Dear Friend and Reader:

This has been an extraordinary year — by that I mean extraordinarily challenging — and everyone who has made it through with a modicum of their sanity intact deserves a hug, so consider yourself hugged. What has kept you going? Perseverance? Faith in yourself? The desire for a better life? Or was it sheer necessity? We now get to focus on desire. Venus will be retrograde in Scorpio and Libra through mid-November, helping us sift through our emotional attachments and material belongings and decide what comes with us into the future and what gets to stay in the past. That said, Venus retrograde always brings visitors from the days of yore. Old friends and lovers can turn up. They may be visiting, they may be here to stay for a while, or they may be reminding us of the prior emotional orientation we left behind, and why we did so.

Yours & truly,

Know your plastic from your cash. Make sure you can tell the difference between sex and love. Pay attention to whether the words people say align with the deeds you observe them doing and keep an eye on yourself too. The onus of awareness is on you, which means applying discernment all the time. The coming month and into mid-November offer you many opportunities to reassess commitments rather than make or break them. If there are flaws in a contract or sticking points in a relationship, they are likely to come out now. You may feel driven to move ahead, but if you do so without understanding what the people closest to you want and what they feel, you may have to let go of your investment in them. Therefore, be prepared to practice understanding above all other values.

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

You may be wondering about your involvement in a relationship situation, such as why you have to sacrifice so much. Yet is that really true? If you take stock of what you give and what you gain, you may notice some striking facts. The planets in their courses suggest that you practice the art of devotion as the means to wellbeing. As you do, you will be taken on a tour of your past commitments, and along the way you’ll unearth emotional details that you overlooked or forgot about. These factors have been influencing your subsequent involvements more than you realize. As you backtrack and try to make sense of the past, observe how much influence over your perception it has. The more you see this, the more you’ll be able to let go of it.

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

As you resolve family issues, you’ll have more creative energy, more freedom and better ideas. You will rediscover a kind of sex that you may have written off because you’re ‘too old’. You will discover that you can take chances that in the past you thought were unconscionable. This raises an interesting question: what exactly is a family issue? What you learned the past month points strongly to the simple fact that it has nothing to do with ‘them’ and everything to do with you. This, of course, is your passport to freedom. As long as you recognize the dynamic, you don’t need anyone else’s permission or help working out what holds you back. What you need is the willingness to be different than the people who raised you. Some of the differences are obvious. Others are extremely subtle.

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

It’s possible that you may rekindle an involvement with an old lover, at the same time a present involvement is deeply compelling. Notice how the relationships relate to one another. While you’re exploring your emotions, I suggest you watch the karma of these situations vigilantly. That’s another way of saying, be aware what the situations breed. Notice what you are creating. Observe the influence they have on the world around you, including the immediate shifts of energy even in situations that seem to have no connection to the relationships involved. I am suggesting that what you do behind the scenes or between the sheets ripples out into the world in unusual ways, and that will provide the true reading on whether this situation, in total, is creative, healthy or wholesome.

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

Stay close to home this month, and tend to your hearth. Literally — keep your home fires burning, create projects for your stove or your oven, and tune into how much strength that offers you. You’ll reconnect to some deep emotional roots and the core of your feminine self that doesn’t always have a way out of the box. The resulting emotions will be complex, interesting and offer many unexpected opportunities for healing. You may be releasing the ways you weren’t nurtured well as a kid; you may get to outgrow the ways that your need for security was used against you. In a sense, the deeper the pain you went through, the more potency you will have to heal that very thing in the world. People depend on you, and it’s obvious that you love it.

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

It is amazing how influential family madness can be on our ability to earn money, even if it’s ancient history. You recently learned a lot about why certain people are so intense, which is to say, you glimpsed what lurks behind the veil. Now that you’re aware of the self-defeating tendencies of some of the people who thought they were helping you, you have the ability to resolve a long-standing financial matter. You will do so because now that the hidden encumbrances are gone, you know what it means to take authority in your own life. And, make no mistake: authority begins with either owning your cash or owning your sexuality — usually both at around the same time. That sense of ownership will make itself known to you because you feel strength whereas before, you felt powerless.

The Virgo Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Virgo and Virgo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Virgo and Virgo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You seem to be trying to tell yourself something. But since it’s something you already know, I suggest you not strain your ears to get the message. In fact what you are learning is more like the recovery of a value you forgot about long ago. This is something profoundly important to the full picture of who you are, but which seemed to contradict your nature at the time you gave it up. This may have, at the time, seemed like something internal that you could not reconcile and which seemed to present a no-win situation or an either/or choice. What you may discover in the coming weeks is that being whole was not a matter of casting something off, but rather about embracing what you didn’t understand and getting the benefits. This is a sign of maturity.

Libra birthday audio is coming soon.

Self-knowledge is dangerous, to those who propagate or thrive on ignorance. A combination of influences are conspiring to make your awareness of who you are inevitable. There is something here about discovering and making friends with the ‘other side’ of your nature, the one you usually consider your opposite, or unfamiliar inner territory. You may not get along at first, but developing a true friendship seems inevitable. This in turn is going to have an effect on the people around you. Because you’re getting to know yourself so well, someone close to you is becoming transparent, and may feel seen through. If someone acts defensively that may be what he or she is experiencing. Now, you just need to know yourself well enough to not respond defensively in turn. This will be a deep, useful learning process.

True creativity comes from within. This you already know, but I suggest you remember every day. You’re likely to be focused more on the ‘in’ side than on the ‘out’ side — your process at the moment is deeply internal, yet there are suddenly clear signs that your ideas need to find their way into the wide world, come what may. Major obstacles are resolving themselves, as if by their own initiative. People who resisted your efforts in the past are more likely to cooperate than they have been in recent months. And you know that maintaining your own emotional core is essential to your creative process; but you don’t want to take that too far. At a certain point you will need to dive into full participation, casting off your hesitancy and working with the resources that you have.

So many trials and tribulations are behind you that you really have just one thing for which to be alert — and that is your tendency to doubt yourself. You’ve been through one of these phases recently, and I trust that you learned, at least, that you’ve had enough of self-defeating ideas. They don’t actually add up to improvements. I suggest you address the issue on the deepest level, at its source. Here is a question for you: do your current friends affirm your most positive perception of yourself, or do they reinforce your doubts? What about your lover, partner or current love interest? Don’t let them become a projection screen. You don’t need them to ‘doubt you on your behalf’. What you need are strong, affirmative, loving people around you, and I suggest you find them.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You’re starting to gather your resources, and this is welcome news. That place is your vision for the future, which is rapidly taking shape and form rather than being the kind of ethereal notion to which you’re usually accustomed. At a certain point you will reach escape velocity and your present situation will dissolve into history. Yet one thing is necessary first: that you identify the moorings that hold you back. You may think that you are slacking, or hesitant when it comes to taking action. I would suggest that you are bound to the present by certain attachments, which thanks to Venus retrograde you now have a chance to evaluate. You don’t necessarily need to cut those ties, but it would be wise to know what they are, know what they mean, and loosen the knots.

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

You’ve spent months working out many fine details of partnership, and what we may call the technical level of reality. As you know the time has arrived to focus on your larger creative ideas rather than fixing all the small stuff that seems to be wrong. As your next wave of evolution arrives — and it has begun, in grand style — you will notice that many small issues will be obviated by the bigger advances that you make. So focus on those. What are your most meaningful goals? What are your deepest desires? That is where to keep your focus. Certain recent lessons have made you aware of adjusting your priorities, because what you focus on increases. Yes, life is easier when people cooperate; and it’s easer for them to cooperate when you are truly committed to your own cause.

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