Like all living things, we humans have cellular memory. After we’ve gone through a life-altering transit, its teachings reside deep within the mind/body/spirit, poised and waiting.

They’re waiting to spring into awareness. This often happens when a lighter transit comes along, and crosses that same patch of sky. (1)

An event pops up to remind us what’s important. An inner or outer event, tailored just for us.

We get several of these triggers during the month of July. They’re cosmic taps on the shoulder, reminding us why we’re here.

Speed and consequence

In recent years, the Uranus-Pluto square (2008-23) has been the main engine of this information. It’s been sending each of us coded dispatches about our era-specific purpose.

As far as the whole human race goes, of course, this has been one unmistakable transit. It’s been whacking us upside the head for seven years,(2) ramping up humanity’s distorted relationship to machines, to war, to the corporate mentality, to the ecosystem, to the concept of freedom.

It has thrown for a loop humanity’s superiority complex. It has up-ended our sense of being in control of life on Earth.

Now in its assimilation phase, the square is still in orb.(3) For most of us, its most emphatic years were 2012-15. (It may be yet to culminate for you. Our individual natal placements determine when the transit hits hardest (4)). In one way or another, we’ve all been shocked and quickened into consciousness by the speed and consequence (Uranus) of the Cardinal Cross, its dramas of destruction (Pluto), its sense of flat-out emergency.

In the blogs on Mothersky.com we’ve been following the transit’s impact on the world at large. Here in the Skywatches we’ve been tracking its impact on the personal level.

Mirrors

Outer life is about global events and society: what we think of as objective reality. Inner life is about personal growth. We usually think of these as two different spheres of experience, and never the twain shall meet.

But they are mirrors of each other. And under skies like these, it starts to become more and more obvious that our inner and outer realities are mutually reflective, and that both express our soul’s intentions (whether our ego realizes it or not).

For many of my clients, there’s a merger going on. Their personality is catching up with the deeper reaches of their being. Their everyday self is getting in touch with their Self: the part of them that deliberately chose this world, in all its glory and insanity.

The ego is getting ready to understand what the soul knows.

Prep work

In July we get another growth spurt like this, another chance to wake up. But first we have to realize that some of us is asleep.

Answers can’t be given unless the right question is asked, and awakening can’t happen without our recognition of the unawakened self. People tend to forget this part, which is why transits whose purpose is to wake us up – especially outer-planet transits and their triggers — are so often dreaded and maligned. They slap us awake. But a slap, if we don’t understand its purpose, is just a slap. Then we turn around and blame the planets! Most unfair.

But for those who use astrology to deepen spiritual knowing, trigger transits are a goddess-send. They invite us to confront what is unfinished.

To get the most out of transits like these, we should psychologically prepare ourselves. We’ll be prodded in the sensitive places. So now’s the time to get them ready, like a nurse with an alcohol wipe.

This means acknowledging where we’re incomplete and imperfect. We were all born with certain blocks and blind spots (usually signaled by natal squares and oppositions). This is the time to identify them.

Sun, Mercury and Mars

Whenever the Sun hits the degree range of Uranus’ and Pluto’s current positions, as happens during the second week of July, expect an event to pop up that provokes the issues you’ve been working hardest on, for the past seven years. Expect a further development when Mercury of Mars trigger these positions the third week of July.

 

The second riff is likely to make sparks fly. Mercury (thinking) and Mars (behavior) are both T-squaring Uranus and Pluto. Whether we want to or not, something will force us to translate into rational terms our most poignant issues (7/15-20), and do something with them (7/14-26).

Don’t make it a reaction. Do the prep work: review what the overall lessons of the period have been. Where have Uranus (vitalizing change) and Pluto (breakdown/ renewal) been at work in your life? In what ways have they been shaking you out of your spiritual lethargy? Where have they been trying to make you more whole?

Before things get going around June 6th, find a few words, or an image — or better yet, a feeling — to sum up the blind spots that it’s time to illuminate.

Stations

There are two back-to-back planetary stations the last week of the month. Venus (July 25th) and Uranus (July 26th) go retrograde, in Virgo and Aries respectively.

Venus at the first degree of Virgo, is dipping her toe ever so briefly into soft, crumbly earth. This is a reminder to chill out momentarily from the high-jinx of her romp in Leo, and pay practical attention. Maybe a relationship issue that needs tweaking. After two weeks she turns back into a party person until October.

Uranus’s station on the 26th prolongs and intensifies the focus on that 21st cardinal degree. Pay attention to the affairs of the house of your chart through which Uranus has been passing. That’s where life will insist on your staying awake. To doze off in that department would be like daring Uranus to disrupt what you’ve been building. Bad idea.

Saturn Retrograde is back in Scorpio, having splashed back into the swamp in mid-June.(5) You know those relationship lessons you worked so hard on, that felt like they ended in December? Well, they didn’t.

After going through a 2½ -year training in how to accept responsibility in merger and intimacy, we’re being pulled back into class to see how much we retained. We’re being tested to see if we’ve dropped the melodrama, and learned how to spot power plays when they arise.

Notes

1 Trigger transits are like earthquake after-shocks (see my blog). But they can also happen beforehand: the influence of a significant transit can reach backwards in time. This is why astrologers may do the chart of an eclipse that has not yet taken place, and watch how current transits interact with its placements. The same principle applies when we study, for example, the first Equinox after the birth of a person or thing.

2 My column in DayKeeper Journal discusses its effect on the USA.

3 The last time Uranus and Pluto formed a 90° angle to the minute of arc was on March 16th of this year. Each of the square’s seven exactitudes marked a peak in a 15-year-long psycho-spiritual crisis.

4 If, for example, your birth chart contains planets in the early degrees of cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and/or Capricorn), you will have already been through the most intense patch. If, on the other hand, you have placements in the mid-to-late degrees of an aspecting sign, it may be peaking now. Check whether anything in your chart is being hit by Mars, Mercury and Uranus at 20°, or by Pluto at 13-14°.

5 Saturn will be hanging out in the last two degrees of fixed water all month, before stationing direct August 1st and re-entering Sagittarius in mid-September. Natives with planets in late-degree fixed signs will feel the pinch more markedly.

 

Great egret: Charles Glatzer, shootthelight.com

Man hit by lightning: Pat Rubio Bodemer

Kodiak bear: Cedrik Strahm

The Blind Girl: J. E. Millais, 1854-6

Eclipse of the Moon: Jacobus Hoeniger, XVth century