New Moon in Aries: Integrate Your Mercury Retrograde Lessons and Charge Ahead

While the new moon in Aries happens at 9:57 pm ET on April 15th, and is impactful for so many reasons (including that it’s the first new moon of the astrological new year) there’s another force at play here that I need to address first: Mercury Retrograde.

Mercury, the ruler of communication, has been traveling retrograde since March 22nd in the sign of the ram and goes direct the same day as the new moon.

Just two days after the sun moved into Aries (hello, spring!), the planet of communication stationed at 17 degrees, preparing to enter the part of his elliptical pattern where he appears to go backward. And while Mercury doesn’t actually change direction, (you can read more about that here), it’s believed his power is less potent, or even erratic, during this time.

While many astrologers issue all sorts of warnings about Mercury Retrograde, I take a different approach. I look forward to this time. I’ve come to understand the power of keen observation during this phase as a crucial part of the rectification process in my life.

No, it’s not always fun, but it’s incredibly productive.

(I love productive truth, even if it lacks a dose of sugar.)

How To Make Mercury Retrograde Work For You

To successfully work with Mercury Retrograde it’s crucial to understand the degrees he traverses during the least potent moments of his elliptical journey around the sun.

For example, Mercury stationed retrograde at 17 degrees of Aries, and traveled all the way back to 4 degrees of Aries. Knowing where these degrees fall in your chart gives you a leg up when it comes to developing an understanding what sort of pattern you should look to emerge during Mercury Retrograde.

What’s A Planet’s Shadow Got To Do With It?

I believe, however, that it’s just as important to look at the day Mercury entered his retrograde shadow.

What’s a shadow? In astrology, a planet is in its shadow phase once it enters a degree point that the retrograde planet will revisit during its retrograde journey.

So, to use this current Mercury Retrograde journey as an example: Mercury stations direct—meaning he’ll end his retrograde journey—at 4 degrees of Aries. Therefore, Mercury entered his shadow when he reached 4 degrees of Aries on March 8th.

While Mercury technically didn’t turn retrograde until March 22nd, we’ve been under the auspices of Mercury Retrograde since March 8th.

Since then, Mercury has massaged an aspect of our life, helping us understand a blind spot that needs rectification. What’s emerged in your life since Mercury traveled at 4 degrees of Aries?

This is the exact degree in which he stations direct on the day of the Aries new moon. Talk about new beginnings!

Mercury Retrograde: Bringer Of The Unexpected

Let me give you an example of how I am personally decompressing Mercury Retrograde.

On March 8th I found myself in the Caribbean for an unexpected extended stay. I traveled to the Dominican Republic for a long weekend and had a ticket to fly home on the 6th. Well, I boarded a flight on the 6th, sat on the tarmac for two hours, and then learned the flight wouldn’t leave due to technical difficulties with the plane. So, we exited the airport, went to a nearby hotel, and re-booked a flight home for the 7th. The next day I woke ready to leave, only to understand that there were a series of storms pounding the northeast United States, and no flights could land in New York City. To make a long story short, I didn’t get home until March 11th, and ended up working for a few extra days on a white sand beach. Not terrible, but not what I planned either.

This is a very Mercury Retrograde experience, since Mercury also rules technology and travel. Oy!

I can’t express enough how illuminating my time in the DR became. I went to celebrate love and life while vacating in the Caribbean with my husband as planned—but on a deeper level, my Mercury Retrograde journey had begun, bringing a couple of truths from my periphery into the most in-depth understanding of my soul. And those extra days in the Caribbean allowed for me to witness, digest, and get to know my current cosmic curriculum—front and center.

Vacation, an exciting proposition to enjoy life, sometimes opens up the space to process things that our day-to-day life doesn’t allow time for. Combine that with Mercury entering his retrograde shadow and unexpectedly needing to extend my trip for five days, and the perfect opportunity emerged to see a few things in a perspective I hadn’t previously considered.

Seeing The Signs And Taking Center Stage

This is a time when easily ignored patterns take the center stage. Mercury (the trickster) pushes consciousness to evolve. Shadows reveal themselves. This, in my opinion, is the point of Mercury Retrograde.

The symptoms are signals vying for our attention. Should we choose to explore them rather than suppress them, tremendous insight and redirection becomes possible. When Mercury is retrograde, he has the potential to turn the volume of a symptom up a few notches.

So regardless of whether you know your chart well enough to integrate house knowledge at this point, take a shortcut and consider this:

• What was happening in your life on the days leading up to and following March 8th?
• What patterns have emerged in your own life?
• What have you grappled with since then that you are now ready to integrate with new awareness?
• If Mercury Retrograde orchestrated a lesson for you, what was it?

Spend time on these questions and get clear! Then, get ready to embrace the new moon in Aries.

The New Moon in Aries: A Time to Level-Up Consciousness

Now’s the time to decompress, integrate, and anoint your new consciousness. You’ve changed! And it’s important to acknowledge what you’ve learned so that you can incorporate this new consciousness on a deep level. Claim what you’ve learned over the last few weeks. And set an informed intention for where you wish to go next based on what you just learned.

As the first sign of the zodiac ruled by Mars (the planet of action), Aries brings some ass-kicking qualities to the forefront. Initiation, action, mobility, and power come to mind when I think of Aries. Think Sarah Michelle Gellar: a quintessential Aries, famous for her role as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This makes this mid-April new moon a time of full-bore engagement, when aggressive goal-setting takes center stage.

Just as the seeds of truth planted in the winter begin to blossom with longer days and warmer weather, so too does the arrival of this new moon and Mercury direct. It’s a hallelujah! A time when we cultivate the wisdom of winter and step toward the manifestations of our future with fresh energy and direction. Fire, momentum, creativity, FUN, new vision, and new leadership. Yes!

Step Toward Your Destiny & Stand Out From The Crowd

Yet, while this new moon boasts these prudent positives—and it is a new moon in Aries after all—it also contains some adversarial components worth exploring.

For example, this new moon which happens at 9:57 pm ET at 26 degrees of Aries offers us a spark to light up our life, as well as a call for transformation: the sun and moon sit directly next to revolutionary Uranus, too.

Uranus emphasizes freedom, individuality, and progressive thinking. The influence of Uranus acts as a reminder that growth and innovation only come when we listen to our true spirit and intuition—when we’re authentic. It supports authenticity. Uranus calls us to ditch convention and maybe even be a little rebellious as we live as our authentic selves. This means breaking the rules and unleashing our originality, all in the name of the betterment of society (as well as our own health, of course). Despite feeling compelled to “belong” and conform, this new moon asks you to acknowledge your need to stand out from the crowd.

To round it out, this new moon also squares Pluto, traveling at 21 degrees of Capricorn. It also loosely squares Mars and Saturn in Capricorn, too. All of this suggests that letting your authenticity shine might not be so comfortable.

Because this new moon occurs in Aries, next to Uranus squaring Pluto, while Mercury stations direct, it might even deliver a piece of information that you needed to know (but were avoiding), so you can eloquently move forward. This is especially true if you’ve avoided your Mercury Retrograde curriculum up until now.

My advice? Don’t avoid it. Dig in. Ponder. Journal. Process. Review.

To state it simply: Get Clear.

Where are you heading? Why are you heading there? Is this in alignment with where you want to be? Identify your BIG. PICTURE. GOAL. Spell it out. And then commit.

I promise your words have power. And this is the most important thing you can do.

Next? Take action. Deliberate, intentional, fire-fueled action. This is not the time for mediocre execution. Nope. BOLD forward moving happenings instead. Make it intentional.

Rise, own your voice, and take a stand for YOU.

The sun only travels in Aries until April 19th, so don’t hesitate to unearth and claim your voice between now and then.

It’s a lot to digest… I know! I’d love to hear from you: what’s coming up for you this new moon? Let me know in the comments!

As always, I send you all of my love.