By Eric Francis
ARIES — Life is a cooperative venture. This is often imagined and rarely practiced, though it is a fact. Even if you grow your own onions, someone else makes your frying pan. Yet the skill of organizing cooperation, and the basic political acumen to facilitate people actually working together, is rare. You must develop that skill and you’re in a good position to do so. This is a long-range project. Whatever may seem worthwhile today will be far exceeded by the necessities of the next year and the years following. Learn to build trust. Learn to be wholly dependable, and to recognize who else has that value. Those are the people you want to stick with; it’s easier to tap into as a resource than it is to cultivate in people, though sometimes that is worth a modest effort to see if people are capable of picking up the tune. Everyone knows what teamwork is, but not everyone cares.
TAURUS — Consider the possibility that someone close to you has especially relevant insight into your thinking and what you may be feeling. You might not like this idea. You prefer to be the best expert on yourself. You try to make your own decisions. But someone may know something you do not. And that something will not be designed to make you paranoid. Any orientation on fear, worry or potential negative outcomes is not helpful and it is not healing, and it’s unlikely to be true. A trustworthy approach is a gentle one, and a balanced one. Also, pay attention to the known self-interest of others. In any transaction where you are the beneficiary, the self-interest of others must be either minimal, or honestly declared — preferably both. That aside, this is a time when you may have unusually deep self-awareness, particularly of what causes you pain. There is an element of this comprehensible only to you — and you alone hold the key to resolving it.
GEMINI — With Venus moving direct in your birth sign, you may have the feeling that you’ve seen, and felt, all of this before. In many respects that is true. Yet your primary growth task is to reinterpret your feelings and results such that you can actually resolve what may trouble you. If you are feeling insecure in your influence with others, or in the stability of your relationships, consider some misinformation that came from your mother, based on her unresolved difficulties. The vast majority of what troubles people is their parents’ material. Yet for a diversity of reasons, it’s difficult for people to accept this. The primary issue is false loyalty. That’s the notion that ‘if I actually am honest about how I feel about what you told me or did to me, you won’t love me anymore’. This kind of thought loop can keep people trapped in their own emotional loops (and depleting personal relationships) for years.
CANCER — The Moon has just finished an eclipse in your opposite sign Capricorn, which may feel like the pressure is suddenly off. If you have that sense of not quite knowing what to do, you’re in a good place. However, you have a few important goals you must focus on, without relying on anyone else to bring them to closure. You probably know what they are; if you have not registered that consciously, make a list of three, and adjust it till you’ve got the right items. These would be actual matters of mostly professional urgency, where your leadership is the only kind that will suffice. That’s because you are the one who is ultimately responsible, and the one who knows the most. Therefore, you’re the most qualified and whose care and power of decision will have the most influence. Raise your awareness to the point where you can identify one issue that deserves your attention, devotion and will.
LEO — Some of the pressure is off of a personal situation, though I suggest you keep your focus on it, and don’t let it drop below the surface. You have a rare window of opportunity to devote yourself to several matters of personal healing, and to make progress in a way that is unusual for this world. You have done better than you expected through a diversity of challenges, though that’s an indication to keep your expectations low, and your actions focused, relevant and oriented on tangible goals. At the moment, most of this involves coming to closure on matters that have dragged on for years. It seems to be an intractable part of human nature to not finish what is begun, no matter how personally relevant. I suggest you do everything in your power to get over this habit, to the extent that you have it. Brilliant things are in store for you, though only if you are not dragged down, distracted and delayed by unresolved matters from the past.
VIRGO — You are under some extraordinary influences, which seem determined to teach you that you are your own person. Yet this is not about rebelling, revolting or being a contrarian. It’s about understanding that the nature of your reality requires not being so invested in another person that you lose track of who you are. There are great benefits to having others in your life; you almost always use your relationships to find yourself. Yet at a certain point, it’s essential that you get onto equal ground with others, which means a balance of respect and self-respect. There is something similar going on where you see yourself reflected in any form of collective or public life. You are more susceptible to what is considered acceptable and normal than you may recognize. While everyone does this, you often consider yourself exempt, which would in effect blind you to the issue. It takes patience and work to meet people on level ground and to have complete and honest exchanges.
LIBRA — Mercury is now slowing to the end of its retrograde, in a house connected to your professional affairs. You may have put much more emphasis on other areas of your life the past couple of months, though I would propose that they are the same thing. All of your goals must align and be in harmony with one another. You can only live with one set of ethics. You are one person, not many people. The astrology of the next six months could easily have you in a position where reacting seems like the only thing you can do. It will be helpful if you’re way ahead of that, and are considering the moving parts of your world in total, with each influencing the rest. When you seem to be overly influenced by realities external to yourself, you know you’re lagging behind your own awareness. At this stage, very little should take you by surprise. You know what you need, and what you need to do.
SCORPIO — Your ruling planet Mars conjunct Chiron is developing in your house of healing and wellbeing. Please make this the primary focus of your life for the next six months. It is not easy to make changes to one’s established self-care routines. We all know that. Yet you have some excellent leverage right now. You probably have your own motivations for evaluating your life and making adjustments, which is what you will be relying on mostly. However, as an astrologer I can tell you that the timing to make several big changes is working in your favor now. One key to success is taking action before you actually need to. Make your changes voluntarily. Take an inventory of all that you’ve learned, and all that you suspect, and organize yourself into approximately three topic areas that relate to commitments to yourself. If you are seeking expert guidance, make sure it’s holistic by the dictionary definition of that word, rather than by branding.
SAGITTARIUS — Not much seems to be happening in Sagittarius at the moment, but there is plenty going on elsewhere that is influencing your experience of life. One of them involves forming a relationship with your priorities. This is a project that has long been evolving, though it’s been working more as a process of elimination. Now you’ve arrived at the point of building, acknowledging and accumulating. This may seem like an odd thing to consider, though your most valuable asset is your agenda. However you think of it, as something you make up, as something you were born with, or as something that you develop over time, your priorities are your gold standard. They are your orientation points. They are how you know you’re doing the right thing. You might first consider whether you have violated any deeply held principles which has, in turn, led you astray of your needs and desires. This could involve putting up with a persistent, long-term situation very close to you.
CAPRICORN — You have just experienced a lunar eclipse in your sign, and I trust you’re feeling better, and under less pressure. There is an immediacy to eclipses that can feel pushy and urgent and then when the bubble pops, everything is quiet and back to normal. Saturn has re-entered your sign for one last very brief visit for this 29-year cycle. This grants what you might think of as a temporary superpower: the ability to define your reality on your own terms. Most likely this will be about a seeming small correction in course rather than a major reassessment. It’s something you can consider and make some decisions about in a relatively calm state. It’s likely to be connected to a matter that needs resolution but has long resisted it. You may decide you were holding onto a little thread, and the resistance was that you would not let go. So take a look at this thread and see what it connects to, on both ends. Even though you’re only holding one end, that’s enough to make a change.
AQUARIUS — The past few days have been a real trip. That’s how activity in your 12th house feels. This would be Capricorn, which has been the scene of a triple conjunction (Pallas, Jupiter, Pluto) as well as an eclipse of the Moon and other factors (such as Saturn backing out of your sign for a while). This has all served as a pressure equalizer between your inner being and the environment around you. You might think of it as burping a Tupperware that really, really needed it, or a kind of psychic orgasm that released pent up need or urgency of some kind. Now you can be a lot calmer in your approach to life, and take things as they come just a bit more easily. Free from all that internal pressure, it’s easier to get along with people. It’s easier to make your basic needs known, and to figure out where you have a mutual point of contact. Meanwhile, you have important priorities on your agenda, and you will need help. Those points of contact are about to take on a whole new meaning.
PISCES — It’s been an exciting few days for you. Nearly all of the action has been in Capricorn, one of the signs most important to Pisces, due to its position as the 11th place from yours — the best one of the lot. Your ruling planet Jupiter is involved, which makes it especially personal, and in certain esoteric traditions, Pluto has a deep connection to your sign. If you’re not already on top of your game, you can easily get there, with a little planning and some cooperation. That is the great thing your life is running on now: the power of human connection, which in essence means appreciation, trust and respect. Here’s something to consider. Those connections are diluted when they exist only in digital form. In fact, if only in digital form, they barely exist at all. While the world is busy having a paranoia orgy about anything and everything “social,” I suggest you turn that on its ear, and emphasize the only kind of contact that counts, and the thing that makes us distinctly human.
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