This post is a preview of my upcoming workshop, Bring It On! 2025 And The Years Ahead. We'll be meeting December 17 and 19 to get more context, look at individual charts, and pose these questions to our actual lives.
2025 looks like it’s gonna be a year of big changes because every single planet that takes multiple years to move through a sign will change signs over the course of many months. This is rare—so rare, I haven’t found another example of it in history yet. Pluto just entered Aquarius, where it will be for 20 years. And next year, Saturn and Neptune will enter Aries for 3- and 13-years respectively, and Uranus will begin an 8-year long journey through Gemini. Each one of these planets has or will change from receptive earth or water signs to active air or fire signs. And each of these planets will be in an easy, flowing, or supportive relationship to one another, so things will move. All this is leading some astrologers to compare the astrology of 2025 to that of 2020, but I don’t quite think that’s accurate. It looks as unique and impactful, perhaps even more so! But there’s a lot more potential for flowing, positive, or easy outcomes. Now… I don’t want to overstate the good stuff. All kinds of things can flow, easy does not always mean good, and we live in a culture that does not agree on what “good” even means. There’s definitely a lot of potential for exactly the kind of depressing collective outcomes we see building right now, like the consolidation of power among a handful of tech billionaires, propaganda wars, institutional failure, and big economic shifts. But I look at the astrology of 2025 and I also see a lot of hope, particularly for individuals seeking to relate well to all this change.
Individuals have more agency than groups, and can make more proactive choices. And while I am not a huge fan of letting astrology rule your life most of the time, this moment calls for a little bit of an astrological leg up. If I was going to sum up the astrology of 2025 in just a few words, I would call it a time to claim the agency you have before someone else does. What happens in 2025 will set the tone for the next couple of decades, and where you put your attention, how you conduct your business, where you get your information, and how you cultivate community will matter. A lot!
Here are the three key questions I would ask heading into 2025--one for each big planetary shift:
What do you need to take radical responsibility for, for the good of the group?
I like the think of Pluto as a number of power dynamics that play out in time. It is power, power struggles, and the way power is always in play, and plays out as a dynamic. Pluto describes the thing we fear the most in ourselves, the way we project that thing out onto others, and the way we hate those people that we project part of ourselves onto. It is also describes the way we eventually become that thing we hate so much. On the flip side, it describes the unshakable power we generate if we take personal responsibility for that process, and own that part of ourselves that we hate and fear instead of projecting it out. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius we saw the French and American revolutions. This time, Pluto in Aquarius is demanding that we face the ideologies that divide us. At a more collective level in the United States, this is easy to see! We can either come together across political lines and fight against the handful of billionaires who benefit from the culture war that fuels their social media channels, or we can keep letting them divide us for profit. This is a choice millions of individuals are going to have to make, and it is not simply going to play out as choosing to either delete the apps on your phone or go full “blue MAGA” and start demanding recounts of the 2024 election on Kamala Harris’ Threads posts. In individual lives, many of us will hear a call to face themselves, and take radical responsibility for their career choices, finances, their marriage, their beliefs, their sense of belonging, spiritual practice, or relationship to their kids. Each of these deeply personal decisions to own our own shit instead of projecting it out onto others is going to have real consequences for the group. And it is going to play out slowly, incrementally. Start building the family, the office, the mutual aid network, the neighborhood, the school board, the friend group, the activist community, and of course the relationship to social media you know you’ll need over the next 20 years. Start now! And do it by looking at yourself and what you need to take responsibility for if you’re going to show up more authentically.
What is the right fight? And more importantly, where are the wrong ones?
Neptune is the planet that describes dissolution, fantasy, and dissociation. It also describes the two-sided coin of actual spiritual enlightenment and the deceptively “enlightened” quality of spiritual bypass. Neptune has been hanging out with Saturn, the planet that describes institutions, boundaries, limits, and structures, since 2023. Both Neptune and Saturn will move briefly into the martial, shoot-from-the-hip sign of Aries in 2025. At a more collective level this will signal an acceleration in the breakdown of institutions, norms, and our sense of reality or truth itself. Misinformation stopped being a problem that the other side is having a long time ago. All of us are being fed the news we want by an algorithm that cares more about harvesting our attention than what is true, helpful, or right. On a global, practical level, it’s a good time to consider your news sources and habits, in an effort to minimize the distortion of algorithms. And on a more personal level, it’s a good time to ask what you are fighting for and why. What are you bringing patient resources to building? What are you trying to make real? Where are you challenging yourself, or facing external challenges? This could be anything from finding a job or paying off a debt to running for office, dealing with a legal issue, making new friends, or establishing new healthy habits. Many of us will find that there’s this project or pressure looming on the horizon that feels both necessary and nebulous, or that inspires both pessimism and optimism. Cutting through the confusion on this project, challenge, or need is not going to be straightforward, and it won’t be total. Saturn, the principle of necessity and reality, will be in the sign of Aries for about three years, whereas gauzy Neptune will be in this part of your life for more than a decade. Whatever this part of your life is—your job, your marriage, your bank account, your activism, or your inlaws—the task will be to develop discernment. Before Neptune hits this part of your chart, it’s a good idea to get a sense of what the right fight is here. It is also a good idea to simply name and recognize as many of the ways the wrong fight shows up as possible. When practicing Zen, you don’t banish or punish yourself for experiencing makyo, or the illusionistic altered states that come up in practice all the time and feel a lot like enlightenment. Working with a teacher, you name them as such, and you let them pass. This capacity to say to yourself, over and over again, things like “Right. That’s just my impostor syndrome. I should apply for this job anyway,” will be crucial over the next many years. As I certainly do as a Zen practitioner, you are likely to need a community of support and other forms of guidance to work at this. And you’ve got time to put some help in place.
How much of your life is a transaction that you are not fully aware of?
If Pluto describes intense processes that transform over time, Uranus describes a lightning bolt of instantaneous change. Uranus reveals the ways in which we have been trying to force something to be something that it’s not. It initiates big life changes. It shocks systems. It levels playing fields… but it also just turns over the table and sends the pieces of the game flying everywhere. In the mercurial sign of Gemini, it will be responsible for changes to trade, information, games, and transactions. At the collective level, I cannot write about Uranus in Gemini in the United States without saying that it reliably predicts the United States going to war. The American revolution, the Civil War, and our engagement in WWII—the four instances of Uranus in Gemini that the US has experienced have coincided with wars. Big ones. It would be surprising, given the chaotic leadership we are walking into, if we escaped a big war over the next 8 years, but we can and should hope that this does not happen.
I am more excited about the way Uranus in Gemini can support individuals making decisions to decrease the grip a small number of very wealthy people have on us. As we prepare for 2025, it’s a good idea to make a list of all the unwitting transactions in your life, and to think as broadly as possible. How much time that you would rather spend elsewhere are you giving to social media, a place where your attention is the product that is being sold? How many places are you taking your phone, even though you don’t need it, because you decided that it’s not a walk if your phone doesn’t count the steps? How often do you look to your watch instead of your own body to tell you how you slept? How many subscriptions do you have that you don’t even need? What are you actually getting when you eat out, or buy something for yourself, and is it of sufficient quality? I am an optimist, but I do think that Uranus’ entrance into Gemini can shake up some of the most intractable problems in contemporary culture, like the fact that we spend so much time in our phones that we are forgetting how to read books. Or the way we only read what we want to read when we read online. Or the way it does not feel like spending actual money when you buy things so automatically… but then are charged very real fees when you don’t have enough money, also automatically. Or the fact that I even trust Apple and Google with my credit card. Or the way we are always plugged in to something and can’t sit with our own thoughts. When did I decide that I cannot just take a shower with nothing but my own body and mind to occupy me? Did I really decide that I would prefer scrolling advertisements before bed to reading a good book? I encourage you to prime the Uranus in Gemini pump by asking these kinds of questions now. Maybe this is about your kid having a phone. Maybe you relate to technology exactly the way you want to, and this is about a specific friendship that has become too transactional or too gossipy. Maybe you’re noticing that your home is so designed for screens that you need more lamps and clocks to even begin to put the screen down. Maybe you’re done giving money to Jeff Bezos—I would support that decision. Maybe you have a Tesla that you bought before it became a very expensive MAGA hat, and you decide that you really need to unload it. Maybe you are finding that you rely on bribing your kids to get them to listen to you. Whatever this first salvo of Uranus in Gemini looks like in your life, the next eight years are about getting a more authentic relationship to information, transactions, and exchange.
Are you curious about how these questions relate to your chart? Do you want to have a positive conversation about the unique potential this year has for you? Join us! There is room left in my upcoming workshop: Bring It On! 2025 and The Years Ahead