Is anyone else feeling it?
Because even by current standards, there seems to be something rather intense in the air at the moment.
Conversations that suddenly have far more charge than they seemingly ought to. Old feelings appearing from nowhere. Relationship stuff. Questions around what we want, what we value, where we belong, what we are prepared to tolerate — and what perhaps we aren’t anymore.
People from the past appearing in our thoughts, our dreams, or sometimes quite literally in our inboxes, and that peculiar feeling of being pulled backwards when we thought we were supposed to be moving forwards.
Now, you know me. I love astrology, but I’m not particularly interested in using it to relinquish all personal responsibility to a planet several million miles away 😉
But I am fascinated by the relationship between the outer world and our inner one – by cycles, patterns and the strange moments when something happening in the cosmos seems to provide an extraordinarily good mirror for something happening within us.
And the astrology of October is rather difficult to ignore.
Venus has just turned retrograde – and this one is interesting
On 3rd October, Venus stationed retrograde in Scorpio, beginning a backwards journey that will eventually take her into Libra before she turns direct again on 13th November.
Astronomically, of course, Venus hasn’t actually slammed the celestial gearstick into reverse. Retrograde motion is an optical effect created by our changing positions as Earth and Venus orbit the Sun.
Astrologically, however, retrogrades have long been associated with periods of review, return and reassessment – and Venus concerns herself with some fairly juicy territory.
Love. Relationships. Attraction. Pleasure. Money. Worth. Beauty. Desire.
And perhaps underneath all of those: What – and who – do I truly value?
Then there’s Scorpio added to the mix.
Scorpio isn’t terribly interested in small talk. It takes us underneath things – into intimacy, attachment, trust, vulnerability, power, loss, desire, the things we grip tightly and the things we’d sometimes rather keep safely below the surface.
So Venus turning backwards through Scorpio can be viewed as an invitation to revisit some fairly deep relational and emotional terrain. But then I discovered something that made my astrology-geek ears prick up even further.
Where were you eight years ago?
Venus has a rather beautiful repeating rhythm where approximately every eight years, she returns to a very similar part of the zodiac for another retrograde cycle.
The last time Venus retrograded through Scorpio and Libra was October–November 2018. Not vaguely around then, but almost exactly eight years ago!
I’m not suggesting that whatever happened to you in October 2018 is about to turn up on your doorstep wearing the same coat 😂 – but I am interested in the idea of a rhyme.
What was happening in your life then?
Who were you?
What were you learning about love, relationship, money, self-worth or belonging?
What were you tolerating?
What were you longing for?
What hadn’t you yet learned how to say no to?
And perhaps most interestingly:
What do you know now that the version of you living through 2018 didn’t know yet?
Because maybe returning isn’t always about going backwards. Sometimes we circle back to the same territory from a completely different place within ourselves.
Our bodies do this too
This is where astrology becomes particularly interesting to me through the lens of the work I actually do. Healing rarely seems to happen in a beautifully efficient straight line – we revisit things.
An old grief suddenly has another layer. A relationship dynamic we were convinced we’d dealt with appears in a different form. Something that once overwhelmed us returns years later and we discover that we can now stay present with it.
Sometimes the mind immediately concludes: Oh God. I’m back here again.
But are you?
Because meeting the same material doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in the same place. A spiral passes the same point again and again – but at a different level each time. The person meeting that old wound today has lived another eight years – you’ve loved people. Lost people. Made mistakes. Changed your mind. Developed boundaries. Broken some. Repaired others. Learned things about yourself you couldn’t possibly have known then.
Your nervous system may have more capacity, and your adult self may have more choice.
You may finally have language for something that, eight years ago, existed only as a feeling in your body.
So if something old is knocking at the door at the moment, perhaps the question isn’t simply: Why is this happening again?
Perhaps it’s: Who am I now as I meet it?
And Venus isn’t the only one asking us to look backwards
There is quite a lot of retrograde energy around this autumn. Pluto and Neptune are already retrograde, while Mercury is moving towards its own retrograde later this month.
Now, I wouldn’t get too excited about the sheer number of retrograde planets. The slower outer planets spend months retrograde every year, so a sky full of little Rx symbols isn’t necessarily the cosmic emergency some social-media posts would have us believe. 😉
What interests me more is the quality of the themes converging at once.
Review.
Relationship.
Power.
Values.
Old material.
Communication.
What has been hidden.
What needs renegotiating.
What perhaps cannot be carried forward in quite the same form.
There is a lot of re- energy here.
Revisit.
Reconsider.
Reassess.
Remember.
Reclaim.
And perhaps – eventually – release.
So what do we actually do with that?
We don’t have to do anything dramatic – In fact, perhaps that’s part of the invitation, because not every uncomfortable feeling requires an immediate decision, and not every resurfacing relationship needs to be resurrected.
We do not have to excavate every memory until we’ve found its deepest psychological root, and certainly not every ex who reappears during Venus retrograde needs to be welcomed back because “the universe sent them.” Discernment is advised! 😂
Sometimes we can simply become curious, and notice what has charge, what keeps returning – what your body does around particular people, conversations or choices. Notice where there is contraction – and where something inside you quietly exhales.
You might even take a journal and play with a few questions:
What was happening in my life in autumn 2018?
What did I believe about myself then that I no longer believe now?
What relationship patterns have changed – and which ones still catch me?
Where am I being invited to choose differently?
What matters to me now?
And perhaps the biggest one:
Is this asking to be healed, reclaimed, renegotiated… or simply finally put down?
You don’t need to force an answer – sometimes the noticing is the work.
And perhaps this isn’t the moment to push forward – for now.
Whether astrology is something you follow closely, occasionally peer at with curiosity, or take with a generous pinch of cosmic salt…
Perhaps October is simply offering all of us a useful question:
What is coming back into view – and who am I now as I meet it?
With love,
Penny xx
