By Eric Francis
ARIES — If you feel like you missed a chance to work through a family or household-related issue, you will have another opportunity soon enough. If you’re trying to avoid one, it will come back to you for additional healing. There seems to be a matter from the past you’re not connecting with or fully acknowledging. It may be that you would prefer to forget it, though it keeps surfacing from time to time. Pay attention and you’ll notice this has more of an influence on your self-concept than you may imagine. It hides behind being a small matter, which is then magnified out of proportion — and therefore seems harder to address than it will be. Many facets of life are similar, and if you successfully address and resolve this situation, you will learn something larger. As with any early circumstances, the thing to remember at all times is that you’re not a child any more. You have adult powers, life experience and distance on these events. Much other useful information will come up for healing.
TAURUS — How has this Venus retrograde (May 13-June 25) been influencing your emotional and erotic life? Are you relating differently in any way to your sexual needs or desires? In what ways are you relating to yourself differently? In what way are you relating to others differently? This astrology gets into some intimate territory where sexual needs intersect with emotional needs. Yet one image this week’s aspects present is learning how to see them as separate. Society (families, friends, potential partners, the local reverend) is assertive in its position that sex, to be “moral,” must be through a particular relationship and associated in some way with special love and commitment. Yet your sexuality has a life of its own, and its own seasons and cycles and orientation on existence. As part of your journey, you can take the time, space and risk and consider them independently. If you feel like you might be judged for this, note that inner response, and keep track of it — you will learn a lot from studying it.
GEMINI — I mentioned last week the idea that true maturity is integral to being able to live in peace with uncertainty and in the face of the unknown. Of course, those things are also what tend to make people the most nervous and even unstable. Yet think of how much mystery you live with, particularly about yourself. The place where maturity morphs into a form of spiritual fortitude is the patience and willingness to do so consciously. It’s more than that, though. Self-discovery takes time. When questions are responded to with simple answers or false certainty is built up, that blocks access to truth, as the mind is no longer open or available to new understanding or awareness. Standing back from certainty is a method that helps you avoid lazy approaches to life that ultimately do not help or which interject delays. That is important now because such beautiful discoveries about yourself are possible. A rare window is open. Seek the truth, not a substitute.
CANCER — Your life has progressed in the past month or so to where you can make observations about yourself that you were not likely to make before. This is a matter of perspective. Sometimes you must get a little distance and see things from an angle. What you have now is the viewpoint where you can hold two opposite properties of yourself as existing side by side. One way to look at this is being able to consider your mental and emotional realities as distinct from one another. They are not, of course, because you are one being, though it can help to think of them as having some discrete traits that can communicate with one another. This could, for example, represent two deep needs you have that seem to compete for your attention. Feel the tension for a while. Let both sides of the equation exist in their own right. They would seem to be in direct competition with one another, or mutually exclusive. If you can bring yourself present for that feeling, and stay there a while, you can observe for yourself whether that is really true.
LEO — You may be ready to reveal openly what you have kept under a veil. Cats are good at hiding their secrets, and you are no different. Don’t do this all at once, though. While it’s true you need to be one self, wherever you are, this is a gradual process of letting off some pressure. The first place to open the valve is within yourself. Gradually, decide what you want to move over from the ‘private’ column to the ‘public’ one — for example, by determining what about yourself you no longer want to keep hidden from others. This may stem from desire, or it may stem from the need to feel real. With either approach, your self-guidance would offer you back some feeling of pleasure, surrender and the sensation of true freedom as a result of even considering the idea. The point of self-disclosure is not doing the right thing in some abstract sense, but rather, feeling better. Being real is its own reward and its own challenge, and many others will follow.
VIRGO — Mercury’s change in direction this week provokes the question of wanting to take care of everyone, by which I mean the whole world: a Virgo trait that is not easy to reckon with. Society is still in love with its ‘every man for himself’ theory of existence, in nearly total denial of how the very purpose of organizing ourselves into communities is to help us sort out the basics. Even with food and clothing taken care of, there are many emotional and spiritual challenges to our lives, and those concern you as well. Here is what I would suggest, as someone who relates to this point of view personally. Keep your interests close to home: your actual home, your closest friends and your most immediate community. Let that be “the world” for you. This is not only manageable, it’s extremely useful, and you will find it rewarding. Work on the level where either you can see some direct results, or there can be some exchange. The rest is digital illusion.
LIBRA — Focus on feeling good, rather than feeling safe. And why is that? The notion of safety is an abstraction on a planet with so many seeming threats, most coming from within our minds. Feeling good is a direct, verifiable experience. You know you feel good because you do. Ah, wait; I must stop myself here. What about the people who only feel good when they feel pain? What about people who feel guilty the moment they are happy, as if they must be neglecting something, or betraying someone? Well, in that case, one does not “feel good.” However, they might feel safe, stable and normal. So, it would seem we have some sorting out to do around this whole topic. Those who feel good are certainly a mystery to those who do not. If I may: feeling is about being present in one’s body, whether good, bad or some other description. That would seem to be the controversial thing: that the body is involved. You could say controversial, or you could say inevitable.
SCORPIO — I’m curious what has transpired for you the past week of your life. What did you experience? What did you learn? Where have you invested your energy? And what was the outcome? While the Mars-Neptune conjunction was exact Saturday, it’s still vibrating, and your ruling planet Mars is still in Pisces, pushing a daring quality to your creative and sexual adventures. Much of this can be adventure for its own sake. You might consider the results as you go along, or you might just keep experimenting and skip the evaluation. As long as you’re happy, it’s all good. That said, later this week, Mercury stations retrograde in one of the most philosophical angles of your chart. That is likely to point you to some matters of meaning, which may seem to come on abruptly, and lead you to question some of what you’ve experienced recently. You can take that as an opportunity to slow down, reflect and edit. You will appreciate any moment of meditation and introspection. It’s been a while.
SAGITTARIUS — The dominant theme for Sagittarius is the nature of your contracts and agreements. You have a tendency to enter these on an emotional basis rather than logical or rational. Emotional could mean how you feel; some would say it’s their gut response to a situation. That’s true as far as it goes. It’s always a good idea to read a contract or to know what you’re committing to through some tacit agreement, and that’s the moment of your astrology at this time. If your feelings, gut or emotions guide you to conduct a review, that would be a good idea. If your mind guides you to do so, that’s an equally good idea. The mental plane gets to the specifics that can be expressed in language, including of how you are responding on a level you don’t usually articulate. And the specifics are currently where it is at for you — not the generalities. You don’t have to commit to anything except being honest with yourself.
CAPRICORN — Mercury stations retrograde in your opposite sign this week, which signifies your changing position on a relationship. I would suggest the most important thing to track is your perspective: whether you’re seeing the world as an adult or a child. You might also track your perception of where partners and loved ones are coming from. While seeing and experiencing life from the viewpoint of your inner kid can be fun, the drawback is that you don’t have much control over the flow of events. Your child self might resort to disrupting the flow, which is much easier, though is not a form of creative power. It is a sign of desperation, though we might ask, about what? Before you try to get control, you might reckon how and why you feel like you lack it. This is nearly certain to be a personal matter having nothing to do with external events. Nobody controls what you think, believe, feel or do — even if you want them to.
AQUARIUS — With so much emphasis on health these days, it’s noteworthy why there is so little emphasis on wellbeing. In the midst of a supposedly medical crisis, how to take care of oneself is not in the discussion. It does need to be in your personal discussion. This can begin with the relationship between your emotional state and what you think of as being a medical issue. The chances are high that what you’re experiencing is originating on the emotional level rather than the physical. You are more likely to feel the ill effects of an insult or self-defeating thought than you are to experience those of a toxin or pathogen. Said another way, fear is unhealthy; stress is not conducive of wellbeing; judgment is not relaxing; anger is not good for heart, soul or blood. That is the order in which to proceed. You don’t need to concern yourself with the dangers of ‘bad stuff’, only with the influence of your mind on your body. And once you have a handle on that, you gain many abilities you didn’t have before.
PISCES — Your energy will start to bounce back as Mars makes its way into late Pisces, away from Neptune. If you experienced a drought last week, it involved the Mars-Neptune conjunction. If your astrology means anything, you will have more traction and be better able to make contact with others, so make sure you focus your message, keep an eye on the details, and make adjustments in real-time if necessary. By that, I mean think on your feet, and think creatively, which means with a measure of adventure and pleasure. You know what you’re doing. Mercury stationing retrograde this week in your house of art and adventure (Cancer, your solar 5th) is an invitation to explore the lush side of your mind in a focused way. Rather than making art, give yourself a project, by which I mean a space to fill. Define some loose parameters and fulfill them. Take one idea and develop it. Along a similar line, reach out to one person you’re interested in, take leadership and evolve the conversation. A little focus will go a long way.
