Aries (March 20-April 19) — Your desire seems to be pulling you in two directions. The way it looks astrologically is that being passive is not working as well as it usually does. By this I mean you know you have to assert what you want, though you often end up just allowing things to happen; this in turn leaves you with people, things and circumstances that you don’t necessarily want. The other direction is newfound confidence in bold experimentation with desire. You have the moxie to go for what you want, by which I mean who and what you want. This involves taking various risks, such as rejection, or discovering that you don’t like what you discover. I suggest you allow a spirit of curious adventure to override all such concerns. Tempt yourself with what is possible. Allow yourself unfettered desire for exactly what interests you, be it someone or some creative endeavor. You will discover that this is a very different approach to life than hoping what you want notices you, or responds to your signals. Quit the Morse code and just plunge into the experiences that you want.

 

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — The Sun’s ingress into Virgo is an invitation to explore your ideas, bringing your body along. You’re being called beyond the mental experiment, and into the journey that you take with your hands, your senses and your sense of adventure. Treat any hesitation that you may feel as an ankle-high fence that you could hop over with one leg if you wanted to. You may have the sensation that your emotional experience will not translate into a specific form of expression that you want. I would propose that the most significant use of your emotions is for motivation; feel your energy in motion and embark on a conscious experience. You will tend to believe what you tell yourself, so therefore use language that describes curiosity, desire and craving for truth that goes beyond some concept of what is supposedly true. Use discipline gently as a tool fully under your control; return to any activity daily if you want to make it part of your life. What you’re experiencing is not a temporary phase but rather an opportunity to reorder your priorities and access a deeper level of what some call talent.

 

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — If the potential expressed by your ancestors was really the thing that limited you, you would have little to look forward to. Therefore, I suggest you use what your parents and grandparents accomplished as a baseline; as a kind of low-water mark that you were born to exceed. Much of what you know about their lives involves the struggle that they went through. You may have some feeling that in order to honor them, you have to honor that struggle, which may mean attempting to repeat it on some odd, unconscious level. Actually, their modest achievements are what has opened the way for your greater ones, including happiness that exceeds what they believed was possible. I would call your attention to an issue that is passed on from generation to generation: jealousy as a birthright. As twisted as it is, toxic, competitive envy is often handed off from parent to child as some kind of unalienable privilege. It’s nothing of the kind, and I suggest you replace it with the wholly positive response to what others do and what they have. Think of any good thing you see as the expression of your own potential, because that’s what it is.

 

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Events this week may take you past a personal limitation you’ve felt, particularly one involving your privacy. Or rather, your perception of what is to be private and what is to be public. I would propose here that these are merely mental concepts, since eventually, everything is known. For you the question is: do you harness more energy by trying to seal up and sequester your personal truths, or by revealing them? Think of the region of your psyche that contains what you might conceal or reveal a battery, full of energy. You get to use that energy any way you want, though you can only tap into it if you’re real with yourself and with others. To put it in somewhat hokey (but no less true) New Agey terms, your truth is your power, and you get to use it any way you want. Any form of accessing one’s true power requires at least a moment of daring, as it well should. You’re now being invited to do just that. Remember, if you ever get stuck, opening up a little goes a long way — and opening up a lot can go even further.

 

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — If you want to improve your financial situation, be more generous. This counts for yourself and with others, in that order. Your astrology bestows you with a natural obsession with money, which may manifest as anything from being hyper-cautious, to thrifty, to a spendthrift; none of these are really virtues. None of them reflects the deeper underlying nature of money, or of resources. You tend to over-think things, rather than allowing your ingenuity to work for you. It would help if you thought in larger, wider ways about your potential and about the amount of whatever you need being available to you. One thing that might help is noticing every time you encounter a thought of lack or scarcity. Ask yourself whether that’s really true, which may in turn lead you to ask yourself how you came to that conclusion. What facts support it, and which suggest that something else is possible? There is a belief that wealth is created by pinching pennies. Actually, it’s created by efficiency and the conscious use of resources. To this end, interesting ideas count for a lot. And so does letting things flow.

 

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — The Sun is about to join Jupiter in your sign, ushering in what may be one of the best birthday seasons in years. Mercury, the Virgo planet, is also in your sign, and you have a lot going for you — this is not an illusion of some kind. Yet you may be feeling anxious or hesitant. This appears in your solar chart as some form of not knowing what you want; at the same time you may feel overly aggressive about wanting something you’re not sure you want. What they have in common is the way you manage desire, which is the most potent force in the human realm. As you may have noticed, very little can stop you or anything when you really, really want it — which is why many different philosophies try to define desire as a bad thing. Whether good or bad, desire exists, and you can think of it a little like voltage. Electricity must be managed carefully or it becomes a dangerous force of nature. But used with awareness and intention, it can be applied to nearly any need. Your desire is that strong, so be clear what you want and what you don’t want — and notice when others try to impose their will on you.

 

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You’re headed for a deeply meaningful personal encounter of some kind, though it’s different than you may be expecting. In case you’re inclined to worry that some facet of your public image is at stake, you can relax; what’s unfolding is much closer to the core of your self-perception and your inner life than anything that others would even care much about. But if you’re concerned what others might think, it would help if you made notes on your worst fears and best expectations, because those will provide you with a mind-map. Expectations and anxiety are more closely related than is obvious. We tend to think of hope, or expectation, as a good thing and anxiety as a bad thing. But they are part of the same concept, which is trying to manipulate the future in an uncreative way. That said, fear is a valuable teacher right now, because it describes a certain contour of your mind in which you have a tendency to get trapped. You may expect this to be a permanent feature of your inner landscape, though I assure you that’s not true. You really can work with this situation and work it out beautifully.

 

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — If someone seems to be interfering with your success, or your forward momentum, look right at the situation. Others may have strong opinions, though that’s different from having power over you. It’s essential that you see this difference now, and really get the distinction. Otherwise you will invest way too much energy in the views of others, or what you perceive as their viewpoint, and ultimately prove yourself ‘right’. What I suggest is that you do what you want until someone tells you that you can’t. If you do, you might make the pleasant realization that nobody is going to stop you. This might even inform you that your concerns about what others think have no bearing in reality, and amount to little more than tying your own shoes together. You have a bold mission right now, and you don’t need collaborators. What you do need is to cooperate fully with yourself. You would benefit from applying some push energy to your goals and your surroundings. Once you do, you may wonder why you waited so long, and decide that asserting yourself with some mojo would be a fine way of life.

 

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Your sign has the reputation of being the ‘big-picture thinker’, the one that can’t be bothered with the details. But the details matter, and you know they do. The fine points of what you’re doing are central to your success. Yet being a micromanager could be detrimental. So you need to know which details to focus on and which to leave to others, or not worry about. Take full charge of whatever requires your specific technical competence. Take responsibility, clear through to every stage of follow-up, about things that are specifically about your own ideas. For example, make sure you do the final edit on anything you write, prior to its being sent out. You also need to be the judge of the critiques of others. Be generous with the wastebasket on this one; only rarely are opinions worth much, so take a moment to extract a potentially valid point from everything and then discard the rest. The key to using your astrology the most effectively is being specific. Vague generalities are a liability now. So break everything down to steps, state the end-goal in concrete terms, and stick to your process.

 

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — What would you do if you had a year to live? Most people would live very differently; for one thing, the endless squander of time would be the first thing put to a halt. Time would suddenly be seen as the precious resource that it is. For most people this is a scary thought, since it tends to remind them of two things — one being how much time is wasted, and the second being the uncertainty of the amount remaining. You would go a long way toward finding some real strength by admitting both of these things, and asking yourself what the logical conclusion is. So, give it a try — inquire within what you would do, and how you would live, if you had just one year. One thing I’d propose is that this will help you get your priorities in order. You will see the connection between your day-to-day way of life, and your longer-range goals that absolutely depend on the wise use of time, including what we humans might consider long spans of time. You have a real agenda for this life, and it will take some skill to make it happen. Let that begin with a moment of clarity.

 

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You will benefit from some real cooperation, though this will come in the form of someone with specialized intelligence. Look around and pay attention, and don’t settle for anyone who seems to know less than they claim. The puzzle you seem to be facing is how to let go of certain responsibilities that weigh you down — yet doing so in a fully responsible way. This will take some ingenuity, and very likely from a viewpoint not colored by your emotional attachments. In other words, you need some applied intelligence, to a specific situation. One of my favorite lessons in A Course in Miracles is about recognizing the problem so that it can be solved. State whatever you’re trying to address in a way that can in fact be resolved, so you’re that many steps closer to actually having that happen. If a situation is resisting being worked out, I suggest you state it in a different way. Turn it backwards, upside down or inside out. Imagine what your life would be like were everything in perfect order. That vision will be truly informative. Really, stop and consider how things would be.

 

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — The question that you want to call into focus repeatedly over the next few years is: what is true, and what is not? This includes variants such as, what is true for me, and what’s true for this other person? You may find yourself in various circumstances where there are different versions of the truth, or two main alternatives that seem unable to be reconciled. This is a trap, and you can sidestep it by staying awake. If you’re tending toward a more complicated version of events or possibilities, experiment with simplifying things. Notice where the complication enters the scenario, and see if you can get an understanding of that influence. Try to break things down to their very most basic elements. You’re entering a phase of your life where your success depends on your clarity. Yet clarity will require an ongoing process of observation and assessment. Look, listen and feel. Always trust yourself above and beyond the trust you put into others, since you have the power to be the most dependable person in your life. As long as you stay awake and aware, nothing is beyond the power of your own intelligence.