15/09/2025
We find ourselves squarely in retrograde season at the current moment, with Mercury having gone direct until November but five remaining planets in retrograde, including the outer planets of Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, along with the minor planet of Chiron.
As each of these experience an apparent backward spin, we can consider it a time to look to our past, not as a place of regret or shame but as a prelude for ever becoming more of who we are meant to be.
In ancient astrology, it was understood that planets in retrograde are journeying through the underworld and gathering insights, perspectives, and information from the unseen world. This was used as a metaphor for what happens within our inner worlds when a planet is in retrograde.
No matter what humans think life should look like, retrogrades remind us that our paths are not linear. Although many of us may feel more comfortable during experiences that are direct and straightforward, are we forgetting the rest of the picture?
As the planets in our cosmos take a moment to retrace their steps, they take us on a journey through our past actions, selves, experiences, desires, and expressions. It is a retracing and reliving of what is still awaiting our presence, awareness, understanding, and compassion.
Throughout a retrograde, we experience what needs to be witnessed so that it may be worked through. The endings that never truly ended and are in need of reviving or final closure. The old ideas that entered our consciousness before we were ready and require us to understand or release them. And the stories that need the kind of reframe that comes from looking at them from a more recently acquired perspective.
As much as planets in retrograde can feel like a step backward, they are a necessary and sacred part of our way forward.
They are the gift of reflection that allows for insight, the introspection that allows for self awareness, the spaciousness required for the assimilation of steps already taken and the sacred pause needed to build the inner capacity to take a leap forward.
All my astrological love.
Jamie Ellouise xx
www.jamieellouise.com