Neptune stations retrograde today, floating back to 18° Pisces where it stations direct in November. We often hear how Neptune transits accompany anxiety, fatigue, deception and confusion. Perhaps they do. But that hasn’t been my experience. In fact, I’ve found just the opposite: Neptune transits have been times of awakening.
As my Sun and Ascendant are at 18° Pisces, I’m familiar with Neptune energy. In addition, Neptune conjuncted my Moon when it entered Pisces in 2011. This is when I began practicing with Ayahuasca, accessing timeless states and beginning an ancestral healing journey that used my body as its crucifixion purge. Neptune went on to conjunct natal Mercury and then to the Sun and Ascendent as it is now.
Whether it be ayahuasca, Buddhist teachings, or nature herself that have served as handmaidens to Neptune’s energy, these transits shifted me. Large parts of my egoic lens simply evaporated, allowing me a glimpse of the bigger picture where my small self was rather insignificant. It’s not that my life was no longer important. It was simply placed into the larger context of family, ancestry, race and finally a human inhabitant on this planet. I made major changes to my life to reflect these insights.
Neptune is hard to define, isn’t it? The planet entered our awareness in 1846 during the transcendentalism and spiritualism movements. Given that Neptune has been my travelling companion, I like to think of its energy as inviting us into the true nature of reality. Neptune lifts the veil so we can get an eyeful of the Wizard of Oz and how the operating system is matrixed into being. Neptune transits ask us to shed the heavy weight of a fixed identity and step into a larger, compassionate perspective. To creatively color outside the lines, a picture where we really are all one.
Image by @thenamdas