Actually Mercury isn’t retrograde right now – it has just entered its retrograde shadow and will station retrograde on 26th November. But that’s not going to stop the drama queens from clogging up social media with their Mercury retrograde hysteria and silliness. Most of the fears around Mercury retrograde are exaggerated and done for attention and I’ve had enough!

Okay, maybe some of the Mercury melodrama is done for fun – clicks and giggles – but it also feeds into a particular mindset that’s disempowering. If you expect to have problems it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your mind is filled with anxiety and that makes you more likely to attract disruption. You’re going out of your way to look for problems – and you’ll find them.

When Mercury goes retrograde the mind turns inwards and this may confuse you if you’re not used to it. The worst effects of this transit may happen when you try to carry on as normal and assume you know what you’re doing. The communication breakdowns and technical mishaps are often caused by people not paying attention. Then they blame Mercury for their own mistakes – hardly fair!

It annoys me even more when people blame Mercury retrograde for something when he isn’t even retrograde! The CrowdStrike incident is a perfect example. It happened on 19th July 2024 when a software update caused a huge tech outage that crashed millions of computers around the world.

Some astrologers blamed Mercury retrograde – but of course they did – except he wasn’t retrograde at the time. He had just entered his shadow. However, Mars was conjunct Uranus having gone exact on 15th July, four days earlier. Mercury was square the conjunction but wasn’t retrograde.

The outage was probably deliberate sabotage which has Mars Uranus written all over it. In other words, this was an attack (Mars) that caused disruption (Uranus), not just a passing technical oops of the kind you get with Mercury.

I’ve had plenty of tech snafus when Mercury has been retrograde and direct. The truth is they happen all the time because that’s the nature of technology – and as we’ll see, also the nature of Mercury. And sometimes the disruption turns out to be fortunate.

For example, in August 2024 a reader got in touch by email with a query just after the inferior conjunction when Mercury was retrograde. We had a short exchange and then at some point Google went mad and put one of her replies into my spam folder so I never received it. That email was sent on 27th August, the day before Mercury stationed direct.

For the next two weeks I remained blissfully unaware that she was waiting for my reply until I needed to add Astro Journal 2025 to my Booklinker account. I had trouble logging in because the emails with the codes kept disappearing into the ether. So I had to log in to my Google account online to retrieve them from the spam folder.

There I discovered the missing email from the reader and was finally able to reply. This happened when Mercury was direct and about to leave his shadow. The point is: I would never have found that missing email if the Booklinker emails hadn’t also been lost.

It wasn’t Mercury’s fault that this happened. I blame Google!

Donna Cunningham has written lots of posts about this Mercury retrograde mania. She points out that millions of people manage to do all sorts of things during Mercury retrograde transits without any problems. The world doesn’t grind to a halt and everything is mostly fine.

For example, I managed to change my broadband contract during a Mercury retrograde transit – something that would normally be advised against. This was in August 2023 when Mercury went retrograde in Virgo while opposite Neptune. Not only that but Mercury was conjunct my natal Mercury and Neptune was opposing it. 😱

I admit to feeling nervous about the process and was concerned that something would go wrong but had to take a leap of faith. There wasn’t a good time to make the switch and it needed to be done. I probably should have done it earlier, before Neptune had settled in to dissolve my mind for the next several years. Knowing that I may not be thinking clearly, I slowed down and researched the details forensically before going ahead. And it went fine. 🎉

Some people advise going into a kind of hibernation as soon as Mercury enters his shadow and not doing anything just in case something goes wrong. But this is crazy. It amounts to spending half the year sitting on your hands.

Obviously, you can’t do that. The sensible advice for Mercury retrograde is to simply pay attention to what you’re doing. Maybe something will go wrong and maybe it won’t.

In her excellent article on Mercury, Dana Gerhardt explains how she realised that Mercury retrograde isn’t the problem – it’s just Mercury! While working in an office that collated reports from around the country, she noticed that:

“things got screwed up during the retrograde – and they got screwed up when Mercury was direct. The flip side was also true: the majority of our projects went smoothly during the retrograde, as they did the rest of the year (or we would have gone out of business).”

As much as she wanted to blame Mercury for their problems, it was obvious that snafus could happen at any time. There was no clear pattern. She goes on:

“That brings us back to Mercury’s two faces – the Magician and the Trickster – and to what years of Buddhist training have taught me: Just when you think you know what you’re doing, chances are that you don’t!”

People share their Mercury retrograde calamity stories like a badge of honour: “All these things went wrong!” But you should be ashamed! The more that goes wrong, the more unconscious you are. If you’re experiencing this kind of disruption on a regular basis with Mercury retrograde then you need to sort yourself out.

In fact, most of the advice for Mercury retrograde is stuff you should be doing anyway – i.e. it’s common sense. Maybe that’s just a Virgo talking. But really, who needs to be told to think things through before doing something important? Or to read the small print on a contract before signing it? Or back up your files?

If you don’t think something through or check the details then it might be your fault when it goes wrong. But it may also be for the best. You can’t assume that you’re right about what you’re doing. Maybe you need to do something else and Mercury is trying to make you aware of that.

So don’t worry about the potential disruption – just pay attention and be sensible. The real point of the Mercury retrograde cycle is to turn inwards and listen to the voice of your soul or deeper/higher Self. That’s how you find out whether you’re on the right path or not. Of course, you don’t have to wait for Mercury to go retrograde to do that either.

In summary: Stop blaming the planets for your shit!

You’re not powerless in the face of the cosmos. You can choose to pay attention. You can choose to think.

You can also choose to get the Mercury Retrograde Workbook, a comprehensive guide to working with these transits that includes worksheets and printable calendars to track your experience. Click the image to find out more!

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