I'm doing the work, so where's my reward? Jupiter Direct

March 11 - June 29; Jupiter Direct in Cancer

Greetings friends,

Today marks one of my favorite annual shifts—Jupiter direct. Jupiter spends four months every year in retrograde motion, inviting us to observe our beliefs so we can understand how well they are—or are not—supporting our movement toward our desires and dreams. In modern translations, we have come to associate Jupiter with all the things we desire—abundance, blessings, luck, indulgence…more. I find it important to point out that while Jupiter is representative of blessings and pleasantries, it is just as much of a teacher as its devilish counterpart, Saturn. Jupiter, as it transits a sign, facilitates a self-paced growth process, one that often involves a great deal of discomfort as we realize that perhaps what we thought we wanted is not actually what we want, and because of that, we have to depart our comfort zones to pursue the thing we are actually desiring. Growing pains resulting from our own self-understanding are bound to result from Jupiter transits.

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IF YOU WISH TO MOVE FORWARD, YOU HAVE TO GO BACK

It’s curious: Jupiter is a planet representing expansion, growth, and moving toward the great unknown, yet in the sign of the home, private spaces, and the nervous system—Cancer—it exalts. Sounds a bit contradictory, right? Exaltation brings a planet into a celebrity-like signature, as the sign gives the planet additional support that it may not be able to access through the sign(s) it rules, allowing it to perform above and beyond its typical threshold. Interestingly, each planet also finds itself at a “maximum exaltation,” if you will, at a specific degree of the sign that it is already exalted in. For Jupiter, that’s 15° Cancer…the degree it’s turning direct at today. Fascinating!

Jupiter’s presence in Cancer has urged us all to examine what our capacity—specifically our emotional one—is, and this is why it finds exaltation here. Jupiter in Cancer highlights how you can only hold as much as you have created the space for; once your capacity is reached, you cannot sustainably support more, even if you may want to. Perhaps many of us have tried to force ourselves into developing the capacity to hold something by latching onto it and using the fear of losing it as motivation to change. But this is inherently contradictory to the teachings of Cancer. Such a strategy automatically pushes us into a state of survival; Cancer aims to help us cultivate a feeling of safety and peace within. Many of us likely started this transit thinking that placing ourselves in an environment that demands the expansion of our internal capacity for feeling deserving, capable, attractive, secure—whatever we’re wanting to feel—would fast-track us to actually feeling that way. But clearly, it hasn’t.

We have been pushed to reckon with the fact that capability and capacity are two different things, and with this understanding, perhaps we have had to make peace with letting go of things that we may deeply desire but do not currently have the bandwidth to sustainably interface with. The time Jupiter spent direct in Cancer, between late June and mid-November of last year, may have involved us trying to muscle ourselves into having that higher capacity, but we may have realized around the time it turned retrograde that we were exerting a great deal of energy without seeing the results we desire, and this is where the Jupiter retrograde period came into play.

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WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL SAFE? WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT’S NOT THERE ANYMORE?

Perhaps you can notice a turning point that happened between late October and mid-November of 2025, as this was around the time that Jupiter reached the degree it turned retrograde from. There could have been an event or experience that pushed you to self-examine more thoroughly, or maybe you had an impactful emotional experience that prompted it instead. Planets in direct motion tend to translate into the material world more literally, so you may have found that Jupiter highlighted, at that time, a primary example of what you were unknowingly attaching your security, emotional safety, and inner stability to. Perhaps around the time Jupiter went retrograde that thing was removed from your life, or its presence was altered in some way, which may have created inflammation around insecurities to prompt deeper self-examination. This “thing” could be anything—a person, a job, a behavior, a vice, something pleasant, something unpleasant…I could go on. But whatever it was, you may have found a strong sense of safety in it because it is familiar to you in some way.

Since then, we may find that the material things we attach our sense of safety to have been reconfigured in some monumental ways, which, again, has pushed us to ask ourselves the question, “What am I looking for externally that I am not providing to myself?”

Jupiter has likely illuminated to us that the nervous system and emotional body always reveal the truth, even if we can temporarily cultivate an external reality that contradicts our inner state of being. Jupiter is a planet that requires a gentle touch to work with, as it is often referring to immaterial progress. We may attach things to Jupiter—money, luxury, travel, knowledge—but they are merely physical representations of Jupiter’s true focus: feeling. I’m not meaning emotion; I’m meaning the feeling you get when you think of the thing that Jupiter represents to you. We tend to attach physical things to Jupiter because they are examples of the feeling we are trying to access—limitlessness, freedom, optimism…being in tune with the forces of the universe. Jupiter is representative of the manifestation process, if you wish to call it that, as it reminds us that we attract things that emulate our same energetic signature. And especially in Cancer, Jupiter has brought that idea, “as above, so below,” into view. Perhaps we’ve become so obsessive over the “above” that we’ve forgotten the significance of and wisdom that can be found in what lies below. Jupiter is the planet of philosophy and spiritual wisdom; it reminds us that attachment is the root of all suffering—to attract everything you have to want nothing. Easier said than done, but there is something to learn from this planet, especially when we watch its movements through transit.

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WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

Now, at the end of the Jupiter retrograde period, we have likely gained some wisdom about what we didn’t know. And this is usually the time in which we are invited to start applying what we’ve learned in a more tangible or material way. Considering Jupiter in Cancer has specifically been speaking to us about the nervous system and emotional body, the retrograde period has likely pointed out to us the weaknesses of these inner systems and has perhaps directed our attention back to early memories and first experiences that put us into a state of survival from the jump. With Jupiter now direct, this is a time for us to start providing ourselves with new evidence to support the integration of the beliefs that we are safe, we deserve the things we want, and we are capable of achieving our dreams. You may find it easier to catch yourself in the act of repeating behaviors that were shaped by unsafe experiences—literal or emotional—from many years ago.

And with all that said, you may find that you’re making peace with the fact that you cannot force yourself into feeling safe; you can’t force yourself into feeling anything for that matter. Similar to gaining the trust of a feral cat, to change the baseline of your nervous system, you have to be patient and understand the harsh circumstances it has endured to keep you alive. A big part of changing our habitual behaviors is understanding how they came into being and empathizing with the fact that our circumstances may not have given us the option to respond to them in a more centered or peaceful way. But another piece of making change is not allowing ourselves to respond to discomfort in the ways that we always have. This requires us to diligently occupy the body and devotedly practice presence and mindfulness. Societal expectations and popularized metrics of success teach us from such an early age to neglect the body’s cues. We have grown up in a world that has rewarded us for being mechanical. But the transits reflect our world beginning to radically change, and similar to how we may think that changing our exterior experience will force change within us internally, we may think that a changed world starts by us working outside of ourselves. It doesn’t. Jupiter direct in Cancer, among several other active transits, reminds us that true, lasting change begins at the cellular level. We are cells of the universe’s body, which means change starts within each of us, individually.

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As we move into this final stage of Jupiter’s passage through Cancer, I hope you can embrace the delicate process of teaching yourself a new way of responding to emotion.

Creating Capacity, A Seminar - March 20th, 2026, 2:30 pm EST

I’m hosting a seminar on how to sustainably expand your capacity (for wealth, abundance, discomfort, attention, love, etc.) as informed by Jupiter and additional transits we’re moving through, but the information shared will be applicable to your life long after Jupiter has departed Cancer. I have received so much advice from all sorts of people over the years about how to make money from sales and have been told all of the things I “should” do to evoke emotion from the people I’m selling to (I suppose that would be you). The standard strategy is to highlight a problem to create stress or fear within your potential buyer so that you can then present yourself as the dazzling hero with the only solution (available at the convenient price of $49.99!).

This has never sat right with me. I don’t enjoy the thought of people working with me because they fear something tragic will happen if they don’t. And on the topic of capacity, my approach to astrology is so transformative that I think, subconsciously, the reason I have stayed clear of the typical sales tactics is because if someone were to be seeking insight from me out of desperation or fear, I would do more harm than good. I’ve realized in the past few years of having a public practice that people need to be ready to work with me, because I go deep. In the essence of that phrase, “People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves,” some of my astrological translations may go right over someone’s head if they are not willing to face all parts of themselves. I want people to work with me because they want to increase their feelings of empowerment, confidence, and autonomy. Because I’m not the dazzling hero that has the only solution, I’m a language translator and an energy analyst. A lot of my job is putting into words what you are already feeling but may be struggling to articulate and make sense of.

But that said, I am intentionally pricing this seminar about expanding capacity at $25 a ticket. I don’t want participating in this event to trigger any type of scarcity mindset or feelings of discomfort about investing in yourself. I want everyone who registers for this seminar to feel GOOD about spending the money. My goal with this conversation is to provide those who are interested with some tools that they can use to navigate the remainder of Jupiter in Cancer and onward from a place of inner peace and security. I’ll be discussing what the remainder of this transit is likely to bring, how we can best work with it, and what that may mean specifically for each of the signs. I’ll be going into more detail about what I’ve discussed in this newsletter as well. If you’re interested, you can learn more about this event and secure your seat through the link below.

CREATING CAPACITY: Friday, March 20th, at 2:30 pm EST

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I hope you found this newsletter insightful and supportive of your personal reflection process. Wishing you all the blessings that Jupiter has to offer in this final chapter of it’s stay in Cancer.

Hope to see you at my seminar, and if not, chat soon.
xx, Aspen