Tornado Season of the Soul: Pluto Retrograde in Aquarius

A four-month descent into personal storm clouds and radical self-confrontation

---

If you enjoy this content, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share it! Leave me a comment telling me how you see the transits playing out. Want to support my work directly? Send me a one-time donation on Venmo: @jennydeeastrology.

---

I’ve recently become enamored with storm chasers on YouTube—especially Reed Timmer, whose birth time I am absolutely clamoring to find. The man screams into high-speed winds while staying somehow tender and awestruck by the power of it all. His passion reminded me of something I forgot: that weather, like its astrological counterpart, is about patterns, yes, but it’s also about surrender. You can predict the storm, but you can’t stop it.

That’s Pluto.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned this week is that retrograde tornadoes—those rare storms that spin against the natural direction of the hemisphere—are the most violent. The winds have to work twice as hard to go the wrong way, and so, they're harder to predict, and thus harder to escape.

Pluto retrograde is a retrograde tornado.

---

---

When the storm spins inward, it doesn’t just stir up the past—it pulls back the curtains on the damage we’ve done and the truth we’ve buried. And from May 4 through October 11, 2025, Pluto will retrograde through early Aquarius, creating a long stretch of inner demolition requiring external control.

This is not a cycle for manifestation. It’s a stretch of time that asks us to reckon with the wreckage. And when Pluto retrogrades, we get the opportunity to reflect on how our greatest wounds inflict agony on others around us.

Later in this article, you’ll find a breakdown of how each sign experiences this chaotic storm, what the fixed signs are resisting, and where your own patterns may be inflicting damage. We’ll talk about the lies we tell to survive—and what happens when Pluto stops letting us believe them.

This retrograde is not just a psychological audit. It’s a confrontation with how pain perpetuates pain. Especially for the fixed signs—Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius—this is not gentle healing or reflection. This is raw, irreversible ego death that first requires confrontation. None of us is off the hook. Even those signs in aversion to Aquarius--Cancer, Virgo, Capricorn, and Pisces--will be dealing with the aftershocks in their bodies, relationships, and value systems. This is not a storm you outrun or dodge—it’s one you survive.

---

---

As I wrote in Mars-Pluto Opposition: Power Collapse, we’re not just watching structures break—we’re living inside them while they collapse. And in The Leo Full Moon, I wrote about the cost of projection and the pressure to perform. Pluto doesn’t want performance. It wants truth. It wants your inner scaffolding to fall if it was built on shame.

The Shadow Is the Story

Pluto transits activate what’s unresolved. When retrograde, it loops us back through old trauma patterns—not to punish, but to expose. It’s your job to do something with what you see.

This isn’t about becoming new. It’s about becoming honest. We can’t tear down old versions of ourselves without asking who built them—and why. We can’t keep