Mercury in retrograde: time to learn the lesson of slowing down
Mercury in retrograde
June 29 – July 23, 2026
A time to learn the lesson of slowing down.
To pause. Think. Listen. Be curious and open, not to jump into action or react, but rather to respond with intention and an acceptance that we are not always, or perhaps never, truly in control.
The only thing that we can control is our own reaction and response to what is, whatever it is.
Tres Jiménez
On Slowing Down While the Sky Turns Yellow
I drew this page the same week Mercury stationed retrograde, and I didn't plan the timing, the cosmos just handed it to me, the way it does. Mercury actually stations retrograde on June 29 at 26°15 Cancer and will station direct on July 23 at 16°18 Cancer, with shadow periods stretching from June 12 to August 6. That's a long runway on either side of the headline dates, which tracks with what I always tell clients: the retrograde itself is rarely where the real disruption shows up. It's the weeks leading in and the weeks unwinding after, when you think you're clear and you're really not.
Worth saying plainly, because I get asked this constantly in sessions when people are spiraling about a "cursed" few weeks: Mercury isn't actually moving backward. It's an optical trick. Earth and Mercury orbit the sun at different speeds, and when our faster inner neighbor laps us, it appears from our vantage point to slow, stop, and reverse, the planetary equivalent of watching a car you're passing on the highway seem to slide backward in your side mirror. Nothing in the heavens has changed direction. What's changed is the angle from which we're watching. I love handing that reframe to a room of leaders, because it's the whole coaching gig in one sentence: the disruption is real, but it's often a matter of perspective, not an actual reversal of your trajectory.
This particular retrograde sits in Cancer, which makes it a different animal than the usual contracts-and-laptops chaos people brace for. A Cancer Mercury retrograde tends to disrupt emotional communication, family conversations, home-related plans, and anything tied to memory and the past, with misunderstandings landing more emotionally charged than logistically annoying.
My own month of June has been the literal summit of a Wheel of Fortune year spending the entire of last week up in the mountains of Lassen California where we both celebrated milestone birthdays, choosing to spend them alone, together.
We were surrounded by lush green pine, fir and cedar trees reaching for the skies.
We also hiked through burned forest where the tall trees were just burned spikes and the forest was a carpet of lush wildflowers and low bright green ground cover coming back to life after the Dixie Fire in 2021 .
This was the place where twenty-four years ago, Jack and I got engaged up there on top of a hill, like the Fool stepping toward the mountains, and it makes sense that the planet of communication chose this exact stretch to ask me to sit in the feeling first and the explaining second.
I keep thinking about the yellow skies that kept showing up in my tarot card pulls leading into this trip, not the easy blue-sky clarity, not the cloudy obstruction, but something more amber and threshold-lit, the color of a sky right before a shift in weather. Mercury retrograde in my own water sign of origin feels like that color exactly.
The card itself is doing what good tarot and good astrology both do when you let them work together: naming the lesson before you've consciously identified you need it.
Pause. Think. Listen.
Be curious instead of reactive. That's not New Age fluff, that's the actual coaching skill I teach in every room I facilitate, the gap between stimulus and response is where all the leadership happens. The earth in my drawing, small and contained inside that swirling Mercury loop, is basically every client I've ever coached through a crisis they thought required instant action. It didn't. It required a breath.
So I'm taking my own cards seriously this cycle. Not rushing program decisions that don't need to be made by Friday. Not firing off the email I drafted at 11pm. Letting the client’s materials sit one more day before I call them done. The only thing I can actually control, as I sketched in my journal, is my own reaction to what is. Mercury will do what Mercury does until July 23. I get to decide whether I meet it curious or combative. I'm choosing curious. Mostly.
Ask me again in week three.
