VENUS IN CANCER + CHIRON RETROGRADE

Navigating the tender territories of love, belonging, and emotional infrastructure

The sensitivity has been cranked up to extraordinary levels, creating a heightened awareness of both the suffering and the beauty that permeates our world. It feels like walking through life with an open heart that can sense and feel everything more intensely. the pain of every living being, but also the love, joy, pleasure, and profound beauty that exists alongside it.

This intensified sensitivity signals a significant point of cracking open. We're being invited to feel more, hold more, and process more as we navigate this expansion of consciousness. This is the sacred journey we're walking with Mercury retrograde in Leo and Jupiter in Cancer. deep heart work that demands our full presence and participation.

SPIRITUAL UPGRADES

When I first began this spiritual work, I heard about "upgrade periods" with excitement, thinking I was ready for anything the universe could offer. But as I've become more intimate with this process, I've realized that upgrades aren't necessarily pretty. They can be messy, painful, and overwhelming because we come to this life carrying generations and lifetimes of calcified material and imprints that require processing.

When we experience an influx of light, awakening, and consciousness, we must also be with everything that has kept us separated from ourselves, from love, from awareness. This process of true upgrading isn't the spiritual bypassing version we see on social media. those confusing phrases and concepts that spin our psyche out. Real upgrades are heart upgrades, tangible somatic and nervous system transformations that literally change how we experience life.

You have to go through the full descent before you can ascend into a new lived experience. Tending to our heart walls and what has kept us separated from love is the most essential phase in this upgrading process, requiring wild and radical self-awareness, honesty, and truth.

HEART WALLS

When you meet a consciousness threshold, you can feel it. There's an ego death approaching, something uncomfortable you'll need to witness within yourself. the ways you've participated in loops of suffering, victimhood, or disconnection. These are breakthrough periods that can be simultaneously painful, challenging, and incredibly confronting.

The universe is currently delivering heavy-duty confrontation, asking us to own and accept how we participate in experiences we'd like to change. While we may not have created the original pain point, we can certainly become attached to it. This attachment becomes the work. recognizing how we perpetuate patterns that no longer serve us.

Heart walls are protective mechanisms that formed when something too big, too intense, or too painful happened to us. They protected parts of us that weren't evolved enough to handle the immensity of disappointment, pain, or grief. But while they shield us from pain, they also separate us from love, feeling, empathy, and genuine connection.

VENUS IN CANCER

This week marks a significant shift as Venus moves from curious, social Gemini into the deeper waters of Cancer on July 30th. This transition moves our focus from external connections and play to family, roots, home, and our emotional landscape. Venus in Cancer embodies the archetype of the great mother, emphasizing emotional safety and ancestral memory.

This opens a new cycle around how we give and receive love, particularly in relationship to home, family, and belonging. Venus in Cancer is fundamentally about heart walls. learning to tend to how and where we connect, understanding the difference between a boundary and a wall, and discovering how to caretake our own needs internally so we can authentically care for others.

Venus represents what we value, how we magnetize and attract, and how we connect. In Cancer, these values focus toward emotional safety, family and chosen family, home nourishment, intimacy, and emotional maturity. This transit asks us to rewire how we feel safe internally, addressing our emotional security at its core.

This journey will surface unconscious material around your maternal lineage, mother memories, nostalgia, belonging, safety, and intimacy. It's reparenting work. inner child work that helps us attune to our own unmet needs so we don't project them onto our relationships.

Venus in Cancer will reveal patterns around emotional enmeshment, codependence, protectiveness, and avoidance. It might bring up ancestral grief, attachment patterns, and unresolved needs for care and attunement. The invitation is to feel what needs to be felt rather than suppress, avoid, or detach from it.

Love is pure and real. we can never give or receive too much authentic love. However, patterns of over-functioning or self-abandonment aren't actually love; they're fear-based responses to abandonment. When we sacrifice ourselves to give something, we're operating from fear rather than love, trapping ourselves in repetitive cycles of pain and loss.

CHIRON RETROGRADE

On the same day Venus enters Cancer, Chiron stations retrograde in Aries, beginning a five-month journey of review until January. For those with Chiron in Aries, you're experiencing your Chiron return. Those with Chiron in Taurus are beginning to prepare for theirs.

This retrograde deepens our process with the wounded healer, bringing us into our core wounds around identity, self-trust, assertion, and selfhood. It will reveal how we carry and respond to wounds around rage, anger, and ancestral warrior trauma. Most importantly, it shows where we've abandoned ourselves in the name of fitting in, social propriety, or belonging.

This is perfect timing for anger work. so essential yet often overlooked. Many of us carry trapped fight energy from times we couldn't respond authentically, when we needed to speak but couldn't, when we had to suppress our life force instead of expressing it. These suppressed energies can create illness, nervous system patterns, and even panic attacks, which are essentially trapped fight responses.

The opportunity here is to be with rage and anger in a new way, finding a deeper layer of our power, truth, and life force. The goal is to let it move and speak—not from the wound to create more trauma, but up through the heart, expressed as purity, truth, and authenticity.

MERCURY CAZIMI

On July 31st, we experience a Mercury Cazimi in Leo while Mercury is retrograde. This creates a powerful point of illumination in our subterranean spaces—our subconscious and underworld. It brings insight around visibility, voice, identity, ego, leadership, and courage.

This is about reclaiming your truth and voice, shifting how you express yourself. It's always a point of clarity and opportunity to integrate and understand what you've learned through Mercury retrograde so far. Often, the second half of Mercury retrograde feels more easeful and clarifying after this illumination point.

VENUS SQUARE SATURN + NEPTUNE

The week culminates on August 1st with Venus in Cancer squaring both Saturn retrograde and Neptune retrograde in Aries. This creates a reckoning point that may feel like hitting a wall, surfacing old wounds around boundaries, fears of rejection, abandonment, and unworthiness.

Saturn loves boundaries, discipline, and structure, while Neptune prefers dissolution and can create illusions. The square reveals where you need firmer boundaries, where walls need to be replaced with healthy boundaries, or where you need to speak your truth to receive the love you desire.

This aspect will also reveal illusions around love—where you might have rose-colored glasses on, where you're pedestaling someone, or where you need a reality check about how you're giving and receiving love. It's a point of refinement and clarity, examining where emotional needs are no longer being met through fantasy, avoidance, or unsupportive relationship patterns.

ENERGY OF AUGUST

August promises to be a month of feeling after the fast, electric energy of June and July. This might not be the best time for big plans or commitments far in advance. Instead, it's a time to marinate in what you're feeling and experiencing.

The work isn't to figure things out before feeling them. it's to feel first and let clarity come through naturally. Sometimes we need to access our emotions fully before understanding can emerge. This is going to be a tender, heart-centered week where we crack through layers of programming, wounding, and limiting beliefs.

The invitation is profound: Can you let yourself feel what needs to be felt? Can you tend to the heart walls with compassion rather than force? Can you learn the difference between protection and connection, between boundaries and barriers?

This is the underworld journey. the part where we descend into spaces that need our attention and attunement so we can actually heal, upgrade, and transcend where we've been before. It requires us to go into calcified places and be with the pain that created them in the first place.

But this is where the real transformation happens. When we can work with the heart, when we allow it to lead and feel safe enough to do so, we can turn down the mental noise that constantly seeks safety through overthinking and overanalyzing. The heart simply knows, but it needs tending, space, time, and attunement to address the protective layers around it.

We're all in this process together, experiencing a collective nervous system upgrade and heart expansion. It's not an easy time to be on this planet, but the fertile ground for growth is extraordinary. We're being asked to stay connected to what moves us, to find our own portals and gateways that lead deeper into our hearts.

This journey is about breaking down and dissolving the calcified parts of us—the generational trauma, the past-life imprints, the protective mechanisms that once served us but now limit our capacity for love and connection. This life is fundamentally about choosing love over fear, learning through our mistakes, and choosing differently each time.

As we navigate these tender waters, remember that belonging starts within. True belonging emerges when we can be authentic with ourselves, when we can tend to our own emotional needs, and when we can love ourselves through the messy, painful, beautiful process of being human.

The heart knows the way. Trust the process, tend to the walls with gentleness, and allow yourself to crack open to more love, more feeling, more authentic connection than you've ever thought possible.

This is the sacred work of our time. not just personal healing, but collective heart repair that will transform how we love, connect, and belong in this world.

Soul Archaeology

— ALI OFSTEDAL

THIS BLOG IS A REVISED TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 111 OF MY PODCAST “SOUL ARCHAEOLOGY”.

Tune into the latest episode of soul archaeology for a full energetic download. available on all platforms.