Honestly, this whole eclipse cycle has me feeling like I’m wading through wet cement. I’ve been tracking transits for years, but this time it’s hitting different. As a software engineer in Madison, I spend my days debugging code, but lately my own nervous system feels like it’s throwing unhandled exceptions. I’m not gonna pretend I’ve got some high-vibe solution. I’m just tired of the spiritual bypassing that floods these threads when the moon goes dark. “Just raise your frequency,” they say. Cool. Meanwhile, rent’s up, the news is a firehose of dread, and half of us are running on three hours of sleep.

I keep pulling the Eight of Swords whenever I sit down with my deck. It’s that classic image of mental paralysis—feeling trapped by your own thoughts, convinced there’s no way out. But the ropes aren’t real. They’re cognitive distortions, mostly catastrophizing and emotional reasoning. When the whole collective is staring down systemic collapse, it makes sense that our brains default to threat detection. Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious for a reason. These eclipses don’t just “shift energy.” They drag whatever we’ve been ignoring back into the light. If we’re not feeling heavy, anxious, or spiritually fatigued, we’re probably dissociating.

I’ve been trying to treat my practice like actual maintenance instead of a productivity hack. Grounding, sure, but I’m finally learning to sense what my body is actually asking for instead of forcing myself into some rigid routine. It’s messy. Some days I just stare at the wall and drink tea. Other days I take a long walk without my headphones, letting the city noise wash over me until my shoulders drop an inch. I’m not trying to “manifest” abundance or rewrite my destiny with a candle. I’m just trying to keep my nervous system from short-circuiting while the world spins faster.

If you’re feeling that same heavy, static-charged exhaustion, please know you’re not broken. You’re just responding to a lot of unseen pressure. The eclipses aren’t asking us to perform. They’re asking us to pause, feel the weight, and let it move through us. Be gentle with yourself this cycle. Drink water. Step outside. Breathe until your chest stops feeling like it’s caving in. We’ll get through it, not by hacking the universe, but by tending to the fragile, human systems that keep us alive.