Planet Waves Inner Space – December 2008

Posted by Eric Francis

Aries (March 20-April 19) For some people, social acceptance is so important they will do anything to keep it once they have it. Don’t be one of them. The story of the recent years of your life has been the struggle — if I may use such a strong word — to maintain your individuality […]

Aries (March 20-April 19)
For some people, social acceptance is so important they will do anything to keep it once they have it. Don’t be one of them. The story of the recent years of your life has been the struggle — if I may use such a strong word — to maintain your individuality while also finding a place for yourself anywhere outside your front door. Whether it’s among your friends, or some group you want to mix yourself into, or a professional situation where you are seeking acceptance, don’t sell out. True enough, as Dylan said, if you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail. But I’m talking about something else: significant success that will be the reward of focusing on your individuality and integrity.

Planet Waves
Fire burns in the fireplace of Bruno’s former studio
during moving days in Nov. 2006, 59 rue de Rivoli, Paris. Photo by Danielle Voirin.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
You have endured so many power struggles, they became a way of life. Even things that had no relation to your survival had a tendency to become, in your emotional perception, matters of seeming life and death. I suggest you track back over your recent and not so recent life and see how this relates to you, particularly in situations where you were confronted by others whose beliefs, whether more or less founded in truth, seemed to dominate the room, the company, the family or your household. The thing is, you do care what other people believe, yet you are finally discovering that what you believe is significantly more important.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
When you think about your relationships, do you think in terms of structure, formal roles and appropriateness? Nobody would accuse a Gemini of this; you are perceived as conversant, easy-going and flexible in your customs. Yet as the model of your world changes even as you witness it, you’re getting a lesson in your relationship anatomy. As you pull off the wall panels, you are starting to see the beams, and they are not as flexible as you might have imagined — or at least not until now. The stress you are feeling when you experience the demand to make a change is precisely the stress that was underlying your existence all along.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
You have yet to master the art of the deal. You want to, and you know that you can. You’ve made a lot of progress; it starts with remembering to count yourself in. This, you figured out more recently than you would care to admit. The other thing to remember is that everything is negotiable. People like to act as if their price is firm, but there is always a little wiggle room, and often a lot of the stuff. The other thing to remember is that you need to let others approach you. Let them speak first. This is tricky because we’re all so insecure, and you, as an emotionally alert person, maintain a certain lack of confidence as a yogi. But try it a few times: let others speak first.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
Err on the side of play rather than work. If you approach life with a spirit of adventure and remember that old forms always, sooner or later, give way to new ones, you can create those new ones as a conscious gesture. At the same time, you can approach the puzzle of your life as precisely that. It’s just that the pieces will fit together in a whole new way other than you were expecting. Meanwhile, stay close to your original idea, the idea that didn’t care how or even if you got there; the one that was based entirely on vision, inspiration or a sense of destiny.

Planet Waves
Waterfront, Antwerp, Belgium. Photo by Eric Francis.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
For the foreseeable future, the theme of your life is overthrowing your parent complex and setting that child in you free. You finally feel safe enough to do this, and that sense of belonging and emotional confidence was hard won. Remember what you’ve been through, and remember that you overcame your insecurities by finding your spiritual core — by all indications, again and again, till you were convinced it was real. You know in your heart that you can accomplish anything, but the true quest remains an interior one; in truth, a quest of the heart. You want to ‘do’ things but the truth is, what you want is to be more expressive, less afraid of the judgments of others, and not at all worried about doing it right. Try again.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
Beneath every true revolutionary is someone who respects tradition. Respect implies awareness; a conscious relationship; a process of working with tradition in a way that makes room for something new. There are traditions that are healthy; some that need to be put in airtight museum cases; some need to be destroyed and forgotten. You may feel, as did Reb Tevye, that without tradition your life would be as shaky as a fiddler on a roof. It has now come to the point where, without challenging the past, your life and emotional world will seem dangerously unstable. If you are feeling shaky, question a past value. Look for the shadow of authority. Not authority itself, but its shadow cast over your heart and soul. Then, stand in the light.

Scorpio
(Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
How many of your thoughts are some form of fear or negativity cloaked in intellectual garb? One of the first exercises in spiritual training is noticing when you’re feeling something other than love. Guilt takes many, many forms. We learn it as children from parents, ministers, teachers, bullies and Boy Scout leaders. Then we forget we learned it, and think of it as something natural, rarely identifying these seemingly diverse feelings as unloving. When you recognize that every form of guilt is a veil thrown over a creative or loving impulse, your life gets easier. You have more energy, and because you spend your precious time approving of yourself, you have more freedom to choose what you want to do. Welcome to the future.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22)
For the past decade, the world has been engaged in an endless war over values disguised as a battle over religious faith. The sides in this symbolic battle are not what we think, and the tumult and chaos mostly represent a massive failure to investigate our own true motives and desires. For just about everyone, that is, but you. You have been compelled to come to terms with yourself in such a way that has made it an irrevocable habit. You have seen the cost of not being honest with yourself. Yet there are practical matters you haven’t attended to with the devotion that’s necessary to truly qualify as ‘getting real’, and that time has arrived: the time to connect every dream to an action plan and action itself, or set it aside and move on.

Planet Waves
Autumn evening, St Gilles, Belgium. Photo by Eric Francis.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
Was there a day in the past week or so when you woke up one morning feeling strangely like yourself? Like you actually exist? Like you belong on this planet? Actually existing has its challenges, and not everyone faces them; but you are being given a down payment on the rewards of noticing that you belong here. Be mindful that your ability to make an impression on the world is increasing rapidly; you need to say less, do less, and feel your presence in the room before you say or do anything. For a while, quietly assume that just arriving someplace shifts the environment, and notice how that change looks and feels. It may be subtle, it may not be, but either way it amounts to power that is best accounted for consciously.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
We live in extraordinary times: ones that will be remembered for the presence of Chiron in Aquarius, and much else besides. That is another way of saying mass scale awakening (pleasant or not, but awakening nonetheless). For you, it’s a way of saying focus, pay attention and experience many situations where you have no choice but to stand out from those around you. I know, you always thought you did this; there is no Aquarius who does not fancy herself especially unique. Yet you lost sight of the compromises you were making. Certain definitions became foggy when they needed to become clear; and many of those involved the direction you thought your life should be taking versus the direction everyone else thought it should be taking.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
Saturn and Uranus have made the first of several contacts involving your birth sign; and you can now feel the effects of this. It may have seemed for years like you were making an excellent movie, carefully written, well directed and acted beautifully, but you were projecting it out into space. Turning the metaphor toward Earth, you may have felt like a brilliant dancer without the benefit of gravity to hold you to the ground. You need a structure to focus yourself against, to press against, to project your light onto — and now you have one. I suggest you take every opportunity to feel the benefits of this, and remember, remember, remember what it was like not to have these things working to your advantage.

 

Copyright © 2008 by Planet Waves, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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