Mercury RX Through the Houses
1H: Mishaps that serve to undermine how you communicate your identity. Saying things that make you come across poorly, or that don’t mesh with your authentic self. Having other’s thoughts and perceptions of you be wildly incorrect or misleading. Standing by a controversial idea/belief. Mercury RX for you is about pausing to ask yourself: which ideas about myself are worth the conviction, are worth communicating, and how can I steady myself against naysayers? What opinions do I carry of myself or of my path that I can let go versus hold onto?
2H: Hiccups in your pocketbook, expenses that come out of nowhere, a need to withdraw more than more than normal. Spending on things not in your best interest, or garden-variety review of things that do or do not bring value. An invitation to become more financially literate, and to move currency in ways that intentionally support your well-being. Using momentary lags in funds to become clearer about their use and worth. Mercury RX here can also have you retooling your apparent worth, your confidence, by introducing you to situations that mirror your lack of self-sufficiency.
3H: Miscommunications in the house of communication, perception, and habitual thought. This is where Mercury RX can appear to wreak the most apparent havoc, but also where its lessons of pause provide some sublime neuroplasticity. This energy comes in to silence words that don’t need to be said, thoughts that are stale, learning that needs to be reengaged, lies that masquerade as truth. Maybe even a voracious energy to say what needs to be said. Going within here helps us to silence the chatter from the daily players in our lives, and selectively choose with whom to share ideas, when, and why. Movements in your habitat of choice, in your vessel of choice, may feel encumbered, broken, but invite you to savor the scenic routes, to find progress in what is slow, and reinvent new ways of movement that will open the highways of your life.
4H: Roommate agreements gone awry, disagreements with your family, stale décor, a confusing line of legalese in your lease or mortgage contracts that stifle the enjoyment of your nest, the leaky faucet. Your living arrangements, your family structures, the foundations that support you require some actual mental fortitude now. Mercury RX here, while literally manifesting within the universe of the above-mentioned issues, can be an invitation to sort out and sort through the ways your house isn’t actually a home. At the bottom of your chart, Mercury RX sees you going deep within, perhaps uncovering gnarlier familial issues, the roots you thought were there to stabilize you but that suffocate you. Becoming quiet to discover the disquiet. In this closer felt chaos, you can clean house, and emerge with a more supportive base.
5H: Those creative yearnings can feel stifled during this time. Projects, pieces, recipes, prose you wish to unveil to the world meet resistance, in the form of an inattentive mind, or an unconfident one. Mercury RX here can be about turning within and having a chat with your inner child, and reconnecting with those thoughts and feelings that make you feel young. In any creative endeavor, becoming intentional about your intended message, the piece of your soul that will involve itself in that message, makes this period fertile for more authentic works. You bring more of yourself out when you allow Mercury to discover more of what is being kept within.
6H: There can be stall with getting a project done, finding the health advice or products that you need, or being able to commit to or continue a routine. Or those routines could use some dusting off—as could your desk, your refrigerator, your bookshelves.…. Mercury RX here can get to work with you (literally) by identifying the little nits that need ironing out, by organizing your organizational skills. It is a time to take inventory: of your schedules, your health, how you serve the world and yourself. Did you really need that gym membership? Or…would that gym membership help keep you more accountable? It is only through these nagging day-to-day hiccups that we become aware of how much more smoothly our machines could function, and how an intentional purification of the dusty bits serves our happiness in the long run.
7H: Hell is other people, huh? The Mercury brand of hell is less hellish, but still equally frustrating in terms of feeling on equal footing with someone else or being able to communicate ourselves into and out of and within relationships with ease. So, when Mercury retrogrades here, we, too, can descend into Hades of our own relationships: spats, disagreements, a clash of beliefs or ideas about the relationship. If you can ignore the impulse to tell a certain someone about themselves, as devastating and dashing as your take may be, Mercury RX can teach you wise and steadied conflict resolution, how to come to the table with people of different opinions and break bread, how to reflect before you raise the sword of fighting words. It may also introduce you to a line in the stand, a word that took it too far, opinions that just aren’t simpatico, that allows you to emerge with firmer boundaries.
8H: The contract giveth and the contract taketh away. More so than any other Mercury RX transit, the sage old advice to double and triple check what you are getting yourself into matters. Like my example above, let the trepidation it causes also invite you to think a bit more about why you want to align yourself and your assets in an irrevocable way with a person, an entity, a product. Think about the ramifications of that debt obligation, or where you overextend and share yourself with others in equally consequential ways. Get smart about literal payment plans, how they are too rigid and could use some revision. Mercury RX here, like the 4th house, can also introduce us to the deeper recesses of our minds, the things that go bump in the night. It allows a reflective lens that provides profound clarity about your human condition.
9H: You might not know what you think you know! Mercury RX here is like the professor who, in frustration, throws the papers on her desk out into the room, a confetti of information now spread about, needing to be put back together. This can be a test of professional character, a test of your faith, a test of how to best use your education and specialized skills to advance in life. The sage advice of double and triple checking your itineraries fits literally. But the metaphorical ways we invest in itineraries that we hope will land us at an ideal destination—university, belief systems, professional certifications—also matters. Mercury may frustrate your implied wisdom and belief in self, but like the professor above, intentionally putting back together the reams of information you have earned and want to share makes the message come across with far more agency.
10H: Your reputation on the world stage feels to be fluctuating. One moment you are managing others and the next your performance is under scrutiny. Where you once felt on top of the world, now you see the world receding from view. Boss and authority figures appear on shaky ground. Your ability to take charge and lead, to co-pilot your own destiny, to work well within professional frameworks becomes subject to random diversions. People who once supported your place on the world stage—clients, bosses, collaborators, family—fall back on their word or cease to show up as readily. This is a time to be intentional about the plans you have for yourself, the progress you have made so far, and if the path you are on will lead to a satisfactory result. Mercury RX here may see you thinking more critically about your public image—where it may be time to step down, turn around, or choose a more stratifying path altogether.
11H: Gossip, backstabbers, he said-she said, subtweeting. When Mercury retrogrades in this social house, the places where we expand into community of like-minded folks can feel like a subplot of Mean Girls. There is something tenuous and stressful about the places where we could once share of ourselves freely, only to have that sharing be misinterpreted or judged. You may change your mind, become aware of group think, dissolve your place in groups whose political or societal leanings no longer support you. Mercury RX here is all about peering past the drama, and letting it inform where your values have fallen out of step with your friends and networks, and to get started on finding the tribe where those values are respected. It can also reveal where our standing in society is, and whether the alliances you have relied on are to be brought further on the journey. Where we feel unpopular, or shunned, or like we have one leg to stand on, become opportunities to carve out your true voice, to scream into what looks like the void, until someone screams back.
12H: Quiet your mind, grasshopper. All the answers are within you. Mercury retrograde is digging deeper into this unconscious sector of your chart, perhaps dredging up private drama, psychic issues and entanglements, but also that still voice underneath it all. It feels frustrating that, at this time, the world has no answers to give you. And that the part of yourself that does have the answers is obscured. Be intentional about sitting in literal silence, not judging what comes up, in using metaphysical tools like singing bowls, tarot, meditation, whatever… to find a voice until yours returns. Sometimes, Mercury retrograde here can also grant you the fortitude to carve out necessary isolation for a creative or research project, or otherwise make it easier to turn down the volume of life for a moment.