Losing yourself to find yourself. Finding yourself in losing yourself. Finally realizing there is no lost or found, no time or space, only Everything now. This is the realm of Neptune, where we’re called to surrender all differentiation and separation. Engaging with Neptune is like wandering through a funhouse – with mirrors of distortion, tilting floors, crooked rooms, and spinning discs that throw guests from a seated position into the air, against padded walls. Neptune can be an initiation to spiritual unity, personal insanity, or inspired creativity. It’s choosing to gaze into a kaleidoscope, staying in the fog until it clears, and risking losing tangibility while waiting for the moment of crystal clarity.
Neptune is the farthest known planet from the Sun in our solar system. Its cloud cover has an especially vivid blue tint, partly due to a currently unidentified compound. Its physical characteristics mirror its metaphysical nature – beyond name, reason, or explanation. Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the Sun and is retrograde 40% of the time. The outer planets, those beyond the view of our naked eye, don’t personally impact us as acutely during retrogrades as Mercury, Venus, and Mars do. Outer planet retrograde effects are often more subtle and collective, but if we’re attuned, we have the opportunity to work with this energy in powerful, life-changing ways.
When Neptune turns retrograde every year, it appears to move backward for about five months. On a simplified level, planets represent functions. Neptune is associated with our state of consciousness, imagination, dreaming, visioning, fantasizing, suffering, confusion, unconditionally loving, compassion, and grace. Neptune reflects our relationship with something greater than ourselves, and our relationship with the collective unconscious. Retrograde planets represent a reclaiming, reviewing, re-defining, or returning of/to the functions associated with the planet. Using this formula, Neptune Retrograde can be interpreted in many ways, such as: Reclaiming your imagination, re-defining your vision, reviewing the meaning of compassion, or returning to Love.
Currently, Neptune is in the sign of Pisces, its own sign, which magnifies and concentrates its inherent energy. Neptune Retrograde, in the sign or domain of consciousness we call Pisces, wants us to slow down…maybe even stop. Pisces is not journeying – the journey belongs to Sagittarius. Pisces is being, letting everything come to you. Neptune is oneness and omnipresence. Its realms are unlimited by our reality structures. It represents cosmic water, or the cosmic womb, the Source of everything, which encompasses everything – the Great Light, Creative Force, Energy, or Spirit. Names mean nothing when everything is One.
I’m deeply committed to my spiritual growth. I enjoy sharing it with others by creating a unity that magnifies and strengthens its active presence in the world. We say we want more love, forgiveness, acceptance, joy, and magic, but sometimes we get stuck in our illusions and ideals. We block ourselves from experiencing what’s right here – for, with, and in us. For example, we may hold tight to an imaginary picture of perfect love that looks and feels a certain way. We’re so attached to the fantasy that we don’t want to try reality, fearing it will disappoint us. We might even sabotage real love if it doesn’t match our image. None of us want to be loved for our potential self. We want to be loved for who we are, right now. Neptune wants to dissolve the conditions and illusions, so we can experience unconditional love.
Neptune is everything, and everything includes our humanity. To separate from, ignore, or bypass any part of us, individually or collectively, is contrary to Neptune. Spirituality is not something outside of our humanity – we don’t need to leave to find it. It’s in, as much as out of us. Much of the suffering we experience under Neptune influences stems from our dueling desires to separate from and return to Source. We have never truly been separate, but it can feel like we’re drowning in confusion and hopelessness. Possibilities overwhelm us, and we get lost in the sea of potential, never manifesting anything. One of the most powerful tools of Neptune is the ability to see through illusions. We challenge our “castles in the air,” to see if they withstand the test of Universal Truth.
Neptune Retrograde is a wonderful time to explore your connection with Source. This relationship lives in your creativity, dreams, imagination – in your consciousness and in all of your bodies. Open yourself up to Neptune Retrograde by creating time to let go of your linear mind. Allow life to fuzz in and out of focus with meditation, time in nature, or any form of art like dance or music. Or simply stare at a wall. Neptune reminds us that we can find solace and sanctuary in surrendering to what is, without needing to change or control it. It calls us to disarm and melt our bodies, hearts, and minds, becoming ultimately mutable. In this spaciousness, we’re open to visions, images, and messages. We can hear, feel, and fully experience the Divine within, and profound healing is possible.
Neptune Retrograde can expose, often by first obscuring, what we’ve already set in motion. We can see the movie we’ve been projecting from a higher perspective. It can blow us open to the different shades of love that are so beyond our minds, we feel a little crazy. During Neptune Retrograde, or whenever it feels right, I invite you to deconstruct this thing we call “reality.” Feel beyond that which you can think. Let go of all the words in this blog – you already have what and where they came from. With Neptune, there’s never anything but now, and now is always perfectly complete. It’s a new moment.
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