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.

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.

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.