It’s easy when it’s easy. The best parts of our personality get all the love. The simplest parts of ourselves get all the praise. Our successes are lauded while all of the errors that we made along the way are ignored. We tend to hope that all the atrocious things that we have done will be eclipsed by the magnificent success promised us by going live on Snapchat.

Most of us strive to be good. It’s safer that way. We are under the illusion that we are protected that way. We are taught that if we can stifle our individuality, forget about our eccentricities and find a way to glorify what is sold as socially acceptable, then we will be raised up, loved up and given the keys to the Kingdom. 

We sell our Mars for Barbie parts. We sell our Mars for fake wars. We sell our Mars to keep our egos safe. We sell our Mars so that we don’t have to check ourselves. We sell our Mars because we don’t know that it is ours to own. And when we sell our Mars for cheap imitations of what it means to be the master of our individuality, we forsake ourselves the journey of becoming our unique selves.

And if we knew the true value of that, we’d never place it on the market.

To own our Mars is to accept ourselves, our entire selves, as we are. To own our Mars is to own our most difficult traits. Consciously. To own our Mars is to own the most intense parts of our personality, the most problematic parts of our character. To own our Mars means that we don’t ask anyone to do our Mars for us. We don’t shop it out. We don’t make everyone else the bad/wrong/horror because we know that we are that too. To own our Mars means that we fight our own battles and refuse to do the heavy lifting for others. Because we don’t care if it means that they won’t like us. When we own our Mars, we understand that our own energy is worth protecting. To own our Mars means that we are so comfortable with ourselves, because we know ourselves so thoroughly, that we aren’t moved about by our anxiety. We move with purpose and precision. We move with confidence and conviction. 

To have self-determination in a world that was built upon our demise is no small feat.

A Mars retrograde, like the one we are embarking upon from April 17th to June 29th, is an invitation to deepen our understanding of the most difficult aspects of our personality, the most challenging forces in our life and to make contact and make conscious our inner resilient, self-determined woke-warrior-witch.

Mars may be the unsocialized, unrefined, undignified, ungracious parts of ourselves. Mars may be difficult to deal with, but Mars will be the one, the part of us that will show up at our moment of need, to save us.

In my Blueprints of Our Potential workshop starting tomorrow (sales end at midnight tonight), we will explore the many ways in which Mars expresses itself in your chart and in your life and how you can best use this time to deepen your relationship to your power, desire, potential and courage.

xc