As with most things that trickle down from the spiritual community into mainstream understanding, a distortion takes place and people often get hold of the wrong end of the stick. This is true for all spiritual concepts whether we are talking about Divine Partnerships, Kundalini Awakening, the Law of Attraction, or in this case Mercury Retrograde – a one-sided narrative takes hold and becomes the mainstream definition of the much broader original concept.
It’s almost as if the mainstream understanding of spiritual concepts is the dumbed-down version of it (no offense intended). I don’t think this is anyone’s fault in particular, but merely a side-effect of the fact that the mainstream tends to see things from a one-sided point of view that does not allow for complexity or depth.
Simple and simplistic sell, but not everything can be reduced to a one-sided view without losing its multifacetedness or depth.
This is certainly true for the complexity of a planet such as Mercury in Retrograde. Now, I am not an Astrologer so what I am sharing is not from an astrological viewpoint. It’s simply based on my own experience over the past say 25 years in which I have lived through Mercury Retrograde consciously multiple times a year and have learned by trial and error.
Most people fear Mercury Retrograde and expect all hell to break loose because that is most often how we are told to see this celestial event that takes place three to four times a year. But just because Mercury goes in retrograde nine to twelve weeks a year (three weeks at a time) doesn’t mean we need to put our lives on hold because of it. We have to keep moving forward in our lives, even if Mercury decides to go what appears to be in backward motion.
Sure, sometimes that doesn’t always pan out the way you want it but often the worst thing that does happen is delays. I signed the contract to my house during the Mercury Retrograde period of February 16 to March 10, 2020. I had to make sure to seal the deal and I couldn’t wait for Mercury retrograde to end.
Five days later Spain went into lockdown and I was locked out of the country until July 2020 which was also during a period of Mercury in retrograde but the move went smoothly despite having to fly to Spain and send our belongings with a moving truck over land and water. We managed to only lose one box which had a year’s worth of sambal Manis (the only sambal I eat) which turns out you could also buy on the island.
So yes, you can lose things during Mercury in retrograde or things can break down but in general, it doesn’t have to mean that disaster is upon us. In fact, Mercury retrograde can be a valuable time to tie up loose ends and to go over things done in the past to improve them. Astrologers often talk about this, but somehow this message always seems to get drowned out by the fearmongering about everything that can go wrong when Mercury goes into retrograde.
This is why I wanted to write something about Mercury Retrograde that will change your perception of it so that you can stop fearing it once and for all. Part of shifting into the new paradigm is, shifting out of fear-based thinking, and fearing Mercury retrograde is of course a fear that is just as superstitious as avoiding walking under a ladder or thinking that seeing a black cat means bad luck. You and your life are safe even during Mercury Retrograde.
I have used this particular Mercury Retrograde which is almost at its end, to improve things in my business. Despite Mercury ruling technology, I was able to make massive upgrades simply because when Mercury is in retrograde we get a chance to improve what we’ve already got.
Mercury retrograde is a valuable time to revisit the past and redo what can be done better.
Here’s a list of the tech changes I made in the retrograde period:
Changed servers
We host our sites on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) but the provider that we were using was terrible, our sites were blinking on and off like Christmas lights. This is not good for people wanting to use our site and it’s also not good for Google ranking. We complained a couple of times to the provider’s helpdesk which didn’t work, so I set up alerts to track our downtime and you could see that the sites were going down (offline) every hour.
We had to move these sites and not first wait for Mercury to go direct. After sending in a screenshot showing how often our sites were down, I finally got the company to refund me the three years I had paid ahead and we moved servers the next day.
We made backups of all our websites and moved them easily and without any hassle – we never even needed the backups but we made them just in case. The new server is fantastic, much faster and we have experienced no more downtime. Funny side story here, I was just about to sign up with another provider that an old colleague from my web design days recommended when his site went down and stayed down for more than ten hours.
As downtime was our issue, I took it as a warning not to buy with this provider but to go to another company that has an excellent reputation. It was as if my guides were waving red flags not to sign up, because his site went down exactly when I was going to put in my credit card details.
I brought in an expert for speed optimization
After switching servers the loading speed of our pages had improved but not enough so I decided to bring in an expert. I went to Fiverr.com (this is an affiliate link) which is a site where you can buy tech and other related services. This was after I spent a couple of hours on a call with my full-time developer Noor trying to fix it ourselves. Noor was skeptical because you never really know what you are going to get on Fiverr.
There are a lot of amateurs on there, but a lot of pros as well. I actually met one of my dearest friends on Fiverr, who I also visited when I was in Dubai in 2019. We have been friends since 2013, I helped him improve his English and he is the photographer behind all those amazing photos from the photoshoot in Dubai.
To avoid buying a cat in a sack, I made sure to select a gig with the best reviews, and lo and behold within 24 hours they turned our sluggish site into a mean, lean fighting machine. The first thing my developer checked when he came online was our page speed and he was blown away by how fast they had made the website. Noor is by the way the best developer I have ever worked with, but his forte lies in custom coding – he can build anything I ask him to build.
We are using a plugin for the Oracle now, but Noor built our first Oracle website from scratch including the pick-a-card functionality. Anyway, long story short the page speed optimization was a huge success, we went from scoring 19 and in the red to now scoring in the mid-80s which is what you need if you want to have good SEO (search engine optimization). Running a spiritual business online is not just all about the woo, thanks to my background in both IT testing and online marketing I also know how to run the tech side of my business and find the experts I need when we don’t have this expertise within our own team.
Ordered a Media reel
In one of the many mini-courses or Masterclasses that I have followed next to the online programs I am enrolled in and wrote about recently, I picked up the tip to create a Media reel with all your media exposure. A client of mine who is an Ace in getting media exposure offered a masterclass on how she got so much media coverage and what it has done for her brand and business.
Me always eager to learn, even though I have had some excellent media coverage as well from big names in the Dutch media was keen to learn more from this media diva. I had already implemented a couple of her best practices but didn’t have a media reel yet. So, I went back to Fiverr and an amazing girl from Argentina made a beautiful media reel for me. Despite Mercury being the planet of communication, we had no hiccups whatsoever and she delivered an amazing end product that I am really happy with.
Upgraded The Ultimate Guide to Inner Union
Because we are working on a press kit page I was thinking about how to show all the newspaper and magazine coverage I have had in the past and I decided to go with a flipbook, a flipbook is a digitalized PDF that you can flip through like a real book. I found a gig on Fiverr that converts PDFs to a flipbook format after trying to find how to do this ourselves and only finding sites that came with subscriptions.
Now I don’t mind paying a subscription, I for example have a Shutterstock subscription where I buy all my stock photos. I don’t use all the 10 images a month, but I use images every month which is why a subscription with them makes sense. A subscription for one or two flipbooks doesn’t make sense so I was glad to find them being offered on Fiverr without recurring costs. The guy delivered in two hours and then we went back and forth on getting the branding right which took around twelve hours in total minus eight hours of sleep.
I have to say I have had ONLY extremely positive results making these upgrades during Mercury Retrograde when trust me I have had my fair share of bad luck on Fiverr over the past 12 years. However, instead of everything going wrong, everything went superbly right. I mean three Fiverr gigs in a row delivered beyond expectations is certainly a record. It’s the equivalent of hitting a green wave at the traffic lights while driving your car, it doesn’t happen every day.
This is not to say that nothing went differently than planned during this retrograde, I had a cancellation from a healer who was scheduled to do a group healing in one of my groups and I am still looking for someone to replace her, but it doesn’t need to be Mercury Retrograde for someone to cancel. Granted, it is more likely to happen during Mercury in retrograde but these things can happen any time of the year.
So, instead of becoming frantic every time Mercury goes retrograde, use this time instead to upgrade what you already have. Look at it this way, when Mercury goes retrograde the Universe is giving us three weeks multiple times a year to revisit what we already have and see how we can improve it. That’s such a precious gift because sometimes looking back is just as important as moving forward, as it gives us a chance to move forward in a higher evolution of what we already had.
This was certainly true for me this Mercury Retrograde because I also upgraded the name of my healing modality to Soul Embodiment® Therapy and started the trademark registration.
This current Mercury Retrograde ends tomorrow October 1st, 2022, and the next retrograde starts on December 28th, 2022 but with the information I have shared, you will never again have to fear Mercury coming to stir the pot. Instead, you can use the gift of Mercury retrograde to upgrade your current life circumstances. Mercury retrograde is probably not a good time to start something new unless you have to, but it’s a great time to perfect upon the old or already existing. Mercury retrograde is a gift and not a curse.
With my deepest love,
