Horoscopes: October 2009

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, September 29, 2009

Aries
(March 20-April 19)
The challenge of the coming seasons and indeed years of your life could be stated this way: In order to thrive, you must get your most intimate relationships working in harmony with your most ambitious worldly goals. There are a number of elements to this, one of which is tapping into an unusual sense of mission or aspiration that has emerged in your life over the past year or more. One of the things I’ve learned from my clients is that most of us tend to set our goals too low to be satisfying. What we think of as thinking big is typically another form of thinking little. You are now being invited to think bigger than you ever have before. The second part of this challenge involves the way we conceive of our relationships. Too often they are experiences that work against our overall progress; we employ people in our lives who end up with the role of setting limits on our potential. While it’s challenging to change this assignment, you will soon arrive at a point where it feels like you have no choice but to do so. Here is a key. If you view these as separate missions, they will likely seem impossible. If you reach a point within yourself where you experience them as the same thing, you will find a way.

Taurus
(April 19-May 20)
Your life is a study in expectations and agreements. We often confuse the two; you would benefit from sorting them out, and replacing the first with the second. It’s challenging to notice when we are acting on the basis of an expectation, or presuming that another person will do so, though this is your first assignment. This takes honesty with yourself, and it will raise the issue of where those expectations came from in the first place; usually they are a lot older than the situation you are examining, and by a lot older I mean decades or lifetimes. Replacing expectations with agreements is more challenging, but it’s the action piece in this equation. Agreements imply that both parties to the agreement actually know what they want—very much opposite the situation where expectations rule. Step one starts with you, and it involves figuring out what you want; give a voice to those wispy notions and concepts that brew in the back of your mind. Remember, you’re not committing for the rest of your life, only as a medium-range goal to give you a sense of direction. Then get a grasp on what the people closest to you want. Look for the places that intersect; these are the actual points of contact in your relationship, the common ground you both stand on.

Gemini
(May 20-June 21)
Many seasons of your life have been spent figuring out what was bothering you. This has involved a difficult confrontation with the past, during which you’re likely to have discovered how much emotional baggage you’re dragging around, courtesy of your family and your upbringing. This nagging sense that something was wrong has been the source of so much of your perfectionism. What you’re now discovering is that it’s best to exchange this for other methods of growth that actually get you somewhere. At the moment, it’s equally important that you leave behind the baggage as it is that you leave behind your struggle to sort it out. You’re about to embark on a new kind of challenge: something entirely more creative and that is obviously beautiful. You crave this with all your heart and soul. How many times have you discovered that analysis only gets you so far? At a certain point you have to pick up the world and sculpt it with your hands, proceeding on the basis of feeling. For the next few weeks, you may still need to iron out your concepts. I suggest you boil what you’ve learned down to a few ideas short enough to write on the wall; something easy to remember, akin to a sharp tool you can hang on your belt and use when you need it.