Hello, and welcome back to *Wreaking More Joy*.

I’m Janette Dalgliesh, and in this season we’re exploring how women can rekindle the romance with our purpose, our joy, and our personal power — especially in our working lives.

Today, we’re meeting Venus.

This is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented of the planetary allies, along with Moon.

The two major planets of the zodiac assigned female gender are also the most misrepresented: hands up anyone who is surprised by that!

My favourite quote about Venus comes from Jungian astrologer Liz Greene: when Venus takes a lover, she takes him for her own benefit, not for his.

There is not a nurturing bone in her body. She is completely and utterly self-focused. And we do not have a single positive role model for this liberated version of Venus. In this form, she’s castigated as selfish at best, a gold-digging doxy at worst.

Venus’s lineage includes the Greek goddess Aphrodite and before her, Ishtar, the complicated Mesopotamian goddess of love, fertility and war.

She’s a far cry from the demure maiden covering her nakedness with her own hair, as depicted by Renaissance painter Botticelli.

It’s true that she loves to pair up, but that’s because it is only in her partner’s eyes that she can see her true self reflected.

And the part of liberated Venus we’re especially interested in today is her role in relation to desire.

She is the goddess of desire, not because she is desirable (though she is), but because she always knows exactly what she wants.

And it is not her job to make it happen.

In the ancient stories, Venus doesn’t hustle. She doesn’t prove. She doesn’t strive. She doesn’t even earn.

She simply lies back in the temple, and receives the offerings brought to her by the acolytes.

You can instantly see how badly this beautiful aspect of the human psyche has been distorted in modern culture.

Because we live in a world where desire is only considered “valid” if it is:

* achievable

* sensible

* productive

* morally acceptable (and that is wildly different depending on your sex, your gender, your age, race, sexuality, or disability status)

* unlikely to inconvenience anyone else (unless you’re a rich straight able-bodied white man)

* and can be acted on immediately

In our instant-gratification culture, our brains are trained to shut down desire almost before we consciously register it.

If it doesn’t fit those narrow parameters, we kill it almost before we’re aware of it.

We tell ourselves we didn’t really want it anyway, or it wasn’t meant to be - and that’s absolutely tragic.

Here’s the thing Venus teaches us, and this level of unapologetic desire is really uncomfortable for systems that want us compliant, including the ones that live in our heads and become the brain weasels.

Desire is separate from fulfillment.

When we activate an absence of rush, and slow things right down, we begin to discover that:

* You are allowed to want things you will never have

* You are allowed to want things you don’t yet know how to achieve

* You are allowed to want things that scare you

* You are allowed to want things that make no logical sense

Desire is information.

It is not a demand.

It is not a contract.

It is not a to-do list.

One of my own examples is both utterly obvious, and devastatingly human.

I want a hug from my Dad.

He died in 2010, so I can never have one. I can have hugs from other people, like my brothers. I can go back in memory to what his hugs were like.

But I can’t have one.

And pretending that I don’t, or trying to convince myself to stop wanting one - that would be a lie.

I would be gaslighting myself.

Because that desire tells me something true about my heart, about who I am, about who my Dad was, and the role he played in my life, and how precious that relationship is and was.

It doesn’t require fixing.

It doesn’t require reframing.

It doesn’t require a workaround.

It deserves air.

So many women have been trained to believe that wanting something unachievable is weak, indulgent, or dangerous.

But Venus says ‘naming desire is power’.

When it comes to our purpose and our work, this matters deeply.

Because many women are quietly suppressing desires like:

* I want my work to feel meaningful and spacious

* I want recognition without feeling sleazy

* I want rest without guilt

* I want to be influential without becoming hardened

* I want more money and more integrity

* I want something bigger, but I don’t know what it is yet

And the moment those desires arise, our Saturn-trained brains jump in and say:

* “But how?”

* “But be realistic.”

* “But what if you fail?”

* “But what will people think?”

Venus doesn’t answer those questions, because that’s not her job.

Her only job is to say: This matters to me.

When we deny our desires because they seem impossible, we don’t become more grounded.

We become smaller.

So here is your Venus practice to play with. This is especially powerful if you’ve been taught to be “practical” at the expense of being honest.

Let yourself want something, anything, that you’ve been too scared to admit fully to yourself, knowing that you are NOT yet stepping into the fulfillment of it. If you want to make it about your purpose, great, but you don’t have to.

Notice when your brain tries to rush you into the next stage (nope, we’re not going there yet buddy).

Stay in the state of simply noticing the desire. Let the desire sit with you

* Without pressure to perform

* Without problem-solving it

* Without editing or watering it down

* Without deciding if it’s allowed or appropriate

Write it down, still without turning it into a plan or a to-do.

Say it out loud, or name it privately if that feels safer.

Let that be enough, for now.

Not everything you desire needs to be fulfilled.

But everything you desire deserves to be acknowledged.

Unacknowledged desire doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground and then comes out sideways as resentment, burnout, or numbness.

Venus reminds us that naming what we want, unapologetically, including the impossible things - that’s not indulgence, that’s self-respect.

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