A Watery Mars Retrograde Finishing Up: 5 Lessons from the Spirit of Water

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [ https://nightlightastrology.com/ ]. Today, we are going to take a look at some of the culminating lessons of Mars Retrograde in the sign of Cancer by meditating on the element of water. I think this is also appropriate to do today because the sun is entering Pisces, and the moon is in Scorpio. There's something of a Grand Water Trine forming, not exactly by degree, but by whole sign. With so much water in the air, and as we reach this culmination point of a Mars Retrograde cycle in a water sign, I felt like, yeah, let's talk about water for a little bit.

And I have some special guests that are going to appear. This is Tina the Teardrop, and I have some other little creatures I'm going to show you. I'm also going to tell you, in one little part of today's talk, how I use Tina the Teardrop to convey something about the element of water to my little girls. So, on that note, before we get into it today, remember to like and subscribe. We have this goal of trying to get to 80,000 subscribers on the channel. My goal was by the spring equinox. We're about halfway there. I'm not sure we'll get 5,000 more by the spring equinox, but why not try? If you listen to the channel regularly and are not yet subscribed, it's free to do so, and it really does help us grow the work and the community.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, NightlightAstrology.com. Coming up this Thursday night is my next webinar. I do a monthly webinar, and this month, if you go to the events page on the Nightlight Astrology website, click on Live Talks, you'll see "Venus Through the Fire: Unpacking the Mystery and Magic of Venus Retrogrades." This is going to be an exploration of all of the interesting dynamics of Venus's Synodic Cycle, which will help you explore the placement of Venus by phase in your chart, as well as understanding Venus Retrogrades. And we do have a big one coming up in March, so this ought to be useful.

When you register, get the link to attend the webinar on Thursday evening from 7 to 9 PM Eastern. If you can't make it live, you do get the recording afterward. You can watch or listen on your own time. All right, on that note, let me show you why we're talking about water today. I'm going to put the real-time clock up now.

Let's notice, first of all, that here we are, Tuesday, February 18. We have got the waning gibbous moon in the sign of Scorpio. We also have Mars finishing its retrograde in Cancer, and a huge abundance of planets in Pisces, including the sun, which just entered the sign of Pisces today. The Moon and Mars have mutual reception, being in each other's signs—very watery—and a nice day, I think, to reflect on what water brings us: the magic, mystery, and beauty of the element of water.

Now, this is not meant to be exhaustive. I have five things to talk about today, and I'm sure we could add probably 100 more things about water to the list. Water has been talked about as something symbolic and elemental in many different traditions, from Chinese medicine to Ayurveda and the Western esoteric traditions for thousands of years. What to speak of all of the other indigenous traditions from all over the planet who have given a spirit and voice to the element of water in so many unique ways.

So again, when I talk about a symbol like water, it’s not meant to be completely definitive. It’s like this huge mandala of images and associative meanings that we can tap into when we invoke the element of water. But here are five things that water teaches us, in no particular order. Before I do this, I want to introduce you to these little characters. I'm only going to use one of them today, but I thought I'd introduce you to them in general because I think I told you around the time Venus was sextile Pluto that my daughters love gross stuff.

A very appropriate Venus-Pluto connection for little kids is bathroom humor—potties, toots, and all that good stuff. So, let me introduce you to a few characters. This is Elaine Earwax. They've all got very unique names. This is a little piece of earwax named Elaine. She tells stories at bedtime—all sorts of interesting, funny, gross stories. This is Bobby McBarth-in-Your-Mouth. He also tells very unique stories. My daughter had an experience one time that led to her creating this. She said, "Mom, I just threw up, but it went into my mouth, and I didn't come out of my mouth, and then I swallowed it again." We all cracked up so hard, and then Bobby McBarth-in-Your-Mouth got created.

This is Earl the Poop. Yeah, Earl the Poop. He is the first and original of the gross storytelling members of our family. And this is Apilies. We were explaining the story of Achilles to our oldest daughter, and she thought it would be funny to make a mythological character called Apilies. He is a pea drop, and there's a whole elaborate story about how he became a pea drop in a famous battle. Anyway, he's fun. He tells stories too.

Okay, and this is Tina Teardrop. My younger daughter, Summer, made this one. She's supposed to be kind of like a cloud and misty, and she's a teardrop. I actually used Tina to tell some good stories about water and the symbolism of water to my girls. Now, I've found this is really important. A tip, if you're going to do something like this: don't be too literal. You have to come up with stories that convey something of the symbolism by showing, not telling.

This is something I learned in graduate school for creative writing: show, don't tell. It's a way of conveying something through stories, images, myths, and metaphors—the poetry of it. When you sit down with a friend and tell a story, like, "I was sitting in a steam room, and there was this woman next to me breathing like an elephant, and I was so annoyed," you convey it through an image. Your friend laughs, and they can imagine it. We are poetic beings. We tell stories through images, suggestions, and metaphors.

So, to convey something about water, it's good to tell stories. For kids, it's actually easier in some ways to tell stories than to just say, "Water means this, and water means that." It's not like a Ted Andrews' *Animal-Speak* book—not that that isn't filled with great information—but I'd much prefer that we invoke some good stories about foxes than have our daughters read a paragraph about what a fox means. Do you know what I'm saying? Later, of course, when we've invoked a symbolic imagination, books like that can still be very useful. But anyway, off my soapbox and onto our five things that water teaches us.

Let me get my camera to focus. There we go. Okay. Number one: grief, pain, and suffering are also fertile and creative. One of the things that water has represented for thousands of years in astrology is the processing of grief, sadness, loss, pain, and suffering. This world is a watery world insofar as we're in a valley of tears. We live in a valley where impermanence, change, loss, grief, suffering, and the mystery of why certain kinds of suffering happen, or why sickness falls upon us, or why we have to live with loss and grief, or why mortality is a thing—these are all things that we tend to process instinctually, emotionally, through grief, tears, and deep feelings.

It's a very watery part of life. Life is thought of as something that comes in and through water, and life in this valley is filled with suffering. However, one of the things that has long been said and taught to us by so many great mystics, poets, and artists is that grief, loss, pain, and tears are also fertile. So, Tina the Teardrop—whenever she talks, it's interesting. I don't know why I gave her this voice, but she talks very quietly. She likes to whisper. "My name is Tina, and I only tell stories in a whisper." So, she's the quietest of all the characters. They all have different voices, but Tina's is a whisper.

Tina told them a story, and it went like this: Tina was the first creature on Earth—completely made up, by the way—before there were any creatures. She crawled out of the water, and she was kind of like a fish but also kind of like an animal. She came onto the land and looked around, and there was nobody there. She got really, really sad—she didn't even know what sadness was. It was the first feeling she had ever felt, noticing that she was alone. So, she started crying. And from her tears, they went into the earth, and vines started growing. The vines spread all over, and out of them came plants, flowers, trees, and animals—all of the beings and magical, interesting creations started popping up everywhere.

So, that's basically the gist of the story. And what I concluded with was saying that our emotions are very powerful. Even when you feel sadness, your sadness can be the start of something really creative. Your sadness can go into a piece of art, or it can go into music, or it can go into making something. So, that's a very brief little bedtime story that came from Tina the Teardrop. But it's a simple truth.

As we are at the culminating point of a very watery cycle on a very watery day, I think it's important to remember that many of us during such a cycle may have experienced the valley of tears—the watery reality of impermanence, the instinctual fears and anxieties that we live with as tentative beings who know we are not entirely safe. Safety is a relative thing. Mortality is a promise for everybody. So, how do we live in this sacred, tentative space?

One way that we do so is to recognize that our emotions can power great acts of creativity. I find, whether it's playing my guitar, writing, creating these talks, or coming up with something to do with my kids at bedtime, that finding a way to let my emotions, fears, and anxieties fuel something creative is one of the best uses of them. Think of blues music, gospel music, jazz, or any kind of music that channels some of the grittiest parts of being human and being alive into a form of expression.

So, one promise of a watery cycle, even if it's been really difficult—even if the Mars Retrograde in Cancer has been hard, or today with the Moon in Scorpio, which can bring up deep, heavy, intense feelings or emotional catharsis—is that these waters are fertile. These waters are creative. We all come from water, in a way, and we all return to water. In a recent chapter of the book I'm writing, I wrote about how my family dog made his way down to a pond near our home to lay next to the water to die. We come from the waters of the womb. This place is watery.

If we're able to see that water reflects both life and death and to see them connected on a continuum of creation, then we can tap into the fertile power of emotion. That's something valuable to know: my emotions are not good or bad. They are powerful and creative. That can be taken in different ways, but it's something to remember right now for all of us. Even little kids can understand that.

The second thing I've been thinking about with water is that being alive is naturally an exhausting process. There's a way in which we exert ourselves psychically, emotionally, and physically every single day. When you're a kid, I think about how my kids hate going to bed. If they could stay up forever, they would, and then they'd just fall over and fall asleep. But one of the things that has been happening for me during this Mars Retrograde has been a heightened awareness within my training regimen—kind of a hobby bodybuilding thing—to prioritize rest and recovery.

It's something that's always been a part of my process, but not something I've taken as seriously as the actual lifting, cardio, or diet. We need to rest well, recover well, and nourish ourselves. Water, as an element, refers to things that truly, deeply quench our thirst because we have a natural way of emptying our cup out every single day. There's a lot of rhetoric out there about self-care—some of which I find problematic. The rhetoric of self-care can become quite narcissistic.

I'm only reflecting on this as someone who's been in communities like leading a yoga studio for 10 years. The way people sometimes utilize the self-care gospel for reinforcement of some really selfish and often self-destructive tendencies is sometimes problematic. A self-care gospel without real nourishment and an appropriate level of humility is hard to develop and find. It's something I'm not going to get on a soapbox about any more than I already have, but what I'm trying to say is that we need things like whole foods.

It's hard to overeat or harm ourselves if we're eating healthy, clean, organic, whole foods. It's hard to harm ourselves if we're getting enough sleep and drinking water instead of soda. Water is simple, clean, and nourishing. It's so easy to feel drained and depleted emotionally, energetically, and psychically. Sometimes we reach for things that won't actually fill us up or quench our thirst. Instead of resting, maybe we have too much stimulation from our phones or something we're watching right before bed, and then it's hard to rest.

As I've aged, I've learned that healthy habits are deceptively simple: whole foods, water, sleep, and movement. There are a million ways to move your body and care for your inner life, but if we don't do those simple things every day, we run on empty. Then it's tempting to reach for quick fixes that won't sustain us. One of the things I've noticed during this retrograde is how people talk about feeling depleted and drained. A Mars Retrograde in Cancer can be about getting in touch with self-undermining habits—like not knowing how to take care of ourselves.

It's not just about prioritizing ourselves and doing whatever we want, but figuring out what truly heals and nourishes us. And those things are usually simple, like water. I know that talking about self-care, diet, exercise, or rest is complicated. Many people have serious afflictions that need more than these simple things. I understand that, and I'm not trying to be overly simplistic. But one of the gifts of water is how simple the healthiest things usually are. Even if we add those things to the most complex situations, they tend to help.

Let's move on to the third thing: connecting to others through feelings is a part of how we feel healthy and alive. One of the qualities of water is that it runs downward to pool together. Water has a collectivity to it. Although we have personal feelings, and it's important to have a relationship with our inner life and emotions so that we feel whole, emotional health is about how we work with and allow different emotions to flow together.

There's an inner level at which we're developing emotional wholeness, but on an external level, it's also important that we share instinctual, physical, and emotional connections with others. It could be joy, happiness, interest, curiosity, entertainment, fun, romance, sensuality, or creativity. If you play music with others, it feels really good. You feel them, and they feel you. With my girls, something as simple as putting a puzzle together or taking the dog for a walk with my wife to have some alone time—those moments of connection are important.

When someone tells me something they're going through, I feel it, and they feel what I'm going through. It's important that we connect in feeling with other beings. I'm not sure how much of that is possible purely through social media or internet contacts. There's something simple and basic about sharing meaningful emotional contact with other human beings in the flesh. Even chatting or texting with people has a kind of connection, but it's different from sharing a coffee or dinner with a friend and feeling what's going on.

If there's one thing a cycle like this in water can teach us, it's the importance of having healthy, harmonious emotional contacts with others. That's part of how we feel healthy and alive. It's part of how we repair, heal, and nurture ourselves. Sharing and exchanging feelings with others is part of how we rest, recover, and nourish ourselves. Sometimes cycles like this show us that certain relationships aren't doing that, or can't do that, or are hindering that. It's important to have healthy exchanges. The topics don't have to be happy, but you have to leave feeling like you connected.

The fourth thing is that releasing negative feelings can be done without avoidance. Negative feelings are part of life—grief, pain, suffering. We started off talking about how they can be fertile and creative. But there's also a way in which we have to release them. I watch this with my girls. Tina the Teardrop has had something to say about this with my younger daughter, who has a Pisces Moon. She's super sensitive, sweet, and emotional. She gets really stuck sometimes in a feeling or a mood.

We don't force her to feel a certain way, but we try to let her feel what she feels. I used Tina to talk about how we can honor and acknowledge an emotion, really feel it, and then, when it's time, let it go. Sometimes we think that letting go of a negative emotion means we're avoiding or denying some part of ourselves. That can be true if we try to avoid negative emotions entirely. But there's also a place where we need to say, "Okay, I've felt you, I've acknowledged you, and now I'm going to release you."

Every being does this dance differently. It's not about being cookie-cutter or doing something in a Zen way. One lesson from water, especially during a Mars Retrograde in Cancer, is knowing when to let something go—something difficult, something you've been fearing, or something haunting you emotionally. How and when do we simply let go and say, "Okay, I've listened, I've heard, but if I continue to let you be here, your presence will be a burden or create disease within me"?

For emotions to be creative, we need to let them flow. We can't hold onto them too long, or they become stagnant, like a stagnant pool of water where disease grows. So, that's something to think about.

Finally, the fifth thing is to watch for the quality of water. This is a wild story. When Mars was going direct through Cancer in my third house—your local neighborhood, the local culture and environment—we found out there was going to be construction in our neighborhood due to some issue with the water piping. They discovered toxins in the water, like lead. We had our water tested, and it was concerning. So, we started using a Berkey water filter and looking into a filtration system for the kitchen sink.

Then my trainer suggested getting a spring water delivery service. Spring water is great because filtered water can strip some minerals out, and those minerals are good for you. So, my wife and I looked into it and decided to try it. As Mars was slowing down to station and turn direct, we got the spring water delivered. I drank it, and I swear to God, it was like a psychedelic experience. I'm not one to sensationalize stuff like this, but I had an altered state kind of experience with this water.

The first thing I noticed was that the water felt thicker and denser—probably because of the minerals. Then I started feeling like it was charged electrically. I started feeling the water in my body differently than with normal filtered water. I started feeling what I can only describe as the voice of water, saying, "Yeah, I'm from the earth. I'm loaded with minerals. I come up through the earth, and I have the charge of the earth in me." I really felt it. It was shocking.

One of my biggest Mars Retrograde takeaways, on a super mundane level, was this weird thing that happened in my local neighborhood with the water and shifting to natural spring water delivery in glass bottles. We swap out the five-gallon glass bottles every few weeks. It feels like I'm drinking real water now. I don't know what I've been drinking before. I'm not saying the rest of the water isn't real, but that's how I felt drinking this stuff. It was incredible.

I started having this weird, intuitive thought—maybe because Neptune is about to move into Aries—that people might start fighting over water. It was the first time I'd ever thought something like that. I suddenly felt very defensive and protective over water. It was a profound experience for me. This happened as Mars was retrograding through a trine with Saturn in Pisces in my 11th house, so maybe I was tapping into some collective concern over the health of water or the future of water on our planet.

One very literal thing is to consider the quality of the water we're drinking. It's a huge part of what we need every day. I've heard one formula being half your weight in ounces—so if you weigh 180 pounds, drink 90 ounces per day. But the point is to watch for the quality of your water. I'm not saying go get spring water, but this made a big impact on me. It was one of my biggest takeaways from Mars Retrograde. I'm someone who drinks water—I don't drink soda—but this was like, "Whoa, I'm drinking a totally different kind of water."

We can also take this metaphorically. Watch for the quality of the water. If you've ever noticed when you're dreaming at night and become lucid, there's some part of the environment playing a role in your dream. For example, I had a dream recently where I was lying on a highway in the Arctic, freezing, next to a dog that was shivering and peeing on the highway. I became lucid and realized there was a crack in our bedroom window letting cold air in, and I had to pee. So, I closed the window, got up to pee, and put on a sweatshirt. That's how psychedelic spaces work—the imagery and feelings are often connected to things in our lives.

You don't need psychedelics to get in touch with those connections. Dream work, meditation, and even a simple water quality test can help. You can stop at any point and ask, "How am I feeling right now?" Tina does this with our girls. She says, "As a little teardrop of water, I like to think about how I'm feeling." My girls love it. They get really excited and interested. I think one of the reasons I chose that whispering voice for Tina is that water signs were said to be quiet or mute—secretive or subtle. Emotions are like that too.

A simple water quality test we can run at any point is to ask, "How am I feeling right now?" before making a decision or answering someone. My wife is really good at this. She's a Cancer Rising and developed this skill as a yoga teacher. We do this with our girls too. It's a simple way to take care of ourselves daily. Just check in: "How am I feeling? What's the quality of the water?" You can feel, "Oh, this feeling, that feeling," and get in touch with it. That's what I'm really feeling. If we learn how to work with what we're actually feeling, there's so much emotional intelligence there to guide us.

Cycles like these are great for all of these things. So, I hope this has been a useful, interesting episode with some thoughts and meditations on water. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't. I look forward to seeing you guys again tomorrow to continue unpacking some of the transits of the week. Bye, bye!