“Is Mercury Retrograde or what?” This is becoming such a catch phrase and the subject matter for many memes, but what does it really mean when Mercury is retrograde? Years ago when I first learned about Mercury Retrograde, I connected it with bad luck, computer issues, miscommunication, flat tires, car accidents and appliances breaking. I definitely feared the retrograde. Lately, I’ve grown to, perhaps not love retrograde, but respect Mercury Retrograde and the lessons it brings. I don’t want to jinx myself but I’ve found that since I’ve changed my perspective, I’ve had much smoother retrograde experiences.
Every year Mercury appears retrograde at least three or four times. This happens when Mercury passes the Earth in it’s orbit and looks like its going in a backwards motion, thus creating what we refer to as Mercury Retrograde. Mercury is the ruling planet of communication, so the ways we think (share and understand information) along with technology and transportation tend to be affected during Mercury Retrograde. It is wise during this time to loosen up our expectations, slow down, practice responding vs reacting, take the time to analyze our options, hold off on making big decisions and, here’s a BIG one, be very careful with our words and how we interpret the words of others. If I had a dollar every time I misinterpreted someone else’s words during Mercury Retrograde, I’d have a nice pile of cash! If we look at how Mercury appears in the sky during a retrograde, we’ll notice that at first there is a pause, then the planet appears to move backwards. The symbolism of this apparent movement coming on the heals of the year 2020 is not lost on me, and I believe this is the reason Mercury retrograde is hitting differently right now.
We are emerging from the cocoon of 2020. Which, for many of us, felt like a great pause. In this pause we did a lot of pondering and re-evaluating. We gained clarity on what really matters within the framework of our lives and now here we are “stationing direct” and beginning to move forward once again. Are you afraid of getting swept back up in the hectic pace as “normal” life returns? I am. I don’t want to lose the lessons pandemic life taught me.
Since Mercury rules communication, I urge you to pay attention to that tiny voice in your head. What are you trying to tell yourself? Take advantage of the universal energy created by Mercury Retrograde to slow down, listen and pay special attention to any reoccurring thoughts.
I have a meditation practice which I find to be really helpful in enabling me to decipher and get to the root of what I’m feeling. I sit quietly and become centered in my body. Once I feel a calm clarity in my body and mind, I check in with how I’m feeling. I take my time to notice: do I feel sad, anxious, mad, irritable, happy or excited. When pinpoint the emotion I’m experiencing, I then ask myself what I can do with these feelings. For example, if I’m feeling sad, I ask myself why am I feeling this sadness and what simple steps can I take to shift my feelings? If you sit with the question long enough, an answer will appear. When I have clarity, I close my meditation and journal about what I discovered. This is a practice and I promise the more you do it, the easier it gets.
As we move forward into this post pandemic world, it’s important we don’t lose sight of what is meaningful to our soul. Keep track of your soul centered goals but also go slowly knowing that we can’t expect great change instantly. Take this lesson from Mercury that we can’t effectively move forward without first pausing and reviewing where we’ve been.
Well it’s here, we’ve been on this COVID global pandemic journey for one year. It feels momentous and like something to document. I, like most of us, am not the same person I was a year ago. Putting my life on pause for a year made so many things so loud, so heartbreakingly important and so visible. It’s important for me to acknowledge my privilege and although I lost my job, my husband who is a first responder did not. Thankfully, we did not have to worry about our finances during this time.My privilege makes me feel like I shouldn’t even share my story because I know so many others have gone through so much loss and suffering over the past year which makes my story feel insignificant. However, I feel the need to get my words out. I’m beginning this story without knowing where it’s going to end or if I’ll even decide to publish this. I’m writing this in hopes to heal a part of my heart and to not let myself forget the lessons I’ve learned. We all have our story and I do think it’s important for us to document living through these unprecedented times.
Here’s where it started. On March 6th, 2020 my husband and I set off on a road trip to Arizona in our new motor home. We were off to celebrate my dad’s birthday in Tucson (where my brother lives). We had no idea that when we returned back home, our world would be unimaginably different. At this point, we knew about what was then being called the corona virus but we still felt safe. Day by day, as our trip progressed, things started to become more uncertain.
Once we left Tucson, we proceeded on to Flagstaff where our son was living. We picked Max up and continued on to our planned trip to the Grand Canyon. It was at the Grand Canyon that we started to feel a certain level of concern for our safety when we boarded a park shuttle and found ourselves crammed up against a lot of other people, many of them European tourists. Having heard the horror stories coming out of Italy, we got scared and quickly exited the shuttle. Things were starting to feel very strange. We cut our trip a bit short, dropped Max back in Flagstaff and headed for home.
We decided to make a quick pit stop on our way home to visit my sister in law in La Quinta and while we were there our daughter called to let us know her university was closing for two weeks. So she and her boyfriend met up with us in La Quinta since we figured there seemed to be no rush to get back home. While we were there, shit started to get weird. People began clearing out grocery stores and toilet paper became a hot commodity.
It was time for us to get back home and figure out what awaited us. All commitments were being canceled and as strange and uncertain as everything was my homebody nature was kind of excited. We had forced downtime. It sort of felt like the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve except it kept going. Also, I was becoming more scared of the virus. With so much unknown and my husband out working with sick people, I felt certain that he was going to get COVID and I figured he’d unknowingly bring it home and I too would get sick. I worried about exposing my parents, family and friends to the virus. We went into lockdown with our little pod being my husband, our daughter Stevie and her boyfriend, Alex. And then our son’s work shutdown, he lost his job and his lease was up on his apartment in Flagstaff. It became apparent that he too would be coming back home.
Since it wasn’t possible for my husband to get time off work, it became apparent that I was going to have to be the one to help move him back home. My level of anxiety was building. I didn’t think it was possible for just Max and I to do this move but I was worried and felt a lot of guilt about asking anyone else to risk exposure to the virus in order to help us. In the end, Stevie and Alex came along and helped me get Max home. They were a godsend emotionally as well as physically. I was starting to sink mentally. It was breaking my heart to see my kids having to give up their newly found adult lifestyles and their independence. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This wasn’t their plan or mine. A few years prior, my husband and I, facing our empty nest future, decided to sell the home we lived in for 20 years and downsize to a much smaller place closer to the ocean. We were settling into our new empty nest lifestyle quite nicely, enjoying our fun new community where we could walk and bike to restaurants, bars and the beach. I only had to walk two blocks to the yoga studio where I was teaching and I joked that I was retired from all my mom duties. I was adjusting well to my new lifestyle. And then…
Yep, the birds returned to the nest. I was no longer retired. I was back to cooking and cleaning and being the mother of the house. I wouldn’t have had it any other way because times were uncertain but we were all together and we were as safe as we could be. Besides it wasn’t lost on me that I was being given the gift of time. When my kids left for college, one of the saddest thoughts was that our time living together as a family of four was over. Huh, little did I know! So we carried on. My daughter’s university never opened back up. Yoga studios closed and seeing my Reiki clients in person was out of the question. Then we learned to Zoom. Can you imagine we ever survived without our knowledge of Zoom? I’m an empath who soaks up the energy around me and things were getting very heavy. When I don’t have the ability to recharge myself, its like pouring from an empty cup and cup was draining fast. I was asked to continue teaching yoga through Zoom but I couldn’t even imagine how that would work. My small house was full of people. Where would I teach? And more than that, I felt I had no energy to give. I was on autopilot, I began to check out and I began to lose myself. I kept thinking of that scene in TheNeverEnding Story when Bastian’s horse gets stuck in the pit of despair. The horse is drowning in the muddy swamp and Bastian says, ”don’t let the sadness of the swamps get to you. You have to try. You have to care.” That was me, I was stuck in the swamp of sadness and I couldn’t get out. But, one must carry on…so we did all the quarantine things.
We cooked.
We Zoomed with family.We bought local farm fresh veggies.We embraced lounge wear.We took daily neighborhood walks. We tapped into our creativity.
I tried to balance the joy of simple pleasures with the sadness in my heart, and then on May 25th George Floyd was killed by an officer who pinned him down and knelt on his neck for eight minutes. Our country, already so politically divided, erupted. This was a turning point. After enduring almost four years of a Trump presidency where he normalized racism, misogyny, ableism and unapologetic narcissistic behavior, this was where we were. I’ve always been politically outspoken and up until this point I had definitely lost some Instagram followers due to my political opinions and now it was time to level up. My eyes were opened to acknowledge my own privilege and to learn about systemic racism. I pledged to become an ally to marginalized communities and to continue my learning.
I could feel myself changing, not so much into a different person but more like settling in to my inner knowing. There was clarity about what really mattered and there was simplicity within that clarity. I began to really feel the importance of setting my boundaries and using my voice to speak out. Then there was the looming Presidential Election and a chance for change. But somewhere along the way, I became aware Qanon. At first I laughed about their wild conspiracy theories, like Pizzagate, but then I started to realize that some people who I considered to be very close to me were actually buying into these conspiracies. And the world became even more uncertain.
From that point on it was the election, which in typical COVID fashion took weeks to confirm, then the insurgents storming The Capitol and now here we are acknowledging the racism and hate crimes directed at the Asian and Pacific Islander communities all of this is heartbreaking and scary, but also all of this ugliness is being brought into the light so we can begin the necessary work to fix our broken nation. I am changed (and changing), I have lost some friends but I am hopeful and thankful.
I am so thankful for the COVID-19 vaccine and our opportunity to safely start our new normal life. I’m thankful that my hard working husband, Rory never contracted the virus and I’m thankful that my entire family stayed safe and healthy.As much as I’m saddened that my daughter had to miss out on the end of her sophomore year and all of her junior year of on campus college education and all that goes with it, I’m thankful for the unexpected time we’ve had. I’m thankful for her being my“emotional support human” and her ability to make me laugh.I’m also thankful for this unexpected time with my son. With Stevie now living near her university and Rory often gone at work, Max and I have become great roommates. He’s at that point in his life where he is doing some deep work to figure out who he is and how he wants to show up in the world (as any 21 year old should) and we’ve had some great conversations as we’ve really gotten to learn more about each other.
Coming out on the end of this strange and momentous year, I’m definitely feeling the caterpillar and butterfly metaphor. I heard that before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly they must first completely dissolve themselves into unrecognizable mush and then the transformation begins. I can feel myself coming out of the mush.
In the early planning and brainstorming phases, while building my website, I was working on my domain name and finding it to be a bit of a challenge. How does one define themselves in way that seems so front and center? I’m a pretty humble person and I’ve never been super comfortable in the spotlight, unless we are talking about stage lighting…which is a story for another day. Suffice it to say, I don’t prefer to draw too much attention to myself and creating this website felt a bit like standing in a spotlight.
However, back to my domain name…adding Healing after my name felt a little cringy considering today’s current climate in the wellness and yoga world. Hop on Instagram and you’ll find a slew charlatans spewing conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, falsely claiming to have special knowledge, with the audacity to appear more knowledgeable than scientists or medical professionals. I certainly didn’t want anyone getting the idea that I was hopping on that bandwagon (but be sure to take a look at my new line of probiotics….no, haha)
I am not a healer but I know how to facilitate healing. Thich Nhat Hanh says,”When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body’s natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.” The body is a self-healing organism but we live in a constant state of heightened stress in the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system and we make it real difficult for this healing process to occur. My training and knowledge have taught me the importance of shifting our bodies into the parasympathetic nervous system where stress leaves the body and healing takes place. So, at the end of the day, the best and most concise way to “brand” myself was to add the word Healing to my domain. My goal is to share with you the various ways in which we all can facilitate the healing of ourselves. I’m excited to be here and I hope you’ll join me!
Miraval in Tucson, one of my most favorite healing spaces.
Morgen Brunner Healing 