Monday Morning Horoscope for April 17, 2017

Aries (March 20-April 19) — The past few days have been an unpredictable adventure, though for some reason today you can focus your mind in a different way. Take some time and get your priorities in order: determine what comes first and why. What seemed so important yesterday may have lost some of its significance and urgency, and something you may not have considered is calling for your awareness. Pay special attention to a financial matter that’s been nagging you and that you may have been avoiding because it was too difficult to work out. A creative opportunity is about to present itself, though it will help if you’re in a positive state of mind and open to an innovative or unlikely solution. This will teach you something about negative expectations: they are rarely helpful. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You have found your confidence, as if an invisible wind has filled your sails. Notice how this can blow away your questions and concerns like so many feathers in the breeze. This is confidence that will come in handy over the next few days, as you address a question that’s been overshadowing your life for a while. Remember that you don’t need anyone’s permission to be who you are or to live the way you want to live. Indeed, such permission would be irrelevant even if someone handed it to you in a fancy wax-sealed envelope. You’re the one and only person in the universe who can offer yourself the time, space and motivation to live. The whole discussion you’re having with yourself is likely to center around this one theme. You belong to nobody but yourself.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — It’s perplexing to many people that anyone might be emotionally connected to the work that they do. By that I mean so devoted that they work for its own sake, because they care about the task at hand and the people involved. Yet when you’re aligned with yourself, this fairly describes your life. You’re motivated by service, and you draw energy from a source that most people are only dimly aware of. This is the mark of true leadership, particularly on the ethical level. Recent astrology has shown you just what you’re committed to and why. It has nothing to do with money. It’s deeper and more important and much larger. You could say that you’re powered by an understanding on the spiritual level. Let it be known, and remind yourself, that your true impulse involves teaching and healing.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You’re the best source of your own wisdom. You’re also your best representative, publicist and spokesperson — that is, if you care about accuracy and integrity, which you seem to do. Far from being a matter of overconfidence, this is about you presenting yourself to the world in a way that advances your own cause. You may indeed take positions that make you and others around you uncomfortable, because that’s the right thing to do. You know that your life is not a popularity contest. At this stage in your life, you can draw strength specifically from the need not to please anyone else. You don’t have to make a policy of pissing people off; you don’t need to be defiant; rather, if you orient on your personal will, and insist on an actual, honest conversation, you will discover your independence and your integrity.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Set aside any concerns you may have about your professional reputation and make the decisions that you need to make. While this may be slightly more complicated than going out for ice cream, understand what that complexity really entails. First of all, there may be an actual question of ethics involved. What’s the right thing to do, as objectively as you can see it? This involves assessing the impact of your choices both on yourself and on others. There’s something deeper as well: whose thinking is influencing you? Whose unresolved baggage is clouding up your mind? You may think something is exclusively your issue, only to discover that one of your parents passed it on to you, thinking they were doing you a favor. If someone taught you to be afraid of your own shadow, maybe they didn’t deal with their own.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You have no need to drag around the injuries of past relationships. It’s just that it’s so popular, there would hardly be a movie or TV program without it. Some days it seems like all of society is one enormous advertisement for betrayal, guilt and jealousy. It takes consistent mindfulness to overcome this problem, and to declare that you’re free to go your own way. Part of being mindful means keeping your mind open to who people are today, and offering them the truth of who you are today — and who you want to be. The recent Venus retrograde in your zone of love and partnerships indicates that you have entered new territory in your intimate life. The idea of an intimate relationship simmers down to allowing someone to feel who you are, and feeling who they are, which must be based on goodwill and trust. Let this be your foundation.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — A partner may have taken you on a wild ride lately, leaving you to wonder which way is up. Yet how much of that seeming misadventure crept in through your own self-doubt and confusion? Assess that honestly, and be real with yourself about what you determine. In this world, everyone must mind their own boundaries and set their own agenda, lest someone else do it for them in a less helpful way. People are in love with their ideals, though recent experience has revealed that you need to be more realistic about your expectations, your needs and your desires. And you need to be realistic about who people are, what they offer you and why indeed they’re in your life at all. Far from requiring a cold assessment, this is something you would give yourself based entirely on compassion and the desire for peace of mind.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — The pressure seems to have let off of a relationship; in particular, what a partner was going through that may have had nothing to do with you. Yet this isn’t the time to blaze ahead blindly. Many factors, in astrology and in the world you live in, are calling on you to be conscious about your partnerships. The reason most people are afraid to do that is because they’re afraid of what they’ll find, or they’ve committed to something that they might question is really right for them. But you must be willing to put every human exchange in your life to this vital test of truth. Time is your most important resource, in part because it’s the main thing you use to teach yourself what’s right and what’s wrong. You don’t need to repeat or reinforce negative lessons of the past when you can embrace the actual potential of your future.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You have a rare opening, most likely financial or professional, though as you approach an actual decision you may feel some fear or apprehension. That doesn’t make it the wrong thing for you. It’s natural enough to feel some anxiety around any big choice, especially if you have something to lose. So don’t just back off and go the other way without giving all sides a fair hearing. Lately you’ve had a tendency to be somewhat narrow or over-focused in your career ambitions. Especially in times of overwhelming change, such as we’re in right now, it’s necessary to hang loose and to feel the wind and the weather. To some real extent you must consider what’s the right thing to do every single day, even if that means continuing what you were doing yesterday. Leave yourself room to modify your plans, and to allow genius to slip in through seeming error.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — If you’re feeling a weakness or seeming flaw in your character, take a step back and evaluate things slowly and carefully. Perhaps it’s true that you’ve found your ‘Achilles heel': that’s from the story of the Greek hero whose mother dipped him in the river Styx when he was a kid, thereby granting him special powers. Yet she held him by the foot, and his un-dipped heel became his vulnerability. Here’s another perspective: that vulnerability is where your true power comes from, as long as you use it that way consciously. One last detail from mythology: the river Styx is the one associated with forgetting past lives. The ‘undipped’ and vulnerable part of you is that which remembers something important from the past — perhaps the very distant past — and that’s information you need, and need to use, right now.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may feel as if you’re hiding something from yourself or from others. That’s unusual because lately you’ve been so transparent, erring on the side of making your personal truth known. Yet what, specifically, you might be hiding is fear. Many people are a lot more worried than they’re letting on, such as about the things it’s not polite to mention over drinks and hors d’oeuvres. However, your friends and acquaintances count on you to be a little weird in ways they’re afraid to be. What else is an Aquarian for? If you bring up the subject — any subject that truly concerns you, and which you might not normally casually mention — you might find that you have an interested audience, and people interested in an honest discussion. When that happens, you may find yourself feeling like you’re living on a different planet — a much better one.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Over the weekend, Venus stationed direct in your birth sign. It did so while making a conjunction to a slow-moving, spiritually oriented planet called Chiron, which has been in your sign since 2010 and will be leaving in less than a year. The past six weeks have been a lifetime-scale review of who you are, what you’re doing with your life, and how you feel about yourself. Though it may have been subtle, this has been a rare opportunity to cultivate self-awareness. Even if you list the events of the past two months (including a little extra margin of time), you will be amazed at not only how eventful each day has been, but how meaningful. You may have forgotten many of the developments, though they deserve to be remembered, because each of them holds a clue and a key to your future.