Aries (March 20-April 19) — Feed the weird part of yourself this week: the nonconformist, the artist, the original thinker. This takes slightly more courage than doing what you might usually do, or going along with what everyone else seems to be doing. You can feed that aspect of your psyche as well, taking as few risks as possible — though if you do, you’ll be missing out on some glorious opportunities. The planets look like this: to think differently, you have to break free from the structure of your past ideas, and the past in general. This is unusually easy at the moment; everything is conspiring to draw you in that direction. Yet internally, you’re craving deeper contact with yourself. Mars, your ruling planet, has re-entered Scorpio, which is calling on you to be submissive to your own inner emotional truth. You have not reached the bottom of your journey there; stay open and guide yourself deeper. You’re doing this for one reason: liberation.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You’ve arrived somewhere you’ve been before, perhaps only recently. Your challenge is to see it as a new place. The way to do that is to change your vantage point in some way, such as remembering something you learned that influenced your understanding of your life or of a relationship. You seem to be under pressure to resolve some form of indecision or uncertainty, though I suggest you keep your mind open to the possibilities. Key situations are definitely not resolved, though you may not want them to be. ‘Unresolved’ means subject to change, which in your scenario will likely be change for the better. Over the next week or so, you will be able to put words and ideas to things you’ve been thinking for a while but have not been able to consider clearly. Just make sure that clarity does not fix your viewpoint. Keep your thoughts, your eyes, your ears moving. Turn your head from side to side and notice what you see.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — The debate over whether love works, or is real, or lasts forever, is meaningful only to those who are obsessed by guilt. Once guilt is seen as the obstruction that it is, the nature of love becomes obvious. Yes, it’s something that you offer to the people around you; yet in our era, perhaps the greater need is to accept the love that’s offered to you. You can only have as much as you’re willing to receive, and I suggest you open all the way up and just let people care about you, feel for you and support you. You might be thinking that love and support are just not there; or “I’ll receive it when there’s more available.” That, however, is not a formula for happiness. Embrace what is offered to you. Little kids smiling at you count. Random dogs saying hello count. Your ex emailing to see how you’re doing counts. Even an honest ‘no’ gives you information about how and where to proceed: count that as a form of affirmation.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You can see and feel ‘both sides’ of yourself with unusual clarity right now — so well that you might decide there are a lot more than two. Yet they aren’t separate; you are not separate from yourself. Inner division is an optical illusion, yet it can take some learning to understand that on an intuitive level. You might try a meditation for the next week or so, in various forms: I am united with myself; I am one being; I act in harmony with my own intentions; I am aligned with my creative force. It’s true that one of the most challenging spiritual quests is healing the sense of a Self divided against itself. As you explore, learn and facilitate that healing, you’ll experience many points of personal reunion; each of them beautiful, each a reclaiming of something that’s truly yours. And as you do this, you will become stronger, more honest and less easy to deceive.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You cannot control how other people perceive you. Try as you may, everyone is going to come up with their own idea. There is no point resisting or resenting the attention that you get, when you try so diligently to be visible and to make the right impression. It’s interesting how much energy people invest in being their own publicist, stylist and manager trying to get a grip on their image, and the mixed feelings that result. While you cannot control what others think, you can influence it. The distinction is relevant because wielding influence is different from the illusion of controlling someone’s perception. One distinction is that it would necessarily lead you to pay attention to the response you get from your environment. That will tell you a lot, and you’ll have more fun. You just need to hang loose and be more transparent. Open up and actually offer people insight into your thoughts, and notice what happens when you do.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Reach for something big. Yet recognize that means offering yourself wholly to what you want. Our whole society is centered around getting right now. There seems to be little recognition that getting anything involves an exchange, and when what you want is something dear to you, something you identify with, the thing you give is yourself. This is making a good few people freaky, as it seems like they’re sacrificing something. Giving, however, is different from giving up. Offering is different from sacrificing. You expand, you grow, you become, by offering yourself. Your whole life is about growth, becoming and evolving, and if you leave out that crucial part about surrendering your energy to what you want to become, one result will be inner conflict. The question is: what benefit would you see from rolling yourself into a little ball and holding on tight? A flower blooming is a sign of life. Vulnerability not only demonstrates love; it makes love possible, and makes it real.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — What limits do you suspect are wrapped around your potential? Said another way, do you decide what is possible today based on what you accomplished previously? That would be a mistake, because the definition of an accomplishment is doing something you’ve never done before. That’s the whole point. So you need a better basis for assessing what you’re capable of than the past. This would take you out of your proverbial comfort zone, though you might ask yourself how comfortable it really is in there. Or, you might ask: Does self-doubt make me feel good? And if so, why? Anyway, you can go beyond that, though you would need to tap into some long-forgotten resource or talent. There is something you know perfectly well how to do, and it holds a key to your ability and willingness to do so much else. Remember, this comes from you, not from someone else.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — There’s a reason to avoid going deep into your feelings: you might learn something about yourself. It would be something you could no longer deny, and would therefore need to rearrange your life around. It looks like you can sense the potential for radical changes to your day-to-day activities, the way you structure your life and — most significantly — who you think you are. What may be making you nervous is that you don’t have any sense of who else you might be. But that’s like saying you don’t want to leave your room because you don’t know what you would find when you do. The whole point of discovering and admitting that you don’t really know who you are is so that you can enter the unknown with a sense of adventure. But you’re not really going far; you’ve been carrying a vast, unexplored world within you your whole life — and now it’s calling you.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the United States president from 1933 to 1945. He is famous for many things, including a statement about the nature of fear that they used to teach (in partial form) to schoolchildren. He said: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Your astrology is insisting that you have a clear, fully aware relationship to any form of anxiety, hesitation, nervousness or the bouts with outright panic that so many people experience these days. The reason you want a conscious relationship with these feelings is that it’s the only way to resolve them. You can bob, weave and dodge all you want, but you will still feel pursued by your own inner emotions. Just remember: fear and desire often masquerade for one another. You would do well to pause and ask yourself what’s really going on.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — As one challenge eases, another seems to come on. Yet have you considered that this energy is coming from inside you? For many years, you’ve built your life on an idea of stability and predictability. You’ve associated an idea of consistency with being a good person. Yet did that equation serve to create either goodness or consistency? Now, any direction you want to move demands that you change. That’s because you have no choice but to grow, and growth is change, which means being different. It’s possible to try to build your life on some concrete idea of yourself, oriented mainly on being secure. Yet you’re likely to create a tense, rigid emotional state when the thing you need is to move and flow. There is so much energy rising up from your core that it would be dangerous to block it. That includes hanging around people who reward you for being stuck or narrow. Your real friends embrace you in all your contradiction and wild potential.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — What you need is experience, not theory. It’s easy to chew everything over in hypothetical form, especially if you live mostly on the Internet. Genuine exploration happens through your physical body. Even if you’re a theoretical physicist, a designer of bridges or professor of philosophy, you don’t really know something for sure until there is an actual experiment performed. I suggest you set about doing that experiment, by which I mean anything prompted by an idea, which also has an uncertain outcome. You might do something like driving to an odd part of the countryside, intentionally getting lost. Visit some strange part of town or some other city, where you would never ordinarily go and where you know nobody, and do something the natives do. Take any chance to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments, and to expose yourself to points of view you totally disagree with. That will stoke your creative (and social) fires brilliantly.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Don’t take the pressure so seriously. Most of it is based on abstract thought. It’s true that you’re being called to greater things in every facet of your life simultaneously. What you’re experiencing as stress is actually energy, which can work for you or against you: that’s your choice. Therefore, it will help if you connect everything to your motivation, by which I mean take inspiration from anything in your environment. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. It’s amazing how that can foster the efficient use of time. In that spirit, I suggest you invest no precious time waiting. Rather, make conscious choices and take action. Look at your limits and decide what to do with them, rather than merely living with them passively. Everything — by which I mean every problem or scenario — has a workaround. Learn how to identify your options and choose from among them. You have plenty.