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I write regularly at jessicashepherd.substack.com — soft, human words on healing, astrology & intuition:
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Sagittarius Full Moon Lunar Eclipse: Blind Faith
If you're a sensitive you may be feeling foggy, spacey or tired this week as Friday's Sagittarius lunar eclipse squares Neptune, the planet of sleep, dreams, spirituality, consciousness, deception and self-undoing. Neptune, like Twelfth House planets, is accompanied by that vague and fuzzy, dazed and confused feeling. If we want to nail down anything, a relationship or health problem, we won’t be able to. We can’t see very far into the future. Nay, we may only barely be able to see the next...
Taurus New Moon Solar Eclipse: Worth
As someone with a very un mainstream career, when people ask what I do for a living, what I call myself (at this point either: writer, astrologer or health coach), sadly, is determined by what is most likely to merit the least amount of judgment from others. Being so firmly planted “outside the system” has put me in the position of getting a bird’s eye view about what and who people, and our world, values -- and what I’ve learned is painful. While I have followed purposeful calling(s) that...
How To Travel & Stay Healthy
Travel as a sensitive person isn’t easy. Plus, I am an adventurer. If I am on a trip, I want an EXPERIENCE. My husband loves to re-tell the story about the time we were touring the underground labyrinth at Buda Castle in Budapest which featured a fountain of Dionysian spickets flowing with red wine. Of course, as though it were a water fountain, I didn’t hesitate and leaned in for a drink. Later, reflecting on the vinegary taste, I realized it may have been someone else’s spit bucket wine....
Libra Full Moon: Time To Get Growing
Springtime is the season of awakening. All of nature is conspiring to wake up: the Sun warms the birds so they'll sing, likewise encouraging the buds. This encourages certain housecats to chase said birds. We feel this, too. We get the equivalent of cabin fever in our bodies, lives and relationships: it becomes increasingly impossible to put up with the same old same old. It is a time when, as my friend said on his Facebook status update, we discover that “Staying in my comfort zone for too...
Pisces New Moon: The Knower
I used to co-teach a monthly new moon astrology class, one where we’d give a handout months’ worth of transits coming down the pike. Always, students bemoaned the transits. Mercury is retrograde, again? What good is that? Yet hope springs eternal -- even in the heart of the most jaded starwatcher. When Jupiter met Venus, or the New Moon was particularly positive, the air glimmered with potential. So it goes with life. We parse it out into good and bad experiences. We anticipate our future in...
Neptune-Venus Transits, Neptune Seventh House Transits: The Impossible Relationship
There are times in life when impossible relationships appear. They aren’t available, you aren’t available, there’s a difference in age, or geography so vast that coming together is not only crazy but exceedingly impractical. Some may say that’s the definition of true love. It may be one. However, the difference between a possible or impossible relationship is that sooner or later the relationship itself, through its potential for drama, heartache and impracticality, reveals that it is not...
Virgo Full Moon: The Being & The Doing
My client called me the other day, confused by the way the very ground of a decision she had just confidently made had quickly emotionally bottomed out. “Yesterday I was so sure of my decisions but today I’m feeling anxious, uncertain about everything.” I looked at her chart: the Sun, currently in Pisces was transiting her Twelfth House, the house of Pisces. During the 30-day or solar transit we each experience annually, our fears loom larger, life feels topsy-turvy, chaotic. Any load we’ve...
Saturn Transits The First House: The Life Waiting For You
With Saturn now moving retrograde, I figured I’d check in on how I’m faring with Saturn. Saturn has been transiting my first house since September 2011. I had been looking forward to Saturn leaving my twelfth house like I looked forward to being released from an obligation I had no interest in keeping; in my twelfth, Saturn had taught me to quiet down, stop working so hard, to chill out. Dialing back and losing focus in the diffuse awareness of the twelfth house does not and did not feel...
Leo Full Moon: Stand In The Light
I was backing out of the animal shelter, after stopping by to say hi to the kittens and puppies (it’s good for the mental health), when Saturn in Scorpio and I had an automobile collision. She got out of her car, and immediately dished me up a nasty insult. But I was so high on kitten and puppy serotonin I think it granted me a sense of grace because in one moment I experienced a deep sadness around how people treat one another and in the next, I felt the truth of this person, that despite...
Capricorn New Moon: Spiritual Instincts, Earthly Rules -or- Why Earthless Girls Work Harder
Dolly Parton, a Capricorn, once said: “The magic is inside of you. There ain’t no crystal ball.” Well, to tempt Fate, the Capricorn Gods, and Dolly, I had a psychic reading yesterday. The psychic told me she’d never seen an aura like mine, it was larger than normal (apparently the average aura is 7 inches and mine is 12) & its activity made her dizzy. She told me I wasn’t of this Earth, but from another planet -- a planet of superior intelligence (which sounded like the planet Uranus to...
