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Welcome to our second Mercury retrograde of the year. These next few weeks invite spaciousness in our minds, our words, and our days. This Mercury retrograde isn’t about anyone else. It’s about you.
When Is the Next Mercury Retrograde in 2025?
The closest planet to the Sun enters its perceived backward spin on July 18, 2025, and remains there through August 11, 2025.
What Does Mercury in Retrograde Mean?
In astrology, Mercury rules the mind. It is communication, mental processing, learning, and memory. It is the framework through which we perceive our life, our selves, our experiences, and our future.
Because it is the quickest planet to orbit, Mercury retrogrades more than any other cosmic body, entering its backward spin three and sometimes four times a year. We know this energy well. We have been breathing, moving, and dancing with Mercury retrograde since our first breath. Something innate within us all is attuned to the wisdom and medicine of it.
All planetary retrogrades remind us that life—and, by extension, we—move in cycles. Our path is not linear. Rather, it spirals, opens, and unfolds in a rhythm that we cannot always control.
Retrogrades are the necessary step back that brings us a vaster perspective from which we can take a more expanded intention, consciousness, and alignment with what lies ahead. They are an inward reflection and reconnection with what truly matters to us. They are a space to disconnect from the many messages of how our lives should look so that we can instead listen to the quiet whisper within of how our lives should feel.
Think of Mercury in retrograde, and any planet in retrograde, as a refueling, reorienting, realigning, and return to the inner so that when we are moving through the outer, we are certain to move in our truth.
What Mercury Retrograde 2025 in Leo Teaches You
While in Leo, Mercury retrograde’s reflection becomes oriented toward the self. Ruled by the Sun, Leo is radiance, creativity, selfhood, and spark. It is the sign of self-expression as sacred act, a constellation reminding us that we are creations of creation. And it is here to ensure we continue in that thread as we continue to create.
Mercury retrograde 2025 in Leo is a space to reflect on the narratives, perspectives, thought forms, and ideas in our minds that keep us from our most authentic and liberated expression of who we are. Leo expresses its essence brilliantly because that is what it means to be alive. It reminds us that we each have a unique radiance, a spark unlike anyone else’s, and to dim that would not only create a disservice to ourselves and to every other human but disconnect us from life itself.
What has kept you dim, hidden, contorted, or quiet? Where has your voice been hidden, your light turned down, your expression cut off?
This Mercury retrograde is about you and no one else. It’s about saying yes to yourself and honoring the unique and sacred expression of life that you are. It’s about you saying yes to your most radiant and liberated iteration of yourself and your life. It’s also about what exists within your heart and how that desires to express, shine, and play in this world.
What Mercury Retrograde 2025 Means for You
This retrograde, bring your mind into alignment with your heart. Speak to the fears and narratives that have kept you hidden and offer them a different perspective. As you do so, you’ll create space to feel into your unique radiance and the creation alive within you. How does being you feel? Read for your rising sign.
Aries Rising
Create space between yourself and the world. Create space so you can tune in without the voices of peers, family, and collective narrative. This retrograde is a space to reconnect with your own voice, truth, and spark beneath all that. To learn how to celebrate yourself, move with your own rhythm, and create a life of romance, play, and creativity on your own terms.
Taurus Rising
It’s an especially internal retrograde for you that draws you further into your psyche, body, and emotional currents. It invites you to wade through the storehouse of memories within your underworld and the inherited narratives and patterns asking for an update. The child you once were knows who you are and how to radiate your beauty. Return to that. Learn from that.
Gemini Rising
This retrograde arrives as a doorway to a sanctuary where you can return to your voice, your truth, and your expression. It’s a cleansing and clearing of the realm of your mind. And it’s a journey into your voice, that sacred connection between what lives within and what exists in the world around you. Reconnect with your voice, whether through writing, journaling, sounding, humming, singing. Practice until you feel reconnected, realigned, and empowered.
Cancer Rising
Sometimes you need to take a step back from caring so that you can practice receiving. Life is giving in every moment, whether through wisdom, resources, or love. It does so through the intangible realms of feeling and the tangible realms of finances, people, or opportunities. How can you create space to remember what it is to feel open to this? You are realigning with the inherent and unquestionable worthiness etched into your being. As you do so, you are rewriting your narrative around receptivity and, by extension, abundance of all sorts.
Leo Rising
You are a radiant expression of vitality, beauty, and playfulness. What aspects of yourself don’t remember this? What inner narrative tells you otherwise? What keeps you from the embodiment of truth? These spaces are your doorways back home to yourself. This Mercury retrograde, continue meeting all that exists within you that is fearful or hurt with compassion.
Virgo Rising
It’s time to come home to beauty, sacredness, reverence, and your inner knowing. Close your eyes for a moment. Feel all that is sacred residing in your body and moving through all things. And this retrograde, reconnect with that. This time holds medicine for you that can be found only through silence, awareness, and meditation. Ask questions. Open your heart. Write letters to the sacred asking for your desires. Release your grip and surrender to something infinitely larger.
Libra Rising
Intentionally create space between yourself and the collective this Mercury retrograde. Clear every external voice and expectation. Meet any fears related to fitting in or standing out, being accepted or cast out. This retrograde is about you, although it is also about any old scripts that tell you to contort, dim, or hide yourself or that ask you to agree with those around you in the name of acceptance. Who are you beneath who you have been taught to be? There is beauty and magic there.
Scorpio Rising
It’s a retrograde to pause and reconsider who you desire to be in this world, what you desire to create, and the legacy you want to leave behind. You’re looking inward so that you can look ahead with greater clarity, intention, alignment, and purpose. Begin to ask where do you want to be in 10 years and beyond? How do you want to feel in your final moments?
Sagittarius Rising
We are each born into certain perspectives, teachings, and narratives taught as truth through the generations embedded in our collective. This retrograde invites you to explore the pathways existing within you. To take you into the meaning of life, truth, and purpose. To bring you into direct conversation with existence itself. As you reflect on the philosophies currently residing in your mind, bring the question, is this true to me?
Capricorn Rising
Your heart is ready to open—to yourself, to your chosen people, to life, and to beauty, creation, and playful expression. There is depth, medicine, magic, and pure aliveness that exists within you and it wants to spill outward and be expressed. This Mercury retrograde arrives as a remembering of all that exists within you so that you may be a channel for it.
Aquarius Rising
This retrograde invites your awareness to be drawn from your mind to your heart. It invites a reconnection to love as a way of being. What does it mean to share, receive, and be love? How does this way of being offer peace, realignment, and an update to the narratives within your mind surrounding self, relationships, collaboration, connection and relating to others? Continue coming into the heart and offering it a clear pathway to your mind.
Pisces Rising
What would it mean to celebrate yourself? To infuse your everyday rhythm with self-love, creativity, and play? To continue holding up a mirror to your sacred beauty? And to let that way of being inform each movement, decision and habit you make? This Mercury retrograde invites you to move from and with self-respect as you make decisions for your body, mind, and life. After all, you are an expression of creation.
