Mercury Retrograde: Nature’s Clock for Slowing Down
We are cruising through the middle of the Mercury retrograde as I write this in late January 2022. Mercury is also transitioning from the sign Aquarius to the sign Capricorn late Tuesday, 25 January or early Wednesday, 26 January in the wee hours of the morning in the UK and Europe.
That means that the nuances of this first 2022 Mercury retrograde can have ripples in a few different areas of your life as it passes through two zodiac signs. When Mercury retrogrades in one sign, it can have more focused energy in a particular part of your life.
In today’s blog I wanted to share some of my experiences during this Mercury retrograde. And then spend some time on how we can best utilize this Mercury retrograde energy rather than to run and hide from it. When we heed the timing of nature’s clock, we can discover something we may have missed.
To find out more about this Mercury retrograde and the particular quality of it through the signs, check out the January 2022 Mercury Retrograde blog. If you want to get the dates for all 2022 Mercury retrogrades, you will find them here.
I also wrote a general ‘Mercury Retrograde Survival Guide’ that gives you lots of information about any Mercury retrograde.
For this retrograde season I decided to put a lot of focus on how to use this energy to our advantage rather than counting the days until it passes.
Mercury Retrograde Success Stories
It’s not that we can wish away those annoying Mercury retrograde things that come up, but we can take proactive action to moderate their effects. I put my advice to the test by walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
I did that by traveling on the day Mercury went retrograde, lol. Not just a jump over to another state either, but connection flight overseas traveling in the midst of the Omicron wave. At first I thought, ‘what am I doing? I’m an astrologer and I should know better than to travel.’
But the timing was what it was and rather than switch up what would be my normal travel plan, I decided to experiment and give you feedback from an experiential perspective. I learned that you can still do business as usual, with buffer time and loads of patience.
Remembering that we are not only in a Mercury retrograde, but also a Venus retrograde, it’s important to take special care to notice events, people, feelings, and situations that are begging for our attention as it relates to the past.
For example, my travel story was about visiting my family after being away for two years because of the pandemic. That was a pleasant Venus retrograde event. But a Venus retrograde has a different flavor from a Mercury retrograde, so I’m going to focus on Mercury. You can read more about Venus retrograde here.
Traveling was certainly more stressful because of the requirement to provide a negative Covid test from the 24 hours before. Meaning, I wouldn’t know if I could fly until the day before. The only other option was the lab test, they give you three days on that one. Only problem was that labs were taking more than three days to send back test results.
That was stressful, but I knew that travel planning was going to require more effort than usual now that the whole concept of traveling has changed. One of the things I often say about Mercury retrograde is that we have to try three times as hard compared to when Mercury is direct.
I made way more calls and spent more time outlining my different travel options before choosing the best one, which did work for me in the end, as I was able to fly. I recommend you try it. Devote more of your time and full attention to your tasks, and be more detail oriented than usual, three times more.
Acknowledging that with Mercury retrograde things can go sideways faster and easier will help you avoid those annoying Mercury retrograde events. With this knowledge, you can proactively decide to devote more time to your endeavors. Schedule out the time ahead, and practice saying no to requests that squeeze your calendar.
While you are devoting more time to getting things done, another thing that worked for me was slowing down. This one can be hard, especially if you are obligated to others like a boss, or your child’s school schedule. Or if you are someone who keeps yourself busy all the time.
It can be difficult to slow down or space things out with more padding because we don’t want to. Or we go about business as usual forgetting that this is Mercury retrograde. It is nature’s clock reflecting the time, which under a Mercury retrograde, is a time to slow down.
If you look at the clock for normal routine stuff, like when to leave work, when to eat dinner, when to pick up your kids, or weekly stuff like when it’s time to do laundry or grocery shop, it’s the same kind of idea. Mercury retrograde is the time when you are called to slow down, take a look around, and reflect backwards.
These concepts worked well for me. For example, leaving far earlier than I normally would ended up with me not only arriving on time, but with an extra 15 minutes to grab Starbucks with my parents before jumping on a train. I gave myself twice the usual time it takes to get to the train station.
Knowing that I was more likely to experience stress and being late for appointments has been helpful this Mercury retrograde. Where I may normally book myself up on work days, I deliberately scaled back. It was hard I admit, but in hindsight it worked out.
I am thinking of a day when I was going to try and squeeze in an eye doctor’s appointment between two tasks in a neighboring city. It looked like there was plenty of time in my schedule. Turns out, my cell phone lost service in the location I was in and I had to go old school and ask for directions, from a person, in person, face to face, gasp!
I was able to get everywhere I needed to go, and on time. But there was not one extra minute left that day. Had I tried to squeeze in that eye doctor, well, it would not have happened. I dodged some major stress.
I know these are minor and simple examples. But I wanted to share them with you because sometimes it’s hard to really slow down. The slowing down isn’t just so you make it to all your appointments. There is a deeper opportunity here.
Mercury Retrograde Slow Down: A Deeper Opportunity
Slowing down helps you open the space to go to a deeper level on something important. It is clearing space on your calendar and pulling out all those to-do lists that you have set aside for ‘someday.’ It is reflecting on all those things that you say you want to achieve in life but haven’t started, or are stalled.
It’s about realigning what you do on a daily basis with where you want those days to take you. Time can slip away from us while we are attending to the daily details. Mercury retrograde is asking us to take a pause, lift up our heads, and look around.
Look at how you spend your days, your time. What is getting done and what isn’t. Where do you want to be in one, three, five, ten, and twenty years? Is what you have been doing taking you in that direction? What occupies your time? Are you in alignment with your goals?
If you are saying ‘yes!’, yay you! Celebrate your successes and reinforce your plan. Look backward at your progress, learn from it, and use it to move forward.
If you raise your head and look around and realize that you are spending a lot of time doing things that are not taking you down the path of your dreams, vision, and future success, Mercury retrograde is the time to make those course corrections.
There is a gem of knowledge and wisdom that can be found in every Mercury retrograde, but you do have to seek it out. To benefit from Mercury retrograde, take the time to look backwards to move forward. Mercury retrograde is nature’s clock reflecting the time to slow down.
Evaluate, realign, and get yourself set up for moving forward when the Mercury retrograde cycle ends. We get three Mercury retrogrades a year. This is really perfect for goal setters to check in on their journey. Realign what needs realigning, celebrate your successes, and slow down.
The path to success usually requires some realignment from time to time. That’s normal. It’s not a time to focus on what is going wrong, other than to gather your lessons learned, but to focus on what is going right, and how to do more of that.
It’s time to shake up your schedule, make vision boards, consolidate and update your to-do lists, and write S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and with a time table) action plans taking you to the next Mercury retrograde and beyond.
I hope you find the time to do some big picture looking around in your life. If you would like some help, I specialize in this by combining goal setting and astrological timing together. I would love to help you gain greater clarity on your path, and help you get there.
Working with me is about going from functioning to flourishing and my goal is to help people get what they want out of this lifetime. Schedule a free initial consultation to discuss your needs, or book an astrological consultation to go deeper into your horoscope.
Happy trails!