How Mercury Retrograde Is Trying to Help You

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It’s here! Mercury retrograde. Again.

If that brought a cringe or even a cry, it might help you to look at mercury retrograde not as the bringer of chaos to all things travel, communications and technological; but rather as a messenger of where we are out of alignment. As a spiritual teacher and a clairvoyant, I’m eternally looking at what we are working on, how it is showing up in our lives and what exactly are we trying to learn from our experiences.

Like many people, mercury retrograde throws my life into varying degrees of chaos. What surprises me is that I never stopped to ask the question that I ask of pretty much every single thing that happens in my life: What am I trying to learn? I had this “aha” moment several months ago and it was so incredibly obvious: Mercury retrograde is terribly misunderstood. Although it does throw a proverbial wrench into our lives every time it occurs, it really is just trying to help us learn a great spiritual life lesson: to live in alignment with our own spirit.

SEE ALSO: 5 Easy Ways To Raise Your Vibration: Living Healthier, Happier Lives

Mercury the Messenger

If we look at mercury as a messenger — because after all, it is known as the winged messenger — then we would understand that it is trying to tell us something when it moves into retrograde. After having my “aha” moment, I started exploring the energies of mercury and its relationship to each of us. I started working with people to encourage them to track mercury retrogrades to gather data and be able to understand what they are working on as individuals.

Each mercury retrograde is in a specific sign and each sign has its own element (earth, air, water or fire). Each of us has our own sign in mercury, which has its own element as well. What I have noticed over the years is I move through some retrogrades much easier, with minimal chaos; others are full of upheaval. Sometimes I seem to be incredibly accident prone, when other times, not at all. During some retrogrades, I ruin my technology; during others, I lose my usual verbal diplomacy and whatever I think comes out unfiltered.

What I never stopped to consider was, why? Why do some retrogrades impact me in certain ways, while other retrogrades, not at all?  But then I had a flash of insight that there is something so wonderfully, incredibly connected to our own spiritual journey; there is something much more empowering going on, rather than mercury just messing with our lives. Imagine mercury, all these years, just trying to help us while so many of us shook our fists at it!

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Who is Mercury?

Mercury is a curious planet. It rotates on its axis much slower than it revolves around the sun. In fact, a day on mercury is longer than an entire year on earth. The expression, “all in a day’s work” takes on a whole new meaning from this perspective. Mercury spends far more time sharing insight and information with us to help show what it is that we are working on.

Using Mercury to Support Your Spiritual Growth

If we become conscious of our experiences during each mercury retrograde, there are several things we can discover:

• Clues about what we are working on and how it shows up in our lives.
• Opportunities to see life lessons more clearly.
• A better understanding of our relationship to the different elements.
• Opportunities to use energy tools to help us manage our own interaction with mercury retrograde.
• An awareness of where, when and how we are out of alignment with our own spirit.

My suggestion is that you track your mercury retrogrades. Track the experiences you have during each retrograde. List what sign the retrograde is in, as well as what sign mercury is in, in your own chart. If you know this, you can then explore how you react and respond to the different elements. (If you don’t know what sign your mercury is in, visit www.astro.com. You can create a free account and run your chart to find out.)

Things to remember:

• Fire and Air fuel each other.
• Fire extinguishes water.
• Air and water may irritate each other.
• Air and earth may also irritate one another.
• Earth and water encourage and shape each other.
• Fire and water work against each other’s cause.
• Slow Process Worth the Time

As we start to explore mercury retrograde from this deeper perspective, there is so much we can learn about ourselves and the life lessons that we are working on.  For example, you may start to see that when mercury retrograde is in an air sign, you are more irritated and on edge; or, when mercury retrograde is in a fire sign, you can’t get anything done. If you are tracking your experiences, you can start to look for correlations and you can use whatever energy tools you have to learn, heal, grow and ultimately move to bring that area of your life into spiritual alignment.

At the end of the day, mercury retrograde offers a powerful way to see and understand how we are moving through the world. Approaching mercury retrograde in this way is another step toward living life consciously. It is another moment of moving away from “life happening to us,” and stepping toward life unfolding with purpose and intention.