion. Find tips on strengthening the root chakra here and working with fast, airy energy here.
This year’s Mercury Retrogrades occur:
- January 30 to February 21 (in Aquarius)
- March 29 – June 22 (in Gemini)
- September 27 – October 23 (in Libra)
Does Mercury Retrograde affect you or your relationships? What are your favorite tips for navigating this time?
Leave a comment
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Whether it’s love, good health, a solid relationship, serenity, freedom, a title, respect, or a certain number in the bank or on the scale - anything you chase will always be outside of you.
Apart from you.
A Perpetual Separation.
The energy of chasing by nature keeps you in pursuit and the desired "thing" running away from you. This creates more resistance & frustration and actually widens the gap between you and what you want.
Andrea Pacini
Author