Venus retrograde guide for Cancer

The Venus retrograde takes place in your 7th house of relationships. Through Taurus and Libra, it impacts your 4th and 11th houses. This is an intense transit for you as it’s in an angular house and will affect your primary relationships.

With Cancer, there’s always a lot of feelings when it comes to relationships. Feelings come naturally for Cancer, and sometimes this can be more reactive than responsive and with Pluto journeying through your relationship sphere, your relationships have felt very karmic and intense. Your obsessive, desire, lustful natures can emerge, some for that might be empowering, and some send you into the victim mentality. Likely to be a mixture of the two.

This Venus transit to Pluto can also bring back karmic ties with people from earlier that are not completed. It could also be that old relationships resurface now, either literally or to reveal their old wounds.

There’s a lot of realism and truth in this Venus retrograde cycle, and waking up what’s difficult, taking ownership. Past contracts that need to be rescinded. It’s going to feel like a death process for many. But there might be resistances to resolving the past. Even redefining your needs, reevaluating how you relate can be a challenge, since we need to let aspects of our identity go to come into the new.

Not only past partners, but also unresolved issues with current partners may take more centre stage as Venus conjoins Pluto in her retrograde form. It is equally likely that new people, powerful, intense relationships can emerge at this time. They equally might feel karmically compelling.

With Venus-Pluto in the 7th, there can be many lower shadowy emotions to manage and make sense of. Intense, uncontrollable love of others always reflects what we need to embody more of ourselves. This might not be without it’s conflict and confrontation, as Venus retrograde tends to bring out the shadow and ugly sides within.

When things get challenging, always remember it’s time to move more deeply into your feminine. In terms of the 7th house, that’s our blame, projections, disempowerment and oppression by and on others. Until we go inwards and take ownership, we are a victim of transiting Pluto in the 7th.

So now it’s the ‘big’ wake up call for you in your relating. When we start seeing how we invest in our victimhood, by showing up in the moment for ourselves, rather than reacting to triggers, we start feeling empowered and present in our relationships. But it feels a bit beyond triggers here. This is an intense month long journey. The sense when it’s so angular like this is that its a real initiation into your vulnerability, and on many levels. It’s like you are penetrating into the core or heart of the illusion.

Vulnerability doesn’t equate to weakness, but it is not a comfortable experience, as the world is set up to overcome and resist vulnerability, and deride it when it appears. As children it is knocked out of us. What can be useful is to welcome the more vulnerable side, like we are supporting our inner child. If our inner child does not feel safe, it’s a great time to see what she’s carrying and support her relationship with the inner Divine Father and Divine Mother so she feels parented.

It might feel like a difficult, dark time. It might feel like you are alchemising, transmuting the deepest of shadows, emotional baggage. Remember also the ancestors can be coming through our fears and shadows and cling to the inner child. It’s not a time to fear that darkness but sit in the presence of it and harness the essence and power within it. It is a lot like being in the unknown and mystery of life. We are all to some extent here now.

The issue with Venus-Pluto is that it’s about us needing to let go. You have a month’s journey in this. It’s time to really face some of the realities and commit to the next stage of your life, you are being shown what is now urgent for you to journey into. It might not appear or feel rosy or even possible to integrate now, but give yourself time.

When you move into late February, you will have more clarity and a deeper sense of what’s needed next in your relationships.

Listen here to the Venus Retrograde podcast