No doubt you’re beginning to put a name to the hiccups being visited upon you or those around you this week: Mercury about to station direct and Mars about to station retrograde. But in the background of the computers playing dead, forgotten keys, mysterious and panic-inducing (yet non-applicable) overdraft messages at the ATM and squirrelly or delayed email exchanges, you might also be noticing overtones of social pressure or familial guilt tugging at your relationships.
Venus, the personal planet that was retrograde to begin the year, is still in late Capricorn (and still working through its shadow or ‘echo’ phase). Today it makes a trio of interrelated aspects: Venus is conjunct the asteroid Psyche in Capricorn; the two of them are sextile Saturn in Scorpio, and trine the asteroid Sedna in Taurus. Saturn and Sedna are opposite each other.
Psyche is an interesting critter, representing the sense of having a wound to one’s psyche that can never be healed. That is, it’s not that the damage cannot actually be healed; rather, it just seems that way. And that sensation presents a block to one’s self-esteem that can take some special maneuvering to dissolve. Conjunct Venus, that sense of wounding may relate to one’s receptivity, the belief that one is loveable, or the sense that one can never have the kinds of relationships one desires.
When we put Psyche and Venus together in Capricorn, that sense of wounding takes on shades of social pressure (‘what will everyone think?’) passed on from the mini-state of the family unit, the actual state and more broadly through marketing. It gets perpetuated by many religious dogmas (think ‘original sin’) in the form of needing someone’s (or everyone’s) permission to do what feels good, to love however feels right for you.