By Amanda Moreno

I’ve recently quasi-broken up with the Tarot. I still read for clients, but I’ve decided it’s no longer in my best interests to use it for myself. You see, I haven’t been using it in healthy or responsible ways. The result is that I start looking at certain questions or areas of life compulsively, feeding my neurosis and essentially projecting all of my power outside of myself. It’s become the antithesis to developing my intuition.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

As I sat down to write this I decided to flip over a card for a bit of inspiration — to use the cards in a different way. I got the Two of Disks: Change. Change is definitely in the wind. I suppose it’s a wind that has become fairly consistent, but it seems to be gusting in hot, dry, gale forces right now. As above, so below — we can see this change at the personal and collective levels and have been able to for some time.

For me, however, the change has shifted from the realms of the Death card — emotional upheaval and transformation — to the Judgment/Aeon card. The dawning of an entirely new era after death has occurred. Both cards resonate similarly, as one corresponds to Scorpio and the other to Pluto. There is a difference, however. I see that difference in the ways it seems the world must have gone mad — the center cannot hold. The new world seems to have arrived and many don’t quite know what to do with it. Rather than an emphasis on internal transformation it sometimes seems as if the new way in the outer world is defined by chaos.

I’m finding, however, that the madness of the collective situation as well as any personal ups and downs I’m going through seem to be receding into the background in an increasingly distant hum. I’m aware that something major has shifted and I get to play with what that might look like. This reprieve is likely just a phase, but it’s a remarkable one for many reasons.

I’m also aware that my much remarked upon feeling of being untethered in time also makes it so that when anyone asks how I’ve been doing, I’m stumped for an answer — almost as if my memory is being wiped out and the present moment is all that sticks out. Hopefully that’s not a sign of impending Alzheimer’s. But it is kind of nice to be able to just respond with, “Well, I’m pretty great right now, here in this moment.”

I draw another card: Seven of Wands. In this deck, the image is depicted as a person leaping over a crevasse. Victory through making the leap — through taking the risk.

I’m noticing that being more present is also allowing me to focus more in ways that allow for more risk taking. My ‘professional’ life — which is really just my life in that my purpose, my passion and my career are deeply entwined  — tends to grow in very rapid and somewhat unexpected spurts. I’m currently in one of those phases. There has been a flurry of opportunities and openings that I can direct any sense of anxiety and dis-ease towards.

Being immersed in the calling of one’s soul can be such bliss — when it’s not isolating and painful, that is. The resulting flow of energy when the immersion is on the light end of the spectrum is always welcome.

It’s always surreal for me when I start getting a barrage of astrological emails, each of which I willingly subscribe to, that start commenting on the intensity and potential volatility of a given time — especially when I’m not feeling that at all. I’ve noticed a trend, which is that often when the collective energy seems to be reflecting the shadow realms and encouraging us to dig deep and change, pushing anger and revolution to the surface, I feel just fine — happy, even. Of course, give me a good Mercury retrograde in a water sign and I’m typically an emotional wreck. But I’m fascinated by the ways in which some challenging energies seem to force constructive transformation and rising to the occasion, whereas others pound us into the ground.

So what’s the wild card, there? Well, I suppose the wild card is all the little idiosyncrasies of our unique individual experiences. Astrology is a useful language and timing mechanism.

I draw another card: Six of Cups, which in this deck is “Desire.”  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mars moving direct erupted for me in a flurry of even more sexual energy than normal, and in an explicit conversation or two with people in my life regarding what my desires are — taking it way beyond the sexual into the arena of “you’re an important person in my life and I need you to know what I’m working towards.”

I’m also well aware that Saturn’s stationing direct seems to have added to the mix in ways that have brought all libidinal energies to the plate when it comes to focusing on taking new risks where my vocation is concerned.

Sometimes I’m in absolute awe that I get to do the things I do — and make money doing them. Sometimes I get a glimpse of what’s at stake, even just at the personal level, and I recognize why I don’t dwell on those thoughts often.

A very wise Ms. Amanda Painter once wrote an article about her first visit to Burning Man. There was a quote in the piece that I wrote down and stuck to the wall in my office. It reads: “There is a certain terror that can come when standing at the edge of what life could be if you actually show up to live it.”

Now, I found the quote to be utterly inspirational and relatable, articulating quite beautifully just how humbling standing on the precipice of what life might look like can be. But I don’t mean to cause harm or sadness to those who feel that process of showing up is too much or impossible. We are living in fucked up times. There are people in the world and people in my life who have gone through things that are soul shattering, sometimes in multiple onslaughts. I don’t know the reasons why, but the realities of the disparities here also fuel my urge to engage my oath with wit and grit and heart.

There is a grace that comes through sometimes when I find myself standing in the eye of the storm, calm and quiet, recognizing the turbulence all around me and realizing I have no choice but to try to engage with an intention to serve the highest good of my clients, my friends, my loved ones and myself. I find myself doing something I found utterly impossible just a short time ago: trusting the universe. The paradox of trusting in a world where there is so much pain is sometimes unfathomable to me and sometimes a source of absolute fuel.

Showing up to live life is a tricky thing. Showing up to live the life of your dreams has its own pressures and challenges. The risk of failure once you step out into the unknown can be a massively weighty force. We can see this playing out in the collective via our refusal to change so many horrendously physically, emotionally and spiritually toxic aspects of our ‘civilization’ because change — and striking out into the unknown — feels impossibly overwhelming.

Our 12-sign Midyear Reading on forthcoming astrology, including Jupiter in Libra, is available for instant access. You can get all 12 signs for just $57, or choose your individual signs.

I wrote the above just over a week ago, and am reading over it from my bed where I have been for most of the past 24 hours. I had to laugh a bit as I read the parts about not feeling the intensity of the astrological weather. It would appear that this Mars-Saturn conjunction has knocked me on my ass. Or maybe I’m getting sick. Or maybe I overdid it last week.

My guess is that those three options are all probably linked together. What I know, however, is that I have no choice right now but to listen to the wisdom of my body. Rest. Eat well. Don’t take in too much information or stimulation.

And then there’s the wisdom of my intuition. Wait. Something is being seeded now. Sleep. Pay attention to dreams. Don’t push it, girl. Just be inside.

I turn over a final tarot card: Six of Disks. Success. It corresponds with the Moon in Taurus, where the Moon is exalted. Confidence, self-esteem and inner strength and security. Calm, grounded and centered. May we all move towards that now.

On the whole, it’s better to learn astrology from experience than just from a book. That’s because you, as the astrologer, are part of the process. Just as modern science has realized, the observer is necessarily and unavoidably part of what is observed.

Even so, the observer’s power to determine the nature of observations is not absolute. There would appear to be an underlying order to the universe which makes events decipherable, if not entirely predictable.

In recent generations, astrologers have come to understand that an observer’s prejudices can actually interfere with understanding the cosmos. It is especially true that human perceptions of good and bad do not apply to events in the sky. As world-renowned astrological authority Robert Hand put it for the October/November 2014 issue of The Mountain Astrologer: “There are no benefics and no malefics.” Even so, some very old biases persist, no matter how errant they may be.

Two planets still often burdened with the malefic (bad guy) label are Mars and Saturn. One way to approach the conjunction of Mars and Saturn in Sagittarius tomorrow is to for you to acknowledge your own involvement in either sustaining or overcoming ancient predilections as regards to those two objects.

You can begin by simply being aware that Mars and Saturn are briefly coming together to share the same degree of Sagittarius. Rather than bring any hand-me-down partiality to the occasion, look to flex the power of your intent by getting involved to affirm life rather than just letting things happen.

Our exciting 12-sign Midyear Reading on forthcoming astrology, including Jupiter in Libra, is available for instant access. You can currently get all 12 signs for just $57, or choose your individual signs.

Affirming life is one demonstrable upside to Mars. It has to do with taking action so as to sustain life. Every time you act to take care of your wellbeing in response to challenges from your environment, Mars is manifesting through you.

The same can be said for any initiative aimed at helping another person to breathe easier. Additionally, either desire or decisiveness, followed by effort to attain results, serves to demonstrate what a good guy Mars can be.

Actually, it would be reasonable to say that Mars can evince in many ways, but passivity is not one of them. That’s how it is appropriate for you to reject old stories that many passively accept about Mars, and go on to create some of your own. Saturn can help, especially when in the process of merging its own formidable energies with the red planet.

Among other things, Saturn is about giving things form. While not as bright in the sky or symbolically in your face as Mars often is, the ringed planet is every bit as empowering. Even though that power is commonly realized over time, the structural quality Saturn can be exercised to bring is like a long journey in that it must begin with a single step. Tomorrow’s Sagittarius conjunction from Mars to Saturn would be an excellent time to take that step.

Therefore, even if you are not sure how far you are going or where you will end up, you would be well advised to get consciously and actively involved in some demonstrably supportive and substantial way with life and living tomorrow. Think of it as your chance to start making something more of astrology — and the world — than you have previously been told it can be. Sure beats just being along for another ride to where you would never have chosen to go on your own in the first place.

Offered In Service

By Amanda Painter

Earlier this morning was the Aquarius Full Moon just after 5:26 am EDT (9:26:31 UTC). If you’ve been noticing a sense of pressure or a deadlocked situation (especially between the beliefs or needs of a group and yours as an individual), you should sense it easing off today.

Mirrored domes, part of an installation at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Amanda Painter.

As Eric describes in this week’s Planet Waves TV and Planet Waves FM broadcasts, this morning’s Full Moon made contact with several other planets around the zodiac.

It’s a scenario with a lot of moving parts. Many of those parts continue to be in contact with one another, and factor into upcoming significant events that will come in and out of emphasis, and therefore in and out of your consciousness.

In fact, looking at the charts as we move into the weekend, I see a short-term aspect — part of the larger ongoing pattern — that was embodied by a chance encounter I had Monday.

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By Amanda Moreno

I somehow find myself somewhat immersed in the study of narcissism and narcissistic tendencies. I wrote about it here a few weeks ago, then taught a class called “Leo and the Narcissistic Wound,” and now find myself in a position to be delivering a lecture called “Collective Astrology and the Madness of Donald Trump.”

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

I suppose narcissism is a fitting topic, it being Leo season and all. Perhaps it’s also a fitting topic seeing as what I’ve dubbed Entitlement Disorder seems to be rampant.

Labeling actions as Entitlement Disorder (ED, as I call it) is my way of coping with and organizing a more mild, more generally expressed series of traits found within our culture that I myself probably display at times. It’s a sarcastic way of pathologizing behaviors I see around me every day: people walking down the street and running into people and things as they veer everywhere while staring at their phones; demanding special treatment here and there; taking up 20 spots on the train or in the parking lot…

At my workshop the other night, we talked a bit in terms of Leo and its connection to children. A student asked about whether the trend towards people having dogs instead of children was relevant there, and how it might reflect or change the correspondence between Leo and children — particularly the act of having them.

Off the top of my head, I said that I considered ‘pets’ to be more the realm of Taurus. I then pronounced my bias, as well as the fact that some of my own judgments might be coming through in what I was going to say next, which was that I could see some Leo-style shadow coming through in the entitlement people display in pet ownership. They begin to consider their pets to be their children, and therefore acceptable companions in any space at any time in any way.

As personal context is favored over collective context, it’s like people fail to take into consideration the fact that someone might have a legitimate reason to request or demand that a dog be kept out of a shared space — like health codes or the fact that someone on the train or in the restaurant might have a fear of dogs or an allergy to them. I suppose some might have allergies to children as well, but so it goes.

The other night I escaped the city to watch the Perseid meteor shower. We found a spot at an outdoor amphitheater with many other stargazers lounging on the grass in the dark. As we approached our chosen spot, a dog started barking. It wasn’t actually a bark, but the most rabid sounding, beastial, dripping-with-venom growling bark my dog-loving self had ever heard. I was fairly convinced the dog was actually a mutant demon wolf and would break free from its leash at some point as more and more people filed past, each and every one triggering it.

I was also fairly convinced that its owner didn’t care. Then again, I don’t know the context, so who am I to judge? And who am I to judge an individual letting their dog lick its balls on a restaurant table — maybe it’s a comfort animal? Or has a hypoallergenic asshole?

That context piece is everything, though, and its right usage has to do with recognizing we don’t know everyone’s context or reasoning. This can hopefully encourage direct and assertive — if not compassionate — communication when we encounter someone doing something we’re uncomfortable with.

As we lay there at the amphitheater staring up at the stars, I began thinking about a show I recently watched on Netflix called Edge of the Universe. The episode in question was called “Planets From Hell,” which probably isn’t relevant, but is somewhat amusing.

In the show, the scientists being interviewed talk about this kind of epic cosmic drama we’ve involved in — the quest to discover how our solar system fits into the grand cosmological scheme of things. We are essentially trying to learn whether or not we are really, truly ‘special’ — one of a kind; a unique planet in all of the inconceivable vastness that is space. What a rich metaphor for the Leo-Aquarius polarity.

I recognized, then, that the last period of paradigm shift in our history that is considered to be equal in impact to the current shift was when we switched from an Earth-centric model of the universe to a Sun-centered model. We did not cope well with the realization that we are not the center. People were burned at the stake for espousing such blasphemy.

Whether the collective madness that erupted was the result of a bunch of people pouting specifically over not being the center, or just was the result of a worldview shift, is probably more nuanced; but the echoes of Leonine narcissistic themes are there. Recognition and celebration of specialness is huge, and when that gets shut down in childhood — as it must to some degree for all of us — or even at the collective level, we inflate our sense of ourselves in some way.

The integration point for an overblown immersion in Leo is the Aquarian polarity — rising above, getting some perspective, getting out of the subjective emotions and taking the objective view. What is the context? Where do I fit into the whole? What are the long-term goals?

I’ve always loved the notion that through the consciousness of humans a second act of creation happens — the first one having been initiated by ‘god’. As we become conscious, so does god become conscious of itself. As we explore the universe and understand our place within it, so do we better understand ourselves. As we get that distance and detachment offered by Aquarius, so are we able to refine our expression of the unique spark of light that is each of us individually, as well as our species as a whole. But we have to take context into account.

Does it make us less special if we discover other planets like ours? Does it make our existence less meaningful if we’re not the only ones? Can we discover our existence in a galactic community and celebrate the uniqueness of everything and everyone, at the same time as we recognize and celebrate our commonalities? We just can’t exist anymore as if we’re the center of the universe, the only ones that matter, or that context outside of ourselves is irrelevant. We have to let notions of un-fallible superiority go. If not, it’s looking quite like our stubborn attachment to rightness is going to kill us.

If we are transitioning into the age of Aquarius — and I support the notion that we are and that looking at epochs in that manner can be a helpful way of contextualizing and increasing awareness and understanding — perhaps we have the advantage of familiarizing ourselves with the shadows of the Aquarius-Leo polarity, lest we dry ourselves up and set it all on fire in a fit of tantrum and hubris.

Our exciting new 12-sign Midyear Reading on forthcoming astrology, including Jupiter in Libra (plus much more!) is available for instant access. Get all 12 signs for $57 or choose your individual signs.

A core conundrum of the polarity involves how to integrate our godliness with our humanity, and how to avoid inflating ourselves in accordance with the archetypal energies we find the safest or most palatable. Instead, we must metabolize those parts into less unwieldy bits so that we can integrate them into our human tribe.

Maybe we are not going to get our way in this civilization experiment if ‘our way’ involves the refusal to give up the vast number of poisonous and toxic physical, emotional and spiritual habits we’ve been clinging to, perhaps since the last fixed age (Taurus). The Taurean age marked the birth of ‘civilization’.

So I suppose if we consider Aquarius and Leo in their square aspect to Taurus, the Aquarian age is a crisis point for what was seeded back then (4,000-1,800 B.C.) — agriculture, the rise of cities, money, banking — so many institutions we associate with our security and material well-being. We are demonstrating (a fixed-sign key word) the fruits of what was sown back then.

It can be so difficult to look outside of ourselves for so very many reasons. I honestly have buckets of compassion for all when I think about the ways we’ve each been wounded and how many people in my life have been rocked again and again by traumas of one kind of another.

I wonder, though, if occasions like the Leo-Aquarius Full Moon this week provide us with little gateways to examine how invested we are in our own dramas, and how much we cling to them or inflate them or need them in order to feel whole. I wonder how we can bring perspective back in, and maybe embrace the notion that it is possible to be special without being the only one and without bringing notions of superiority into it. I hope for moments of clarity for each of us that help us to understand how we can better cultivate the things we are passionate about and the things that have heart and meaning to us, in service to the collective and to making the world a better place in the long-term.

We are now in the last week of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games taking place in Brazil from Aug. 5 to 21. Even if it is not the most controversial Olympics ever, it must certainly qualify as a finalist. Nonetheless, it would seem to be a good thing that the Olympics is accurately reflecting our time.

You even might go so far as to say that the Rio Olympics are actually the ‘real’ Olympics. That’s because, in all probability, there is nothing currently going on in Brazil that isn’t also happening where you reside.

The original ideal of the modern Olympics as an amateur competition is an artifact of the past. Similarly, pristine and problem-free competitive venues are as rare as perfect places to live. Corruption, crime, traffic jams, pollution, public health concerns and other unpleasant realities of modern life are part of the local territory for nearly everybody now.

There is really nothing new about what’s going on in Brazil. Acknowledging the reality, however, is a more recent development. In a very practical way, that’s inspiring.

Denial is not necessary for the Olympic Games to continue. Perhaps that’s the best news of all from Brazil. Victory is still thrilling for those fortunate enough to taste it. Defeat is still difficult to take. The essence of human spirit, represented by the Olympic flame, still burns brightly in enough human hearts to inspire people from all over the world to gather in a form of competition that is not war, and that provides an example for your life.

Denial will not serve any of us. While present realities must be accepted, that does not mean you should surrender to them. It is important to endeavor and do your best to prevail. The same spirit evident in Olympic competitors is also what you need to cultivate inside.

You are not in this life to lose. You are here to win, both for yourself and on behalf of others — just like the athletes now contesting in Brazil. In practical fact, you are a thoroughly modern Olympian in your own way. Even as you are engaged in your daily efforts to survive, you are also part of something bigger than any one person. You are one of many, and we are all come together in the same reality.

As one might expect, the astrology this week continues to be as indicative of earthly events as ever. That’s especially true of the Full Moon and (very subtle) partial penumbral lunar eclipse that will be taking place in late Aquarius shortly before 5:30 am EDT (09:26:31 UTC) on Thursday.

As Robert Hand put it, the Moon signifies “the need to be human.” Assuming that Mr. Hand’s typically concise summary captures something both timeless and essential, a Full Moon would then plainly represent a need to be human at its fullest. In Aquarius, that need is expressed through life as part of a collective.

Our exciting new 12-sign Midyear Reading on forthcoming astrology, including Jupiter in Libra (plus much more!) is available for pre-order. Get all 12 signs here for $57.

Aquarius is the sign of a conscious collective where individuals still persist (and even contest), but not for themselves alone. The fixed nature of Aquarius is consistent with the limiting nature of its original ruler: Saturn.

The air element uniquely combines with fixity to make Aquarius different from any other sign, suggesting that idealistic Uranus is a plausible (albeit controversial) co-ruler. The combination is thus neither Utopian nor dystopian, but real.

So it is that, as the 2016 Summer Olympics nears its climax, a simultaneous lunar maximum and all-but-imperceptible lunar eclipse is following suit. It’s a controversial and contentious situation that is nonetheless indicative of both the hard realities of life and the human potential to continuously transcend them. In order to get the best collective outcome, do what you can to set the same type of example for others that you would would want an Olympic athlete to set for you.

Come together with others as you necessarily must. Then, rise above necessity and see if you can accomplish something more. You may not be in line for a medal, but you are in a position to somehow show the rest of us that the need to be human includes doing your very best.

Offered In Service