2025 Venus Retrograde Reflections
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this piece of writing and I am very happy to be putting it to rest. Spirit has not failed to remind me that ritual is important in my life and embedded into my purpose. Any lingering threads from the 2025 Venus retrograde period are ready to be permanently severed. Without further ado, here are the people, places, and things that resurfaced during that time, offering me the chance to embrace change from within:
No longer feeding what drains me
Have you ever offered advice without attachment? Up until March/April 2025 I cannot say that I had. It wasn’t until I recognized where this was living in my body did I understand how much control and conditioning I had been unintentionally placing around the helpful words that I would offer to anyone, anytime.
The ‘anyone, anytime’ part was also causing me harm. At one point, I believed that this was the only thing and I began withdrawing verbally in more ways than one. When I realized that this created another layer of suffering, I knew in time that the answer was not in silencing myself.
When I kept digging until I got to the core of myself, and quite literally since I found this wisdom in my solar plexus, I realized that it was the wisdom of attachment that was my medicine. I learned that when I offer my hand to help I must also simultaneously let go. I hold space for suffering born of injustice and harm, staying present with pain as it arises. I do not carry the shadows others cast when they turn away from their own truth, nor do I host what is not mine to heal.
I affirm: I am not responsible for other people’s healing.
Sharing my heart with the trash heap
This is directly supported by adrienne maree brown and the chapter in her book Loving Corrections on righting relationships.
I deleted all of my social media accounts in mid-March. I do not have any fake accounts to lurk with, although I am still able to view Instagram content without engagement and in a very limited capacity—I’m talking 3-5 scrolls and Instagram stops me like I’m about to steal the most precious diamonds known to Earth. I recently joined Yoke yoga and I’m beyond grateful that an online network is available specifically for the care of yoga practitioners. It really has made all the difference in my mental health and the sustainability of engaging with social media without attachment.
This was a seed that had long been sown and was in fact a fully grown plant that now needed all of the love, care, and attention that I could give it. I needed to pour into this metaphorical plant all of my faith and trust that it would one day begin to flourish and produce the most abundant of fruit. And that it has.
It felt like all that I had done for my safety and boundaries up until that point had come down to whether or not I was ready to pull the plug on being attached to social media landscapes and engagement. It’s that feeling of knowing that something is good for you, but it doesn’t make the decision any easier to make. That feeling of heartbreak.
As my mind, body, and spirit mends from years of self-worth that has been controlled by an algorithm, I am left with the familiar breakup feelings: grateful for the good times, humbled by the lessons, and grieving that it didn’t go differently.
I affirm: my worth is not determined by numbers.
Living in extremes
This one is directly from my time during yoga teacher training in 2024 after choosing Susanna Barkataki as my formal yoga teacher. The transformation I experienced was divinely timed. By the end of my training program, and with my teacher’s and mentor’s words, I applied to my life the Buddha’s first teaching: the middle way—majjhimāpaṭipadā. How? I’ll share, sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence.
Hello triggers my old friend.
You’ve come to talk with me again.
I can feel you quickly creeping.
A metal dagger in my chest weeping.
With sparks passing through to my blood and every vein.
While I remain.
And then the sound of silence.
On the middle path, I have found this silence to be my medicine. It is the calm after the storm that leads to the safety of the shoreline glittered with village lights. A place where shadow and light dance with the passion of enemies to lovers within me. This is where my community lives, my guides communicate, and my healing happens. The path through is illuminated by my triggers taking an appropriate seat at the table while I patiently, lovingly, wait for silence to arrive. When it does, I listen. I alchemize my medicine and I apply it.
It has come in the form of communicating boundaries, taking accountability for what I can control, maintaining my integrity by shedding old belief systems, and returning to my roots at a depth that trauma, white supremacy, and colonialism can never reach.
On an extreme path, in my lived experience, when I create too much or not enough space for my triggers, silence never comes. In my life, not enough space has looked like disassociation, bypassing, masking, and internalizing harm. In contrast, too much space has looked like adopting extreme political beliefs, hubris, victim and scarcity mindset, blind rage, and projecting harm.
It is a tennis match that manifests as a never-ending toxic cycle of burnout and meltdowns. Thank all that is Divine that there is a choice. Thank all that is Divine that when we make this choice for ourselves, by living our truth, we create an opportunity for others to make this choice for themselves.
I affirm: I am a vessel for all that is the potential of the universe.