Before the Leo-loud, empire-ending dumpster fire of late summer's eclipse season, a moment of radical softness. Here's how to drink it in.
"Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous." - Adrienne Maree Brown
But right before the sky opens up and drops the next massive wave of evolutionary chaos on our heads, the universe is offering a rare, honeyed pocket of plea bargaining with the cosmos, to consolidate whatever the fuck just happened to your life. We are here to patch up our wounds before we have to re-enter the trenches of late summer breakneck developments and whatever dumpster fire alien disclosure plot twists the universe decides to throw at us next.
Before we parse the structural geometry of the sky, know that I have built a full survival manual for this transition at the very end of this text. I have a little guidance, a little message for every single rising sign, a deep guided meditation for when times are good but your trauma makes you too terrified to actually receive the freebies, a little ritual to crack open your capacity for receiving pleasure and a custom tarot layout with journaling prompts to help you reframe the June astrology in context of your personal storyline.
You’ve just crossed the electrified bridge of May and the Gemini current overload.. the one that lit a match under every sleeping nerve, every hidden anger, every plot twist that forced a new beginning you weren’t sure you were fucking ready for.
Now…Exhale..
Stretch those tired legs.
We’re arriving at an unusually sweet rest stop on the nervous system assault marathon that is 2026. Venus and Jupiter dripping some sweet blessing like slow honey after a storm, suddenly your world might for a brief spell(literally!) feel less like a dodgeball game with nukes and more like a silk hammock hung between two oaks.
Early June sends an invite to fold back into our bodies, back to our senses, which - as senses do - allow for healing through the radical act of sensuality. This is the moment you take off the armour, piece by piece, and remember the feeling of soft fabric on your skin.
The senses, in their infinite animal wisdom, begin the work of mending what the mind cannot.
But hold that thought - we will absolutely go full manic pixie, spiritually delulu self-care goddess mode, promise. But first, let’s look at the fucking shitstorm brewing on to the horizon.
The first half of 2026 has been an absolute fucking meat grinder. Structural shifts - relentless, news cycles - weird. And also relentless. And the creeping feeling that reality is losing its firm footing in repeated cycles of history and spiralling somewhere into a low grade sci-fi fan fiction.
If you think you can skip this intermission and just keep white knuckling your way through the year, you are completely out of your mind. You really will want to chill the fuck out now, especially considering where we are heading.
At the end of June, Jupiter enters Leo.
The planet of too big, too much, of loud expansiveness, is pairing up with the zodiac sign playing in the exact same sand pit. The audience for this savage celestial WMMA fight has been gathering for some time now and end of June is a loud megaphone announcing the start of ego maniacs deathmatch with balls-to-the-wall high-budget, theatrical staging and yes, there will be blood, not corn syrup. This is not eat the rich type of shit, this is rich eat each other and we all watch and choke on popcorn.
And then immediately all throughout July, both Jupiter and Uranus start squaring and sextiling other planets and each other like an insane secretary at an old switchboard who just spilled a boiling mug of black coffee all over the live circuits. Throw in a chaotic Mercury retrograde in Cancer and some deeply volatile Leo and Aquarius eclipses, and you have a recipe for absolute carnage. Ai karamba indeed.
The French guy who called COVID is back again, this time insisting summer 2026 is going to be “surprisingly good” which is honestly more alarming than another pandemic.
Lately, you have probably seen a bunch of internet people dragging the Barbault Basket model into conversations, and honestly, most of that Reddit chatter is just that.. the real history is way more restrained and infinitely more fascinating.
The brilliant French astrologer André Barbault was not sitting at his desk decades ago predicting a specific global pandemic. What he actually did was track long range planetary cycles to observe how heavy outer planets cluster together simultaneously. He identified the 2020 period as a major peak convergence zone because multiple slow moving planetary gears were tightening at the exact same time after a multi decade build up. Not another magical Covid prophecy, but an obsessive, intelligent diagnosis of a historical stress pattern.
Saturn and Neptune are currently conjoining in Aries, which is a wild cocktail of harsh reality colliding with total ego dissolution, happening right in the sign of aggressive ignition and raw action. Uranus in Gemini I think we already established about a million times is at the very least and very conservative the extraterrestrials landing on the White House front lawn (also the whole AI bullshit storyline of our current times). Pluto is already deep in Aquarius, enacting a long term demolition of mass technology and collective systems. In the language of Barbault, the basket formation of summer 2026 is another tightening of multiple slow moving cosmic wheels that have stopped acting like separate subplots and are now performing as one single, highly compressed storyline.
And the plot twist? Unlike the messier, chaotic brand of 2020, this one is apparently packaged as a consciousness upgrade arc for humanity. A spiritual expansion pack. A soft reboot. A “you are now ready to access higher levels of reality” notification from a software none of us remember installing.
Either way, it’s less apocalypse, more like a beginning of something resembling coherence. If you want the realistic one, it’s reality becoming self-aware enough to start patch it’s rogue code in public. Fascism out! Utopia in!
••●••
This brief window of early June astrology represents a very specific, rare texture of human experience.
A pocket of pleasure that feels like sitting on your kitchen counter in the morning during a massive city wide blackout. You were ready to leap out of the door and rush (late!) to your tedious office job, but somehow the whole public transport infrastracture collapsed today (you don’t feeli like questioning why), so instead you’re here, eating expensive cherries with greek yogurt out of a ceramic bowl, listening to your old battery operated walkman you brought home from your last visit to your parents.
This pocket of pleasure feels like kicking your shoes off to sprint across wet grass right after surviving a brutal, hours long panic attack, feeling the literal dirt pressing into your soles, and realizing with an embarrassing surge of relief that your body is still real, still human and still beautifully alive despite your mind trying its absolute best to destroy you. (Aka just my regular Tuesday)
A pocket of pleasure that sounds like a key turning in your front door, you lock yourself in, rebelliously deciding NOT to put your dead phone on charger, and spending a rainy afternoon cooking an incredibly complex meal that takes five hours to simmer, entirely for yourself, with absolutely zero intention of taking a photo of it or sharing it with anyone, just to prove that your precious attention can still belong to you.
It is an act of absolute rebellion to refuse to let the chaos outside dictate the temperature of your skin. The profound realization that joy is not a prize you have to earn by surviving enough trauma first.
••●••
A Guided Meditation for Recognizing & Receiving the Good Shit in Life
I’ve already made a meditation for when the astrology turns heavy and everything feels like it’s tilting off its axis (you’ll find that anchor HERE). But not everything is collapse and crisis. Sometimes the sky opens in the other direction.
Sometimes it gives. …And we flinch.
This guided meditation journey is your permission slip to guzzle down every last drip of blessings the skies are showering us with right now.
••●••
Alright, let’s see where this delicious astrological spa treatment land in your chart (read for your Rising Sign).
We’ll analyse Mercury’s journey with Cancer and through a spicy summer retrograde, Venus & Jupiter make out session in Cancer on June 9th, Chiron entering Taurus to help us heal the wound that is your relationship to receiving, to things that ground you - your body, your senses, your worth.
Below your personalized guidance, you’ll find a little ritual, a little tarot and journaling pause away from the noise, a little salve for the bruised hero the fucked up year of 2026 needed us to become.
