Pluto as first cab off the retrograde rank for his annual half year sojourn to the underworld is shadow o'clock. No matter what your idea of that means. Despite naysayers and bypassers and the love and light show, I remain devoted to the dark and to our shadows. Our soul's job here is not only to scarper higher, as much as to learn by digging down deeper into ourselves.

Though the past six months or more have given us cause to cultivate our resting WTF face, the past six weeks have really knocked it out of the park. Today brace yourself and your Mona Lisa smile for fresh shockwaves as two of our key planetary players invoke the kind of radical manoeuvres that engender more than just a ripple in the matrix.

Unless you have been trapped under a small planet sized rock, it could not have escaped your attention that Uncle Pluto has just turned retrograde. Next week he is joined by his partner in Capricorn crime Saturn as he also backs the truck up. Each offers us yet another opportunity to stop dicking around when it comes to our shadow, unarguably the greatest work of our life.

Pluto's grind is here again as the dark lord of our underworld turns retrograde in Capricornia. Only five months to go. Unlike other rx's where we get to slow down, this actually amps Pluto's unholy purpose: to create the kind of chaos that forces us into our dark corners. We are transformed finding our way out. His retrograde takes us deeper and holds us under longer.

Both Pluto and Mars have turned retrograde, joining taskmaster Saturn and truth bomb Jupiter in reverse gear. And although it may well feel like the brakes have been slammed on, in truth this an invitation to enter the shadowlands prepared to spend some highly instructive and revealing time walking among our skeletons, the denizens of our dark.