Mercury Retrograde

Have you ever heard of Mercury Retrograde before? It’s a term astrologers use to describe when the planet Mercury is moving in reverse. It happens three or four times a year for a couple of weeks at a time. The weeks leading up are called pre-mercury retrograde and afterwards are called post mercury retrograde. Essentially, you start feeling the effects before it starts and it takes a bit to move forward again.

Mercury doesn’t physically start moving in reverse, of course. It’s an illusory planetary motion created by the orbital rotation of the earth with relation to other planets in our solar system. It’s a bit like travelling on the road watching another car beside you: when the other car slows down, or you speed up, it looks as though the other car is moving backwards.

Mercury retrograde gives us time to catch up with ourselves, and reflect. Something from the past returns in a different form. People, ideas or buried insights that are keys to moving forward, float to the surface. Often retrograde is felt as a slowed down, contemplative time, and depending on the sign, a chance to go over old ground again, to claim what you missed the first time. Mercury retrograde is a time for review, when underlying patterns come to light.

Mercury retrograde is NOT the time to start a new business, launch a new product or get married. But it’s a great time for tying up loose ends, finishing projects, revising old patterns and clearing things that are just not working for you anymore.

It can be a frustrating time, you play phone tag with someone you really need to get a hold of, computers and cars breakdown, communication is harder, it can feel like you are spinning in your tracks and not moving forward at all. So the best thing to do is to use this time to reflect, review, conclude and end… in other words, do not start anything new.

And then it passes!