Dear Fellow Traveler:

Astrology is always interesting, but the aspects are not always like this. They don’t always push us so hard to get our lives together, work toward our true goals and get rid of the ones that we don’t really want. At the moment we are in the midst of many slow-moving planets — the Gods of Change, as they were once described by one of the great Brits of astrology — making moves and making many aspects to one another. These aspects, as we are seeing, are profoundly influencing our lives, and the world. Saturday, just hours ahead of the fifth and last Saturn-Uranus opposition, an organization called Wikileaks revealed the truth about the United States-led occupation of Afghanistan. I will have more to say about this in Wednesday’s audio and Friday’s edition.

This astrology and the synchronous events that surround it are not only in preparation for what we are calling 2012, they are the very thing itself: momentous, sweeping changes and the potential for making progress in the dimensions of our lives where we want it the most. I’ve been describing this here and in my other essays as the cardinal T-square, because most of the action is in the cardinal signs.

Saturn, at the moment, is the leading actor. That’s because it’s the planet in direct motion, having recently entered Libra, where it will be until October 2012. Saturn recently made its last of five oppositions to revolutionary Uranus, which has been the high-stakes trip along the edge that we’ve been experiencing through the Obama administration. It is worth noting the stunning synchronicity between Obama being elected the very day of the first of five Saturn-Uranus oppositions on a platform of promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and the truth about that war emerging precisely at the last of those oppositions.

We’ve been seeing this astrology play out more superficially as the wild, verging-on-meaningless factionalism/confrontation of ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’ that has dominated American politics and so many other facets of life. And for many, it represents the division in our minds between the past and the future that seems so momentous and urgent right now. As this opposition fades, this brutal oppositional energy will be past its peak and slowly fade away over the next year.

Personally, we can now review how we’ve done integrating our most tense opposites, such as the wild polarities we carry in our psyches, our relationships and the contradictions of what we present to the world versus what we really want and believe.

Wikileaks Editor Julian Assange. Check this link for Assange being interviewed by Larry King.

More locally, we reach another peak of energy this month around Aug. 21, when Saturn in Libra makes its last exact square to Pluto in Capricorn. Saturn-Pluto contacts often come with conservative backlash, with fear and with a confrontation with the past — but that’s mainly because we allow them to. We saw a classic fear-reaction backlash summer of 2001, during the Saturn-Pluto opposition that gave us the Sept. 11 incident, the Enron collapse and the Worldcom and Arthur Andersen accounting scandals. That was pure madness, wasn’t it? And everyone went through something unusually intense at the time. That is astrology, the great bridge between the inner and the outer worlds.

This process was connected with another story: Chiron beginning four years in Capricorn, the sign of “the system.” Now Pluto is in Capricorn, treading the territory where Chiron ran vanguard a decade ago. While there are many important transits going on, this one really is the master of ceremonies. This transit is about doing the deep work of confronting the past: our relationship entanglements and our ancestral past, for example. We have the opportunity to completely rethink our relationship to the business and banking establishment that surrounds us.

And Pluto in Capricorn is saying that we need to reconnect to passion. Remember that Saturnalia (the time of the Sun in Capricorn) was one of the most debauched of Roman celebrations, and that the living incarnation of Pluto would look something like Mick Jagger at his peak of energy.

One last note: Mercury is retrograde in Virgo between Aug. 20 and Sept. 12. This is all about taking care of the details. If you follow the well-documented effects of Mercury retrograde, be sure you leave a week or two on either side of those dates to help you avoid complications and make the most of your time and money. The horoscope you have below takes that effect into account. And there are ongoing details on my Daily Astrology & Adventure blog at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

Planet Waves Monthly Horoscope – August 2010

Your life has been in transition from one moment to the next, one day to the next, week after week. At times it’s been so much you haven’t been sure how to handle it, and you still may not be — this, despite the sense of excitement and potential. Let’s consider that potential and how it’s going to manifest. You go through spurts of bursting with energy, then encounter limits and frustration. At the same time you’re confronted by changes in your environment, your relationships, your workplace, and lately, considerable pressure from family or home-related matters. It’s difficult to see where the two processes fit in: that is, your experience of growth and emergence, and the tectonic changes in the world around you. The next six months or so will be an experiment in seeing the many connection points between who you are becoming and what the world is becoming. What you may have lacked recently — a commitment to flexibility — is what you’re being offered now. Think of that flexibility as your mind responding creatively to your experience. By creatively, I mean self-creatively. Though the changes in your world seem to be the result of powerful forces, there must be nothing forced about your response. When in doubt, retreat and assess your situation, and observe your options, and more to the point, your desires. What you want not only matters, it’s the only thing that does. You have tried every other option; give this one a go.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Suddenly you may have a lot more work than you think you can handle, or want to do — particularly for August, when everyone north of the equator wants to be lazy. Given how many people right now are searching for direction and (think they) have absolutely nothing to keep them busy, I suggest counting yourself as fortunate, and responding with motivation, drive and a sense of purpose. The chances are that your employment-related activities will be a bit stressful, even intense, yet at the same time entirely productive and meaningful. For you, much of the stress seems to be coming from the necessity to do things differently every day, and to make decisions faster than usual, indeed, what seems like immediately. However, if you’ve ever lamented that your life moves too slowly, or that you can never make a choice that you stick to, and that works for you, you now have an occasion to live differently. One special place to focus your attention is on the relationship between your mental health and your physical health. The two are translating back and forth, and you will need to take extra efforts to maintain both. Proceed from the inside out. You don’t need to improve your appearance or your image, but rather focus on rest, nutrition, movement and learning how to make choices without damaging yourself in the process. By damage, I mean from needless stress, unnecessary delays or pointless frustration. Get over yourself, get moving and you will love the way your life unfolds.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Despite your sense that you can ‘think things through’, that’s not really the case when it comes to feelings; you simply need to feel, and make the appropriate decisions. We’re inclined, indeed, trained to obsess over how we feel, and most of this involves guilt about how we feel. So let’s consider guilt, which is always rooted in childhood. It always has connections to the remnants of our family of origin, and we underestimate the power that these people, and their ideas, have on us as adults. Make no mistake: what you’re going through right now has something to do with that influence. Guilt is resentment directed against itself. We blame ourselves for our parents’ shortcomings, believing they are flawless, and get in the habit of attacking ourselves. When we take this into adulthood it can cause significant emotional and relational problems. You may think you can work this out with them, but at this point there is no such thing. Your mission is to work out your life, your feelings, your needs and your sense of safety, with yourself. Be aware of when you are blaming yourself for the problems and shortcomings of your early caregivers, and be aware of when you’re dramatizing this with the people who currently surround you. You know it’s time for you to push out of your mental anguish and step forth into your full adult creative power. Don’t let the past hold you back.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Your tropism for reaching high places has been healthy and strong lately. Your perspective is widening and your sense of time is starting to encompass the future. You may even feel the authentic confidence that you can handle anything — and if you don’t feel it, you sense the potential. I suggest you focus on two priorities. One is learning how to focus on a single goal. It doesn’t have to be a big goal, or even an important one: the idea is to get the feeling of setting an objective, meeting that objective and moving onto the next. The second project is feeling safe. You have a little stampede of planets running through the security angle of your chart over the next few weeks, and that might stir up some of your famous insecurities. Feeling safe is an art. It’s related to the craft of recognizing an actual situation that you have to respond to, and responding well. One way to summarize your astrology is that the numerous situations and conditioning forces that surround you are designed to bring out the best in who you are; to cultivate your maturity; and to encourage you to handle your affairs in a way that’s a marked improvement over your parents’ less than effective leadership style. To do that you have to be standing on a strong foundation, and while you have a short break from reaching for the top, I suggest you get to work.

The Cancer Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than a hour of astrology for Cancer and Cancer rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20 minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck by James Wanless. For instant access, order here for Cancer and Cancer Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical birthday gift.

My phone rang at 2 am the other night. It was a young Leo friend, freaked out. She had a house-sitting gig and had arrived home later than planned to discover that Lilly, one of the cats she was watching, had not come home. This was in a wild part of the area, where coyotes roam. She called Lilly, and then heard a faraway cat squeal, then heard some coyotes yelping, then concluded that Lilly had just been eaten. She was beside herself and crying about what a failure she was. I listened to her for a while, dialed in St. Francis and cast the astrology. The chart looked good, and as I woke up, I remembered many feline moments of assuming the worst. I hung out on the phone with her till she calmed down. At first light, Lilly came strolling home after a warm night of sitting under a bush, sniffing ferns or whatever it is that cats do (nobody really knows). I would guess she was never more than 100 meters from the house. August is a growly month, with coyotes yelping and weird sounds in the night. Chiron makes one last visit to your opposite sign Aquarius, giving you a chance to clean up any leftover work in a relationship healing project. Many other planets get into the act and make a lot of noise. I suggest you stay centered and calm, take care of yourself and remember Lilly.

Leo Birthday Audio is coming soon!

You seem to be caught in a time warp, as if you’re retreating into old patterns that are heedless of all the work you’ve done on yourself. Think of this as a cleansing process. There’s always another closet to clean, another organ to revitalize, always something harmful that you can cut out of your diet. Just make sure that for everything you eliminate, you add something you like. For every closet you clean, keep some of the treasures and appreciate what they remind you of. For every aggravating food you eliminate, add one or two things that are nourishing and give you pleasure. A core element of this process involves how you feel about money. There’s a subplot about how you present your finances to the world. Many are intent on showing the world how rich they are; others make a point of how poor they are. I suggest you try for no pretenses, and for doing nothing that ‘makes a statement’. You’re in a phase where your primary financial goal needs to be investing in yourself. Your old attitudes toward money are crumbling or soon will be, and even as they hang on for dear life, the new ones, the more nourishing and creative ones, are coming in. One is necessarily recognizing that financial growth means developing the awareness of money and its power, building infrastructure and maintaining balances, such as between income and expenses, or assets and debt. Just remember, all of this is for real, not for show.

It’s now clear that you’re initiating the changes in your life. This is coming from a commitment so deep that nobody could stop you any more than they can inspire you. It’s a little like when the root of a tree splits apart a huge boulder. That is coming from the life force energy of the tree, and its determination to thrive in its environment. In a similar way, you are putting down roots. You are solidifying something about the nature of your character, and are confident that you’ve found the pattern into which you want to grow your life. With Saturn in your sign for the next two years, you have two special gifts to work with. One is some extraordinarily materializing power. You have the ability to grow things, ideas, projects and enterprises. You need to use this carefully, and be extraordinarily fair in your use of that power. The second gift is the potential for profound psychological growth fostered by potent, mature introspection. No matter how old you are, the next two years will feel like a distinct phase of entering adulthood. Note that those born in the early 1980s are going through their first Saturn return, no matter what Sun sign they’re born under; though all Libras will have a similar sense of transition into what I will describe as a phase of culmination. You are arriving somewhere real, which will serve as a foundation on which to build the next decade or more of your life.

For the past year, your professional life has felt like a minefield. Everything you plan seems to turn into something different. Relationships with companies and government entities have a way of becoming unnecessarily complicated. Your goals seem to slip and slide around, and you’re more subject than ever to seemingly unconscious motives that come out when you least expect it. It’s time to take a new approach that begins with mindfulness rather than action. The wisdom of this may not be clear yet, and in many ways your charts are calling you toward some big quest, goal or adventure. Yet subtler aspects are saying slow down and meditate. You can, if you want, get to the bottom of this situation. While it seems to dramatize itself in the aspects of your life where you reach for achievement, in reality it has more to do with your internal psychology: deep-seated fears, resentment, guilt, and your relationship to the unknown. There is something about the fear of losing it all or being swallowed by a tidal wave. You seem to be walking a razor’s edge of fear that you might abuse your power, then you keep running into people who do precisely that. This is why I suggest you back off from active goal seeking, life planning and attempts to orchestrate the future, and instead take a psychological and emotional approach to your situation. Start with figuring out the ways in which your parents are still running your life.

Every time you get to a point where you think you can free yourself of the details, you discover more details to attend to. Figure this will go on until right before your birthday, when you make a transition into what you would consider to be a more creative approach to existence. Meanwhile, let’s consider the wisdom of focus or over-focus on details. In short, it will work for you, for many reasons. At the moment some of those involve resolving past hang-ups and hangovers. But it’s about much more than that. The particular path to success that you’ve either chosen or wound up traveling is about doing something innovative, creative and highly specific. Sometimes this is called finding a niche market, which is the opposite of brewing up vats of tomato soup from one set formula. You are creating a custom career, which will serve clients that have highly specific, individual needs. This, at its essence, is an exercise in being aware of details, and applying them creatively. The visionary quality is available on the miniature or even microscopic level, and this is your true quest, at the moment. If you persist with love and patience, you will reach that point where you experience the universe as holographic: each moment, each cell, each point of contact, contains the image of the whole. Exploring this property of existence is where your most effective solutions, innovative developments and true sense of direction are going to come from.

You may wonder why you’re in such a position of authority, or why it seems necessary that you get there. Consider that it’s not really authority that you’re seeking, or that you’re known for, but rather your devotion to purpose. Such often calls upon people to take charge and step up to a challenge, or to lead the way for others. Surely seems as though the world is missing those who can do this well. Yet the world is in a crisis of meaning more than anything, and this you have been cultivating beautifully. I recognize that at times you may feel confused, confounded or confronted by reality. You may feel like your security base is challenged every day, and that you’re compensating with raw strength. Yet beneath that potency and strength is something elegant and seemingly small. That is your devotional quality; your ability to understand what and why, and stick to it for years. Under the current transits (and by that I mean this month and in the current years of your life) this is becoming one of the strongest elements of your psyche. Nourish, refine and honor this every day. Look for signs of authenticity in our mad world. Listen for clues that people know what they need or want to be doing, no matter how confused they think they are. See if you can feel the way the whole world is moving in the right direction, and be mindful of all the ways you fit into the process.

A phase of your life is over, and a new one has begun. Yet you seem to have a question about how you handled a relationship, and how you feel about where someone else is with their life, and the role you’ve taken with them. If you’ve taken a heavy hand, you may feel like some of this is coming back at you. But I wonder how much of what you’re perceiving is reality, and how much is a dramatization of your fears — in particular, a phobia you seem to have about being spontaneous. In essence, as you approach the spontaneous moment, you may hesitate, which is not really hesitation but rather a little whiff of what I will call your ‘fear of the worst’. Don’t worry, you’re not the only person who may experience this, but you’re certainly one who has the ability to tap into the power of the experience. Deep in there is a story about modern humanity’s relationship to existence. We’re a society of people who are all about control, which is the opposite of spontaneity. If you find yourself hesitating and you recognize that this is about letting go of control, notice that this is where the life force has the opportunity to slip into your world. Fear is a mask or a veil placed over this. The more intense your negative expectation of what may happen, the more energy, passion and potential the situation contains.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’ve had a taste of what is possible if you focus your thoughts on what you want to create, if you mind your business affairs and take care of your relationships. Your charts give an excellent image that basically says, the more that what you create resembles you, the more you, and it, will thrive. You see, there really is no ‘it’ in this equation: the poet is the work of the poem. You’re about to discover how what you have created has the power to create you back: imagine a feedback loop, wherein you express something and then receive it with your senses, and refine both along the way. What you’ve experienced through the past three or four months was an experimental phase, which remains in effect now. Think of it as a prototype, and I mean both of process and product. That experiment continues, though for the next six months or so, you have an extended time of reviewing what you’ve done and making adjustments. Note that these are going to be based on what worked rather than what didn’t work. If something didn’t work, notice how or why that happened, take the information on board and quickly move onto what did work. The whole business of learning from your mistakes can only go so far. At a certain point you have to learn from success, and fortunately you have a good bit of that to consider. Check me here, though I can assure you that it comes down to one concept, which is authenticity.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Free will, and freedom in general, are among the greatest challenges that most people ever face. One common response is to panic at the notion of potential and the opportunity to choose. Another is to run away with power and see how much abuse one can foist on the world. But the most common response is to go to sleep and pretend that there is no freedom. As it works out, none of these are viable for you; rather, you’re finally in a position where you must take on both potential and the responsibility of freedom, as well as the power and the sense of danger that comes with it. These are all acting simultaneously on your chart, and therefore your psyche. You have the right to be nervous, but I would not call that a privilege, and I don’t suggest you indulge it any more than is necessary. Simmering down more aspects than I could write about in a good length article, we get one bold theme: you’re ready to step into an expanded vision of yourself. This means being fully present for your own life and showing up for your relationships in a new way. If there’s a sacrifice involved, it’s a kind of habitual insecurity that you ignite on the altar of progress. This comes in the form of one decision that is imminent now that affects both your most intimate private life and your most assertive professional life.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

One thing you get to figure out this month is the extent to which your emotions and your thoughts influence one another. I guess a male chauvinist would call this ‘thinking like a woman’, but plenty of men are famous for it. Our whole society, supposedly so male-dominated, seems to be based on an exaggerated form of emoting that passes for reason. To the extent you feel trapped inside something, it may be this very phenomenon. Part of where you get lost is believing that the opposite of sensitivity is brutal rationality: the kind found in law books. Therefore, the obvious place to retreat is into the soft world of sentimentality. By the way, such a trip may be an exaggerated version of your parental drama, wherein you are caught in the middle. Both sides in this supposed struggle for reality are cartoons. There is an emotional basis for intelligence, and all learning is a process of listening, reasoning and synthesis. You’re an intuitive thinker, and you may indeed know things before you know them. If you find yourself demanding proof, the wise thing to do would be to pause for a little while and wait for confirmation. You’re probably not building skyscrapers, chemical plants or nuclear bombs; you’re navigating your way through the uncertainties and creative opportunities of life. A lower standard of proof is appropriate. There’s such a thing as true enough, as long as you leave your mind open to learn more.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may be afraid that you’re going to lose your focus, so recently discovered after so much effort. But what good is focus if you can’t keep it? It’s a little like being fully committed part of the time. What would happen if you were fully committed all of the time? I know the C word has implications as something you cannot get out of. Yet if you’re unable to do what’s important to you, that also has a feeling of something you cannot get out of. Here’s my theory: you usually don’t know what you want, or you don’t let yourself admit it. When you do know, or when you do admit it, you’re perfectly capable of sticking to a goal. When your awareness slips, so too does your power to achieve. The only thing that’s really changed during the past couple of months is that you’ve been aware of what you want, in specific terms. Perhaps you’ve refined ‘wanting to be a writer’ to ‘wanting to write screenplays’. Somehow you forgot the part about how doing the thing you want allegedly prevents you from doing everything else. Now, all you need is to remember that one thing, without the reminders or accidental opportunities you’ve been lucky enough to have. You really can do this on your own. You have the strength to focus, and you’re finally a good enough sailor to move with the tides of your emotions without drowning.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re getting a rare glimpse into how others experience you in your relationships. This is another way of saying you have an opportunity to feel how much you influence the people in your life — and how much they influence you. This is an important topic of study for you now, because your relationships have the feeling of being under some unusual pressure (and I speak here for both Cancer Sun and ascendant). This involves the longterm placement of Pluto in your 7th house of partners. It would be an understatement to say that the metabolism of your relationships is increasing, and that you’re rethinking entirely your role as a partner, lover or spouse. It would also be an understatement to suggest that most people have little sense of how ‘their’ concept of what it means to be in a relationship is an antique that’s been passed down through the generations, and is treated by each new generation like it’s some kind of precious heirloom or brilliant new innovation, when really it’s nothing of the kind. Pluto moving through this house is unearthing many previously concealed dysfunctional, old values, at the same time bringing new life into your desire to connect with individuals, with humanity and with your environment. An unusually potent total eclipse of the Sun in your own sign on July 11 emphasizes the point that one must be one’s own partner first, and anyone else’s partner second.

As far as I can tell, most of what we do in relationships involves compensating for some sense of our ‘self’ being missing or incomplete. That’s why after a while we notice that we ‘don’t quite feel ourselves’ in the relationship, or that we’re not who we want to be; then we get restless and leave the relationship in order to ‘be’ that self. In many ways your whole life has been a quest to go beyond this: to not just define but to actually experience yourself as a whole person, capable of relating to another whole person. What you may not have factored in is that generations of conditioning have led to what you’ve been overcoming. In this conditioning, so common to the human experience, we’re taught to be self-sacrificing before we have the experience of self-actualizing. Events this month will shine some light on your distant past, and that of your family, so that you can see the origins of your tendencies. You may make discoveries about what happened to ancestors, about the folklore through the line of women that has shaped your experience of life, and of certain facts about your gestation that formed you into who you are, and what you are now outgrowing. Note that all of these discoveries will come with a factor of ‘plausible deniability’. The truth will be easy to evade, and equally possible to embrace, if you are willing. By now, you are surely able.

You may sense or fear that an impact is coming, and you’re tired of living like a shock absorber. With any luck those days are behind you, though you have one little project left: learning how to stabilize your feelings about yourself. Much of the impact you take comes from various judgments you inflict on yourself. Most of these, in turn, come from not having the same opinion of yourself from day to day; and you might want to address this point. You could, for example do a study and determine who you are, and establish what kind of a person you are, and test that out and see if it’s true. What I’m wondering, though, is why you’re so obsessed with your opinion of yourself, no matter what that turns out to be. Perhaps you’re doing the job of someone whose judgments of you were dire and negative. One possibility is that the whole exercise proves you exist. This became like a burden you took on, feeling like if you did all the judging, they would never get the chance. There is now someone in your life presenting a different influence entirely, whose example is teaching you how to let go of your self-conscious quality. This person’s influence is saying: your concept of ‘self’ is a trap, and if you can let go of that, you can find the way to freedom. And that, by the way, is the ‘impact’ you sense arriving.

Saturn enters your sign this month. After a brief visit earlier in the year, it retreated to Virgo and will now spend the next 24 months right with you. This journey starts off with some thunder and lightning: the 5th and final opposition of Saturn and Uranus, capping off a sequence of events that began on Election Day 2008. The prior four oppositions took place in late Virgo and Pisces, veiled from your direct view. July’s event is the one and only opposition across the Aries-Libra axis, which makes it especially personal. Saturn’s role is to help you tie up the loose ends in your life, and there seem to be many. I suggest you over-emphasize matters of commitment, consistency and follow-through. There will be times you’re called upon to make firm, clear decisions, which may contrast with the style of wait-and-see you inherited from your child-self. Remember that you’re only and always deciding one thing, which is who you are. Many external forces are influencing you to change and grow. Yet something deeper and more substantial is at work, which is a return to the deepest core of your self-awareness and fundamentally come to terms with both your true nature and your true potential. This is about taking action, and one thing you can be confident of is that when you do that, the world will rise to the occasion and meet you full on.

You’ve been in pursuit of your core creative fire, and so far this has been an interesting jaunt. Plenty else is going on around you. But most of it has been developing in the next room over, speaking in the psychic sense of that: you’ve known it affects you. You can now shift your focus to this other objective: actively removing the emotional impediments to action. Let’s call these two things project one and project two. Project one has called on you to give up attachment to your goals as a way of accessing something deeper in yourself, what we could call a pure essence and a devotion to service. Project two is about attaining your goals, while keeping that pure essence fully in your awareness. You are now embarking on a new path of achievement without compromising your integrity. This tells you something about the order of operations: integrity check first, then actions taken in accord with that, and then a return to the level of integrity to verify that you’re focused the way you need to be. As you do this, you’ll have a new sense of accomplishment: a bit like riding a bicycle without training wheels for the first time. You will know that you’re the one maintaining your focus, devotion and cultivating your faith as an act of will. The next few weeks contain potent astrology that establishes patterns and magnifies intentions. What you do now will help you for many months.

You are an optimist. You know that if you expect things to go wrong they are much likelier to; and you’ve proven to yourself many times that if you envision things going well, that’s a kind of implicit choice. The question we all face is how to handle obstacles, and the optimist’s method is to turn them into opportunities. It seems ‘the world’ has some catching up to do with how much you’ve accomplished, with how creative you are and with how passionate you are about what you do. You might ask: why does ‘the world’ make it so difficult for someone to succeed? The answer can be found in psychology. Let’s say someone pretends to be something that they’re not; and then they meet someone who is that actual thing. How is the pretender going to respond? A bit of jealousy, perhaps? A bit of anger and insecurity? And how might they compensate? Which brings me to a story around your father that’s appearing in bold colors. Imagine you had a parent who had these very characteristics. Perhaps they concealed it through some haze of denial, ambiguity, ‘nice guy’, alcoholic or gone missing. As a kid, you made up a story to compensate for those deficiencies; then one day you realized your story was not true. This means one thing, at least: you don’t have to live up to his supposed expectations, because most likely you conjured them up yourself.

You may feel like you’re being pushed beyond your limits, but they’re precisely the limits you don’t want. You may be coming up to the age-old question: am I changing, is my partner changing, or is a relationship changing? The answer is all three. You may wonder whether you’re willing to take on all the responsibility (and for some, authority) that is being handed to you, and the answer is: why would you be getting it if you were not ready? Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt more confident and safer on the planet? If so, I suggest you look closely at what was influencing you, though I’m inclined to think that this moment is the time when you’re working with the most solid foundation you’ve ever had. The reason is because you finally feel safe embracing change. You know that security comes not from false confidence in who you are, but rather from embracing a measure of uncertainty and appreciating the value of mystery. You’ve probably figured out that the things most people think make them safe don’t actually do so, and that most attempts at being certain of who one is involve clinging to what their parents taught them. You seem more determined than ever to break free from these false notions of security, and the best step you can take now is to encourage the people around you to do the same. This will be the true test of your confidence.

This month, the two rulers of your sign — traditional planet Saturn and modern planet Uranus — face off for the fifth time in 19 months. The opposition moves toward a conjunction that takes place in 2032, so let’s say this is an important aspect, aided by many other factors. For example, the signs involved are Aries and Libra, rather than Virgo and Pisces. The net effect is that things you’ve been thinking about, perhaps obsessively, are about to translate into a rapid sequence of decisions, movement and action. Your planets say you’re done being reactive; you’re done being defensive; the time when you make the second move has drawn to a close. You might notice your tendency to need something to push back against, or to define yourself by what you are not. Part of what the Saturn-Uranus opposition offers is healthy contrast. You’re learning to see things in more vivid shades than you have in the past, which is a form of commitment. I suggest that you think back to November 2008, when this process began. What can you see clearly now that was not so easy to observe then? Count the ways in which you’re obviously different than certain people you come into contact with on a regular basis. You seem to have noticed this before, though you were less likely to think that the distinctions were meaningful or worth acting on. What is your opinion today?

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Your astrology this month is all about stepping into a more visible role as a contributor to culture. It’s as if a veil gets pulled back, revealing who you are. From the outside it looks like you have some kind of creative role, and like you take the chances to bring that quality into your experience. Obviously you’ve taken some chances, though you may at times wonder what good that did. I assure you it did as much good as anything can, which is to both cultivate and preserve your passionate approach to existence. Take away any one of those daring endeavors and you wouldn’t be the same person, nor would you be in the same place you are now. Yet behind that veil is something else: the ability to have not just impact but actual influence. You’re part of a changing world, and you’re part of that process of change. This is what becomes undeniable. Yet to get there, you must shed some baby fat and a few other childhood tendencies. In order to take on your new role, something about your old role must transform entirely. In your new incarnation you’ll take with you all the talent, commitment and sensitivity you started with, and leave behind your insecurity, abandonment and tendency to struggle. Looked at one way, you are about to grow up fast. Looked at another, you’ve reached an inevitable threshold of development that you’ve been eagerly awaiting your entire life.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

I trust that by now you’re aware of a 14-year conjunction that occurs on June 8, and that I’m proposing this as the inauguration of the 2012 era. Jupiter and Uranus enter Aries (Uranus, this week!, within moments of the Sagittarius Full Moon), and this turns on the Aries Point at full strength: the meeting place of the individual and the collective dimensions of existence. We’re accustomed to events that happen in aspect to the Aries point; this month Jupiter and Uranus will be conjunct exactly on the Aries Point. It is true that many aspects are working together to create the full effect of this threshold, particularly a gathering of planets in early Aries, Libra and Capricorn. We have grown accustomed to thinking of this as something in the distant future.

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a view of shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station crossing the face of the Sun (called a transit of the Sun) on May 16, 2010 about 50 minutes before the shuttle docked with the ISS. Legault took the image from Madrid, Spain at 13:28:55 UT.

I propose that if we want to understand the meaning of 2012 — and I believe it has a distinct message for us — we need look no further than our present moment: with its blended sense of potential, fruition and catastrophic quality. Yet the potential is not necessarily showing up as some major transformation liberating you from everything that holds you back (as happens in the spiritual fantasies of many), nor does the disaster seem to involve the Grand Canyon turning upside down, oceans flooding the continents and the magnetic poles shifting overnight.

You could call that kind of thought mystical porno. Potential is subtler than that; geology tends to be incremental. Yet if you were to play the past 10 years in time lapse, be they events of your life or of world events, you would be amazed. And you just might wonder why you didn’t take so many other opportunities when you had them. You might wonder what it was that was influencing you to be so cautious, to hold to the past or to stick to what is familiar.

The wave pulse of the astrology, combined with the events that play out in the planetary drama, is quite strong right now, and it’s natural to be feeling like you want to be doing something else, free of your routine, your mental patterns, or the limits of your relationships. Now is the moment to ask yourself exactly what that means and how it would feel to have that happen. Not so much how you would do it, but rather the feeling tone of the success you want.

You might question the value of making a move when you feel like you’re under pressure, or extremely restless, even if you’ve had the same message over and over. I would ask: when else would you take real steps toward what you want?

One question that the (supposedly) newly awakening may be asking is: why does it have to be that just as I begin paying attention to what is possible in my life, so much seems to be going wrong in the world? Well, it’s not just now. Plenty has been going wrong throughout the course of industrialism; we tend to pay attention either to what is directly under our noses, or what our awareness level allows in. The truth is we’ve been through many events that should have ‘woken us all up’, and as a culture, as a group entity, we tend to let them go by without making any real changes.

Azure coast, Miami. Photo by Eric Francis.

That said, we live in a point of no return, whether we recognize it or not. It’s a dangerous spot we’re in, as is any true evolutionary moment, and that is precisely what we have: a moment when concentrated evolution is possible. The misconception to get over is that this is something that happens to us rather than something that comes from us. Life is not a movie. There is no writer, except for you; no director, save for yourself. And at the same time we are each creating with the choice to be in harmony or out of harmony with energy movements that surround us.

A significant piece of the danger involves noticing what we’ve lived in denial of for so long: such as relationships that don’t meet our needs, unprocessed anger at our families, and so many ways of life that deny our true personhood. And we might not have thought about our brilliantly enlightened moment as the day when we finally get into a therapist’s office and start talking about this stuff, so we can finally stop having it run our lives and our relationships — or the day we write the first few notes of music, or the first few words of a short story, or visit someplace we’ve needed to go for a long time.

In a recent edition of Planet Waves Astrology News, I described our current astrology as a moment of self-actualization, the opportunity to be aware of the moment we are in, and rise to the occasion. Here is that article, in case you want to read (or reread) it.

Self-actualization is another term for what we now call ‘spiritual growth’ or ‘personal development’. Something tangible is implied in the idea, which is authenticity: the key concept is actual, which means real. It would be an understatement to call this a get-real moment. In the horoscopes that follow, I’ve done my best to explain how this looks, for the 12 signs of the zodiac. I plan to have an extended audio edition of the June planets available by the first. This will include an introduction and then shorter pieces that cover each of the 12 signs, available as one work, so that your Sun, Moon and ascendant (and those of your friends) are all included. Please watch for that announcement.

Yours & truly,

Do we ever really reinvent ourselves? Sometimes we do. Often we do not. As much as we strive to turn over new leaves, write new chapters, get a spiritual makeover, make a new effort at self-improvement, change our image, color our hair, strike off in a new direction, stop letting the family define our reality, we do very nearly everything in our power to resist real change. We have many tools for this, and most of them are relationships. Then one day it happens. Despite everything, we suddenly find ourselves rapidly becoming someone else, doing something different, living another life. It may be wildly different than anything we thought possible, or thought of at all. These are the changes that emerge from the inside and then somehow take us to other places on the planet, or make us thirst for new knowledge, or crave freedom from everything we knew in the past. And that is the moment you are in. You’ve had plenty of time to consider your potential, and by now you know what you want: to be at peace, all you need to do is admit your truth to yourself, and then let go into the flow. There will be time later to reflect on what you’ve done, to revise your ideas and to try a new approach: but this first go is the most meaningful one. It’s the moment when you say yes to yourself: a moment of faith and adventure.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

I’m sure you’ve had one of those dreams where you discover you have a new wing in your house, or that a closet leads to a whole other building. These dreams seem to have one thing in common, which is how normal the discovery is, like the thing was always there, and how could you have missed it? That is the approximate feeling of your astrology this month: an inner dimension opening and welcoming you in, but one that was always there. You may be inclined to respond as if this is ‘not really happening’. You may doubt: how do you know if this discovery is really you, or the product of your imagination? (Clue, it is both at the same time.) You don’t have to ask questions. If you want to do something practical, step across the inner threshold and see for yourself. The feeling is the calling of any potential, talent or dream that has opened up for you lately. The inner space that’s opening up has different rules. You can, for example, say yes to yourself. You don’t have to define your reality with fear, or honor the limits that fear previously set. In fact you don’t need to believe anything that you previously believed, and furthermore, you can define who you are as a mystery rather than something, or someone, who you’re supposed to be able to predict. If you can get past how nervous this might make you, you’ll have a lot of fun.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re in a unique position of leadership, and I mean unique in the true sense of the word: for you, this is once in a lifetime, and truly original in expression. How you interpret that notion will depend on how you feel about yourself. One way to go would be to take charge in your own life — the only true leadership there is. The other option is to keep dreaming, to keep wishing, and wonder what mysterious force will deliver you to your destiny. It’s unlikely, though, that you will be able to take a passive role. You’re at a rare turning point that relates directly to your life calling, your sense of mission and this elusive issue of acknowledging your power. You may feel that you’ve waited too long to do this; you may feel the demand for authenticity and mandatory integrity has come upon you too soon. This seeming paradox is one of the effects of Chiron in Pisces, your 10th solar house. Yet if you look at the equation in a balanced way, and consider what you’re experiencing, you will see that you’re being given information (not an answer, more like a question that is focused enough to get an answer) that helps you resolve a deeper issue: the older one of having only a vague sense of purpose. What you are experiencing now is, very specifically, a sense of purpose that is trying to get your attention. You are being called. It is your option to answer.

How many people get to do exactly what they want, or what they know they came here to do? What stops some and what facilitates others? Looking around, why does it seem that some humans — right in the same culture — get to write science fiction floating around on a wooden sailboat, while others have to collect trash? And since you’re somewhere in the middle, what determines where on the continuum you get to be? We could look at all kinds of worldly advantages: the trust fund, buying a load of Microsoft stock in 1986, knowing the right person. We could credit shrewdness. We could say that one’s karma allows or disallows certain potentials (and more of us believe this than care to admit we do). Your charts suggest that the approach to life that will get you where you want to go is envisioning what you want without giving credence to any idea that it’s not possible. For some it is challenging to envision the existence of their dreams — there seem to be so many quirky facts, mediocre people and global disasters in the way. If you have been trying to envision your dreams for a day or for 50 years, you have arrived at the breakthrough point. It’s not merely that nothing is impossible, it is that anything is possible, so therefore, choose from the depth of your passion. Clue: it’s an easy feeling.

It’s time to stretch every horizon. The first one to expand includes your vision of what is possible, of who you are and of what you can achieve. I’m aware how challenging it is to do this even if you’re ‘good’ at it, though you do have help. What you’re really changing is your idea of who you are, as if some ‘higher self’ version of you contained on another level is flooding into your personality, displacing your ego and offering you the sensation of your most enlightened self. While you’re stretching horizons, don’t forget the boundaries of place that so often seem to hold you back. You’re someone who can make anyplace interesting, though now unusual locales are calling you, as are friends from other parts of the world — some of whom you may not know today. And while you’re stretching, take the next few weeks and lean into some expanded ideas of what is possible. The truth is: you can do anything, particularly using this moment as your fulcrum. How do you get there? In a word, faith. Faith is not something you need a lot of. All you need is a little. What some spiritual traditions call the ‘greater faith’ reaches back to you, responding to your call; the greater light joins your small light. You initiate the process, with your commitment to dare, to see, to embrace your life. That is the invitation for divine providence to make the next move.

Relationships either help set us free to be who we are, or they limit who we are. This is the choice we have. Generally, every relationship is an agreement to live one way or the other, until we remember that we only have one relationship: self to other. The decision you’re now making involves reaching from your core and seeing the continuity of every encounter that you have: longterm, short-term, ‘sexual’, ‘platonic’, committed, casual, or whatever. At the core of that continuity is your understanding that relationship is an agreement to be free or to be a slave; to give yourself, or to be taken; to exchange, or to take advantage of. Our society is not as clueless about this as it was, say, even 50 years ago. Yet the marriage contract, society’s model of relationship, has not fundamentally changed in that time, and there are many movements to make it more restrictive, not less. You, however, can no longer be defined, or limited, by these kinds of unquestioned, prefab contracts. Your Self must have the freedom to explore, to expand, and to individuate in every encounter. It is true that you have chosen relationships as your own primary method of getting to know yourself, so withdrawing is not an option — and given the incredible potential of your human encounters, there seems little point in that. Indeed, current aspects are likely to represent the actual moment when you’re drawn out of your shell, into experiencing the true potential of love.

Your charts this month leave me wondering how much change and innovation one human being is capable of embracing. In astrology it’s a good idea to understate the case, so I will put it this way. You have lived with one order of reality, or known construct of reality, for a while. That includes an idea of who you are, a life pattern and most of all, a relationship pattern. On several different accounts, you appear to be in a process of a top-to-bottom revision of all of these things. Don’t worry, it’s going to last for a while and you don’t need to make all your adjustments at once. Yet the current moment has a particular rarity, which is that if you keep your mind’s eye open, you will be the beneficiary of a vision for how good things can be in the future. One property of this process is that the more change you’re willing to abide, the more potential you can activate. For a while, you have the ability or potential to resist, though Saturn’s imminent journey through your sign suggests that you are at a maturity point that will enable you to handle some significant progress. You will do yourself an enormous favor by thinking of your experience as something that emerges from inside of you rather than as something in your environment — this, even as your environment starts to vibrate and light up and morph into something new before your eyes.

You have often let your work define you. The time has arrived for you to define yourself and your work. Depending on who you are this will be one of the most creative phases of your life, or a phase where you feel so confined that you begin a revolution, so that you can do more of what you want. I would remind you that we live in a society that alternately signals us with ‘do what you love and you will prosper’ and, to the contrary, ‘why do you think they call it work?’ Even those who find themselves highly successful in a chosen field can find themselves confined by their schedule, their creative demands and by a routine. In recent years, something else has taken over, which is your willingness to take risks, and to enrich yourself creatively. Some of the experiments have worked, some have not, but one thing is clear: you are determined to express yourself. This, in turn, translates into determination to be free within your environment. It also translates to something deeper, which is standing uncompromisingly in your truth, and taking action only from there. You can do this; I propose that you’ll discover that the barriers and reasons you felt you could not do this were a kind of mirage. These, in turn, will reveal the deeper material that you can work out through your process of self-creation, which is creative process, which is your personal form of art: yours and yours alone.

You know that the risks you take don’t just involve you. They involve everyone in your world, because so many people depend on you — and you like it that way. Yet what if one day you woke up and you didn’t have to worry about all of them; what if your only necessity was to consider your own options? This would remove the source of nearly all of your fears, and open up a wide horizon of possibilities that seemed impossible before. I suggest you work with this for a while. It may be one of the biggest risks you can take, and you will likely find this exciting. I’m not saying you have to do anything, or try anything; rather, I am proposing that you consider a collection of ‘what ifs.’ What if you were not bound to your current place? What if you could tap your fiery, inventive energy? What if you had the focus to stick to a new challenge long enough to bring it to fruition? What if you could tap into an energy source that you know you carry around with you? What if you could tap into the deep wisdom of the past? What if you were clear about how you feel, rather than about what you believe philosophically? Now add five or 10 of your own questions and see if you can detect a pattern to the answers. There is one. And you are in a rare moment when you can act on the truth that the pattern reveals.

You fancy yourself a stable person — but what does that mean? Every week and nearly every day brings a new challenge to which you have to adapt. What has remained constant is your view of the past, and key values from your past that you’ve used continuously to define your life. When was the last time you reevaluated everything that has happened before? You may have done this once — there are few possibilities as to when, though a time that stands out is the mid-1990s. That seemed to be a moment when you separated yourself from history and in a sense started your archeological clock over. What you’re doing now is different: it’s a reevaluation of a ‘safe’ definition of who you are that appears designed to provide you with predictability. In reality, it’s designed to provide a self-definition consistent with what was expected of you as a child. True, since you define yourself as so fiercely independent, you may disagree with this, and I wish I could know the points of contention — I suggest you work with each of them. These objections are actually a kind of ‘argument against who you are’ that is coming from the past: from people who defined their purpose as being secure, who never stepped into their own original existence, and who are in the end quite different than you. If I could sum up your current revolution in one sentence, it’s that you no longer need to do their bidding.

I’ve said before that for a person who loves ideas as much as you do, this is a great time to be alive. You are in territory where you can surpass all limits, yet to get there you need to embrace an idea that is rarely spoken of: intellectual freedom. You understand this intuitively, of that I am certain. Yet because we live in a society that so desperately tries to repress anything it does not understand or that does not follow today’s economic rules, we’re all a little hobbled here. You have a special advantage: you seek yourself in the free expression of ideas. They may belong to you; they may belong to someone else — but you know a free idea when you see one, and you are gathering the momentum to bring something you love and value to fruition. You’ve spent a lot of time, perhaps years, thinking about how much you love and value this concept — whatever it is. Now you have an opportunity to do something about it. I am sure you sense the potential: to help people, to establish a new kind of beauty within planetary consciousness. The ingredient you must work with is a form of discipline called focus. Yes, odd synchronicities will guide you on your way, but you need the full strength of your mind on this gig. And I suggest you beware of a factor that feels like living two lifetimes at once. Through this endeavor, you will finally integrate them.

Aquarius birthday audio is coming soon — thanks for all the emails!

Imagine you woke up one morning to FedEx ringing your doorbell, signed for an envelope, and were staring at a letter. “Dear [add your name]: It is my pleasure to inform you of a trust account that was established for you at the time of your birth. One of the conditions of the trust was that you would be informed of it at this time in your life, when you were ready to receive and make the best use of it, and that time is now. Please contact us at your earliest convenience so that we may make arrangements for the transfer of funds.” Astrologically, it’s better than money, and better than something that is handed to you. Money is suggested strongly in the aspects — potentially in the form of a highly lucrative idea. This would likely come in the form of a new approach to something you are doing now, or have been working toward. You’ve come further along this journey than you think, and you’re at a breakthrough point. That arrives in the form of believing in yourself without hesitation: the deep rooting of your self-respect into your psyche. When your potential is released, the form comes in with the feeling, the actual sensation, of authentic faith in yourself. You cannot feign this; and you cannot thrive without it, so I suggest you welcome the feeling warmly, walk gently in your confidence and remember that this is your passport to whatever you want.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

For those who appreciate the concept ‘holistic’, I have some astrology news for you — Chiron in Pisces. We think of holistic as something like going to a naturopathic doctor, though it has much wider implications. Here is a succinct Wikipedia definition. The concept of holistic (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, whole, entire, total) is the idea that the properties of a given system (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave. Or, looked at another way, every ‘part’ contains the whole or represents an accurate picture of the whole system.

The Earth is the original holos, a complex system of interrelationships that adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

As of Tuesday morning, April 20, Chiron is now in Pisces for the first time since the 1960s. It made its ingress within hours of the Sun entering Taurus. Still considered a new element by most astrologers, this small body was discovered orbiting our Sun in 1977. Chiron has a strange orbit; it spends just 18 months in a sign when close to the Sun (as it did in the mid-1990s) and seven to nine years in a sign when distant from the Sun (as it is doing now). This makes a sign-change a particularly special occasion at this point, and Chiron in Pisces arrives with a new feeling, shifted sense of reality and a new healing agenda.

The Aquarius-Pisces cusp, where Chiron is now (on the Pisces side, as of today), is a part of the zodiac that is about whole-systems consciousness. These are signs near the end of the story of the zodiac, and as a result they take on vast topics and have a long history. The mental/intellectual quality of Aquarius and the creative/intuitive attribute of Pisces together expand our awareness and help us see ourselves and our issues from a viewpoint that is distinct from what we think of as individual. Chiron’s presence here calls our attention to the necessity to see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves, and subtler than the physical world.

At first these shifts may be difficult to discern, though they are likely to be a new form of a message you’ve been getting for a while. Chiron is, for many, a background presence. Consider that for the five years that Chiron was in Aquarius, we saw a gradual explosion of Internet use — but the change is subtle unless you consider it all at once. Most places it’s more than doubled the past few years, and the number of portable devices seems to be growing faster than anyone can keep track. Usage of Facebook has surpassed Google. That’s an image of Chiron in Aquarius: a vast web of interconnectivity.

Pisces addresses even larger systems, which don’t necessarily need as much technology to hold them up, and Chiron tends to enhance our experience of any sign that it’s transiting. Think of the Internet as a simplistic model of something that already exists: the subtle sphere of consciousness that is biopsychic — the web of life that connects everything and everyone. What if we tuned into our ability to connect with that level of awareness, as a natural experience?

Garbage from around the world ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, a patch of trash — mostly plastic — the size of Texas. This image, though unidentified, is probably Hawaii, which experiences plastic beaches like this as a result of garbage flow through the gyre.

In many respects, Chiron in Aquarius has been a study in form — the particular form that communication takes, such as what kind of device or networking system is used. Pisces is about the content; the creative dimension, which will be emphasized by Chiron’s presence here. Many people fear that they’re not creative; Chiron says it’s about consciously wanting the experience, and then directing one’s awareness there.

This creativity factor involves our relationship to what we think of as God or to our spiritual source. We tend to live as if separated from that source (something easily discerned by observing ourselves and others as we make decisions). Chiron is calling us to full awareness of either direct contact, or our sense that we lack contact. This way we can start taking steps to get what we need and healing issues that can only be resolved through a full-awareness approach.

On the way there, we’re likely to encounter the denial factor, which is the shadow side of Pisces. We know that we deny plenty just to get through the day, and much else besides because it’s inconvenient or threatens our concept of the world. Chiron in Pisces is likely to serve as a force that pulls back the veil and reveals the truth of many issues we would prefer not to look at. Most of them involve the interrelationships between the levels of society and ecology: how advertising pushes us toward ecological destruction; how abuse of mood stabilizers alters our involvement in politics or the economy; how many of us shape our self-image through video games, fashion ads and TV commercials, and aren’t even especially concerned about this. Yet are these really the exemplars we want to be using? And if not, what do we want to hold as an example?

Through July 20, we have a warm-up of Chiron in Pisces. Then Chiron will retrograde back into Aquarius, where it will stay until February 2011, when it returns to Pisces for the next eight years — to be our constant companion through whatever it is that we are calling 2012.

Yours & truly,

PS: This brief essay is just an introduction; I went into greater depth in last week’s edition. I am currently working on sign-by-sign audio about Chiron in Pisces and will be sending out an announcement shortly. Your May monthly horoscope offers an introduction to what this transit means for each of the 12 astrological signs.

PPS: For those readers of Planet Waves Astrology News who have not purchased Cosmic Confidential, here is some news. I’ve begun to post the Key Life Transit sections, as audio, beginning with the Saturn return. I’ll follow up with the Uranian opposition, the Chiron return and several key Pluto transits. On Friday we will begin selling the Key Life Transits audio sections as separate products. This week is your last chance to subscribe to Cosmic Confidential with all sections included. What is $19.95 today will be just under $100 on Friday — please take advantage of this offer.

Dear Cousin and Client:

My Australian colleague Yasmin Boland called me up last week and suggested that I do a set of audio recordings for Chiron in Pisces. She knows I’ve been writing about Chiron for 15 years and that good information is difficult to come by. After writing several other articles about this transit, including the May monthly horoscope, I dove into the audio — and it’s now ready.

Eric Francis.

Chiron in Pisces promises to be an extremely interesting transit — and for those of us who are attuned to the feminine side of life, to nature, to our emotional world, to spirituality and to the planet as a whole entity, this is transit is welcome news. We now get about three months of Chiron in Pisces before it retrogrades back into Aquarius on July 20. It will then return to Pisces to stay for eight years in February 2011. This is our test run; our first experiment; our opportunity to explore this energy and find out what role it’s going to have in our lives.

This audio set is an awesome, economically priced product that gives you a wholesome introduction to both Chiron and Chiron in Pisces (about 20 minutes) and then takes on the 12 signs in individual recordings of about six to eight minutes in length. I go through the implications and my theory of Chiron in Pisces through each of the 12 solar houses. I suggest you listen to your Sun, your rising sign and your Moon sign — though there is good information for everyone, in each of the recordings.

We’ve priced this to be affordable — $14.99 for all 12 signs and the intro, which you can listen to as many times as you want. It’s like a mini-audio book on Chiron in Pisces. Remember, this is the beginning of the conversation, a kind of welcome wagon — this will be an exciting, long-term transit that will change the world in subtle, beautiful ways.

Please use this link to order. Delivery is instant. And please let me know how you like it.

Thanks for checking it out.

Yours & truly,

In many ways you live an existence driven by idealism and fantasy, but this fact is often veiled from your awareness. You’re more likely to consider yourself a pragmatist or someone bent on achievement, and lately you’ve been true to form, bringing new determination to the idea of meaningful success. With Chiron transiting into Pisces, your focus shifts to seeking understanding on the deepest levels of your psychology: your hidden life and your spiritual dimension. Chiron in Pisces is an awakening point to delve into what you may think of as the ‘other side of your personality’ but which is really a deep inner well that is as much part of you as the aspects of yourself that you encounter in normal consciousness. You may have noticed that in recent years, despite your focus on your adult priorities, your imagination has become more like that of a child. Images mean as much as words. The harder you work the more you need to escape. Yet it’s often been difficult to concentrate the energy in a productive way. You’ve become more curious about the nature of your soul, yet it’s often challenging to find a practical home for this quest in the world. Chiron in Pisces is an opportunity to open up dependable access to those dimensions of yourself. If you feel slightly uncomfortable at the prospect of this, or if your early experiences make you stop and question your reality, you’re on the right track.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information. 

In the background of your life for as long as you can remember, you’ve struggled to fit into the world. This experience has been so pervasive that it’s tended to disappear, punctuated with moments of mystery about why you could not find your way. Then the intensity of the issue began to grow, and at times focused into outright crisis. What should you be doing, and if you have an idea of what, then how? Chiron in Pisces is here to help you focus your aspirations in a way that combines three elements of life: expressing your most authentic dreams, tapping into your financial potential for your true career, and taking part actively as an authentic part of a group or subculture. What we think of as ‘community’ is an integration point: the key element and not a luxury. This quest requires that instead of being judgmental of your ideas, creative efforts and past experiences, it’s time to open up and allow the energy to flow through you. You have kept many of your most creative ideas secret for a long time, literally blocking energy, and you’re now being summoned into public view. The purpose of what is commonly called creativity is not merely to develop yourself and your mind, but also to help create a shared experience that allows you and others to open up to life. The goal is not perfection, success or applause but rather a shared meeting space where everyone can thrive.

Coming Soon! Taurus Birthday Audio.

You may be aware of how you would live boldly in a perfect world, rather than the edgy, competitive place we find ourselves at the moment. You are suited for leadership in a place that honors the softer aspects of human nature; that makes space for the hidden life we all possess; that is less concerned with profits than it is with embracing love and peace. Chiron in Pisces is here to awaken you to the fact that whatever state the world may be in, your life needs to be oriented on these subtler attributes of existence. In particular, the work you do every day would benefit from harmonizing with the spiritually or creatively oriented energy of Pisces. The chances are you already have a vision for a professional life that would be something like this, but you don’t necessarily say anything about it. Part of you may be too cynical to believe it’s possible. In your belief system, it may not be possible all at once, but it’s something you’ll be steadily growing toward over the next 10 years, as you move from a kind of active dream state to enacting concrete ideas. Here is an image: Imagine you live near a river, in a time when rivers were safe and clean. Every day you go to the river and gather water and bring it to where you live. Then one day you figure out that you can build a pipe and divert a little of that water on a constant basis, and have it transported to where you need it.

We all have issues with faith. We live on a planet and in a society where a lot can go wrong, and most of how we defend ourselves is by the prowess of intellect: planning, analysis and efforts aimed at control. Yet your usual methods are giving way to a process of visioning the possibilities, and in particular, the possibility you want to manifest. Chiron in Pisces is another way of saying vivid imagery. Therefore, focus on envisioning exactly what you want to manifest, create or become. And among them is a vision of yourself, which rightfully would begin with the feeling of what it’s like to live guided by faith in yourself. This transit will help you tune into the emotional cycle wherein you seem to lose and gain that faith. Vision and faith will feed and support one another. They are habits, and because the sign involved is Pisces, once you get them going they will be enmeshed deeply in who you are. And while challenging, they are such dependable techniques that you will want to use them. We tend to be so dependent on our mental faculties that they take over our minds. Like a computer, your mind makes an excellent slave and a terrible master. Allow your higher power to take over. Said another way, your quest is to go from belief to faith. To do this, you will need to distinguish the two.

All of life consists of relationships, and looked at one way, those relationships consist of agreements. Since this is true on one level, let’s start there. You tend to be idealistic about those agreements, and Chiron transiting into Pisces is calling on you to be practical, grounded and focused. This is a time to create written contracts where verbal ones existed in the past. It’s a time to see if the goals of longstanding partnerships add up to the results you want at this time in your life, and notice whether they are pointing you toward your objectives for the next phase of your life. Do they honor the person you are becoming, as well as the person you are now? Deeper down, closer to the truth of the matter, is that relationships are based on a shared reality that is much softer and more intuitive than an agreement. They thrive on a shared vision. Indeed, our world’s insistence on agreements is a substitute for precisely this intuitive and visionary factor: a mutual sense of perspective; a common spiritual orientation; the subtle understanding that relationships are for mutual benefit. Chiron in Pisces is going to work like a clarifying filter on both dimensions: of contracts and of your shared vision, guiding you toward that place where the two become one thing, which is a dimension beyond either. Chiron will be keeping your sex life pretty hot as well.

You tend to be discriminating — in fact, to a fault. You hold both yourself and the world to high standards, sometimes ones that are impossible to attain. This seems to be the direct result of past disappointments in relationships, events that have gradually cultivated in you a subtle lack of trust of others that you seem to spend a lot of time and energy fighting with. It’s now time to heal that particular issue, and in the process, renew your faith in relationships and in yourself. Here is a question: Was your trust hurt because your expectations were unrelated to the person you were actually dealing with? It’s time to size up how you look at others, and why. Chiron in your 7th solar house is about noticing where you were perceiving people in unrealistic ways, as well as where you lost contact with a common language. Part of regaining that is about learning how to listen in new ways. Indeed, learning a language, hearing comes before speaking. Can you think of important events in your life where you decided it was time to shut your ears and stop paying attention to what others were saying? Imagine Chiron as one of those old-fashioned hearing aid funnels that gathers sound and presents it to you in a focused way. The key to translating is to seek understanding, rather than judgment. Once you know what someone is getting at, you will know what to do with the information.

Many times in life you were certain your efforts were going nowhere or adding up to less than the energy you put out. Still, one thing you can be grateful for is your willingness to be helpful. It’s not that you’re ‘nice’ (you probably are) but rather that your mind is grounded in knowing that part of why we’re alive is to be supportive of our environment. Within our society there’s no commonly accepted concept of whole or holistic: ‘home’ has nothing to do with ‘work’; creativity and earning money are divided from one another; friendships and relationships are put into different categories, and so on. Then we’re conditioned to see health and wellbeing as separate from these other factors of life. Chiron in Pisces, your 6th solar house, is about taking a whole-systems approach to your existence. Now is the moment of making sure that all the parts of your life work together and are designed to support one another. Look for the common ground that everything in your world shares (which is you). Observing how you feel, seeing where your energy goes, considering your purpose for doing anything — all of these will offer clues to how to integrate that which seems to be separate, out of place or challenging. Remember, what you are shifting awareness of is not ‘your life’ but rather yourself. The deepest gift you receive will be confidence in your purpose here.

You have a powerful fantasy life. Oh my goddess: you do know how to let your imagination run free. You take many risks there that [you think] you would never take in real life. This involves the Pisces angle of your chart, and Chiron has now arrived there, representing a cosmic-scale craving to turn fantasy into experience. It could be any kind of fantasy you like, from the art you want to make to the love you want to make to some risk you want to indulge, but remember — we’re talking Pisces styled. Often, fantasy itself is satisfying and serves a nourishing purpose. Chiron has a different objective, which is some form of actuality and fully incarnated experience. I recognize we live in a time when the difference between ‘real life’ and ‘the imagination’ is being played down or intentionally blurred. I also recognize that experience is supposedly scary: it challenges our current, often delicate state of affairs. There is the element of potential failure involved. Other forms of risk show up when you leave the confines of your inner mind. I suggest you consider the extent to which dwelling on your imagination is an indulgence for your conservative side. Conversely, I propose that your desire for experience is about exploring the side of your nature that wants nothing more than liberation. One of the first questions that comes up under this transit is, how attached to your limitations are you?

Those born under your sign tend to be some of the boldest in the neighborhood, but then you pay for it with a deep, abiding insecurity. Which one is really you? Well, the two spheres of consciousness co-create one another. Anyone with a shred of spiritual awareness, and you definitely qualify, has noticed a few times that the human ego is extremely frail and terrified of its own potential lack of existence. There are those times when you recognize that what we call life is about as solid as taking a ride on a soap bubble that can burst at any moment. And what is beyond that? What is the existence beyond the ride on the bubble? You’re vividly aware of this dimension as well, and it’s where some of your most useful information comes from — you know, the stuff that “you don’t know how you know it, but you do.” Chiron in Pisces is here to help you tap into the mystery of your inner core. It’s here to remind you of what is beyond the transience of experience. Most significantly, Chiron will remind you that the basis of your reality is not your ego structure and all the ways you try to define yourself, but rather your growing awareness of your soul. I don’t mean soul in the mystical sense, but rather the most pragmatic: your inner being and the actual foundation on which your existence is built.

Going back at least a year, you’ve been under such pressure to change that it’s amazing you’ve had time for anything else. This pressure has been coming from so many different directions that it’s been difficult to keep your mental focus. But let’s turn the clock back beyond the past year — my question is, how many of your ideas have you acted on? They come flying in; you’re gifted with insight and foresight: but what about some measure of consistent action developing them? Chiron in Pisces will have some interesting, even intense, mental effects, the first of which we could describe as a crisis of focus. You may be overwhelmed with the need to sort yourself out; to get your priorities in order; to understand the rational basis for your intuition. At other times you will be confronted by how little you know, which is a healthy response to existence. Sometimes you feel like your entire thought process is a dream. Imagine that you’re going from a dream to a lucid dream: one where you can consciously choose what you experience. Think of this as being given a power tool, one that is potentially dangerous because it bestows your mind with certain properties of clarity that you’re unaccustomed to. This might arrive with the sense of waking up to how out of it you were. Remember to wake up now, rather than worrying about what you failed to notice in the past.

Financial independence is one of those themes that never seems to go away, and which affects everything in your world. Yet the notions of ‘financial’ and ‘independence’ are outer forms of a deeper question, which concerns how you feel about yourself. If you’re in feel-good mode, nothing can shake your confidence; you tap into an infinite depth of love. If your inner climate changes, you can be wracked with doubts about your purpose, your worthiness, and whether you have enough energy (or money) to accomplish what is most important to you. One of the first tasks of Chiron in Pisces is to tune you into the dualism involved: to get the two sides of your mind in communication with one another. The ‘two ways you feel about yourself’ tend to be mutually exclusive and, in a sense, unrelated. They seem to have so little in common, you might go mad from cognitive dissonance if you tried to think of them at the same time. Yet they have something crucial in common, which is that they’re elements of your potential. There is wisdom in your confidence, and another kind of wisdom in your insecurity. The two add up to something beyond the sum of the parts, which is an understanding of the source of your power; which is your spiritual grounding; which is your self-esteem; which relates directly to money. You don’t need to integrate them — only to notice that they’re attributes of the same thing.

Few concepts in astrology evoke the seeming paradox of existence like Pisces, and one of them is Chiron. Both ask the deepest questions, such as those concerning the relationship between soul and body, or between a person and existence. These are topics of rampant speculation, which usually gets categorized as ‘spirituality’. Yet if we go beyond theory, and beyond the religious concepts designed to abuse human doubt, we come to the fact of life as a journey of experience. And that, in a phrase, is the nature of Chiron’s arrival in your birth sign. This holds true for your relationships, your creative process, your experience of growth, and what you want to do every day. What they all have in common is experience, and as Chiron makes its way through your sign — first for a few months through late July, then for eight years starting in 2011 — I suggest you use the concept of experience to trump your doubts and your misgivings. Experience is the most fundamental bottom line of existence, which places you on equal footing with everyone around you, and at the center of your life. Among the many things we can say about Chiron transiting one’s own birth sign, particularly the mysterious last sign, is that you have some strong encouragement to choose based on who and what you want to experience. If your response is: “Really? Is that okay?” then you can see precisely why it’s true.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.