All About Saturn & Mercury Retrograde

This week, we stand at a threshold. Quietly, but definitively, something fundamental is shifting beneath the surface of your identity.

Saturn, the planet that governs time, structure, karmic lessons, and the scaffolding of self, is now retrograde. It stationed in Aries at 2 degrees on June 29th and will move backward through the zodiac until November 27th, at which point it stations direct in Pisces, 25 degrees. That trajectory alone tells a story: fire into water, impulse into integration, willpower into spiritual reckoning.

The early degrees of Aries are not refined. They are raw. Aries 2 degrees is not the warrior in full armor, it’s the primal scream of new existence, the psychic equivalent of a first breath. It is instinctive, immediate, and driven by an unfiltered hunger to become. But Saturn here, retrograding, asks you not to react from that instinct, but to examine it. It slows the ignition. It introduces resistance not to punish, but to test the integrity of your fire. Is your desire to become truly yours, or is it a reaction against someone else’s expectations?

And when Saturn re-enters Pisces, those final degrees, soaked in dissolution and dream, it takes that spark of identity and plunges it into a sea of unconscious patterning. What surfaces between now and late November may not be new, but it will feel newly urgent.

Past boundaries you thought you had mastered may test you again. Old dreams may reappear, not to haunt you, but to ask whether you abandoned them out of fear or wisdom. Emotional patterns that once ran in the background may now feel amplified, as if your soul is telling you that you’re ready to deal with this now. Fully. Honestly. Without bypass.

This is a retrieval. Saturn retrograde is not here to set you back; it’s here to make sure you can sustain what you’ve asked for.

And just as you’re metabolizing that deeper internal shift, Mercury steps onto the retrograde stage as well. On July 17th, Mercury stations Retrograde at 16 degrees of Leo and begins its slow, deliberate walk back to 4 degrees, where it will finally go direct on August 11th. At first glance, this might read like a typical Mercury story complete with miscommunications, tech glitches, missed appointments. But, that would be missing the real medicine of this transit, which is personal.

Because Leo isn’t just about boldness, it’s about visibility, fullness and expression. It governs the performance of identity, the projection of self, and the art of being witnessed. And the degree shift here, from 16 to 4, tells its own tale.

At 16 degrees, Leo wants to be seen. It’s mid-sign, expressive, confident, performative. It knows how to deliver a line, how to charm, how to stand out. But as Mercury retraces its steps from this degree toward 4, the energy quiets. It gets closer to the root of confidence, the inner child, the first voice, the earliest memory of being too loud, too bright, too much. By the time Mercury stations direct at 4 degrees, we’re no longer dealing with the spotlight. We’re dealing with the origin of the self that first asked, “Is it safe to be heard?”

So this Retrograde strips down the performance and brings you back to the pulse beneath the persona. It’s about meeting the part of yourself that learned to curate instead of communicate. And It’s about noticing when your words are meant to impress versus when they actually reflect your nervous system’s truth.

During this Retrograde, there’s an opportunity to revise more than just emails or brand copy. This is a time to revisit the moments you went silent to be accepted, to rewrite the internal monologue that told you, you had to be digestible in order to be loved, to repair the subtle rift between your truth and your outer presentation.

And yes, there are things to be cautious of. This is not the time to force decisions, especially around creative direction or public image. If you’re launching something from the need to prove yourself, it will likely misfire or fizzle.

This is also not the time to seek external validation for the internal work you’re doing. You’ll be tempted to ask for applause, don’t. If you perform the healing, you’ll delay the real thing. And above all, don’t ghost your past. This Retrograde is designed to bring it back up.

Instead, focus on refining your self-expression with honesty. Revisit conversations where your voice was muted. Reconnect with the language that brings you home to yourself. Reclaim the parts of your story that got reduced to soundbites.

And if your mind needs something to ground itself in during this cycle, here are three mantras to repeat as Mercury slows the pace.

Mantras To Slow The Pace

I no longer outsource my voice to anyone else’s approval.

My words are aligned with my nervous system, not my performance.

I speak not to impress, but to connect, with myself first.

Together, Saturn and Mercury are choreographing a reset that has little to do with productivity and everything to do with pattern recognition. You are being asked to slow down, not as punishment, but rather as preparation for what is ahead. Your future self doesn’t need you to hustle right now. It needs you to pause long enough to see what you’ve been replicating unconsciously. Because once you see it, you can choose something different.

This isn’t about going “backwards.” Rather, this is about building something with stronger bones. Something that doesn’t collapse under the weight of who you used to be.

So, if everything feels a little slow, a little unclear, or a little tender, remember this, you are not being delayed. You are being recalibrated into a version of yourself that can hold the power you used to chase. You so got this friend.