This week’s special edition horoscope offers excerpts from Book of Your Life for each of the signs.
This week’s horoscope is a sample of Book of Your Life, the 2017 Annual Reading from Eric Francis. Though this is an annual edition from nearly five years ago, you may notice how the work resonates today; it is built to last.
Book of Your Life for Aries:
The Initiate
Aries (March 20-April 19) — In recent seasons of your life, the main confrontation you’ve presented others with is the radically transformational change that you’re going through. As you grow, you put others in a position to deal with that reality. If they’re going to be in your life or you in theirs, they have no choice.
Many times people adopt what they think of as a compromise position — tamping down their own growth in an effort to appease the insecurities of others. This creates what many relationships seem to become, which is tacit agreements not to grow. Someone figures out that their progress — mental, emotional, spiritual or otherwise — is threatening their friends, partners or spouse, and they try to keep a lid on the energy. This is often a habit that dates back to early childhood, when your vitality may have threatened your adult caregivers.
By now you’ve figured out one of two things: that you simply cannot stand to do this any more, or that you’re trying, and it’s not working. You are growing at your own pace, and in unpredictable ways. The person you thought you were five years ago, one year ago, even yesterday, is not quite the same person you are today, potentially in some profound ways.
To the extent that this is shaking up your consciousness and that of the people around you, you simply must develop confidence in yourself. You must adopt the faith that you’re doing the right thing. To put it bluntly, your life cannot be dictated by the insecurities of others — whether real or imagined. That is to say, it’s possible to project your insecurities onto others, and then prune back your life, your energy, your feelings, in a pointless effort to appease what you think they are struggling with.
Let’s call this the ownership principle. It’s the first law of feelings: everyone has to own their own.
Book of Your Life for Taurus:
The Crucible of Transformation
Taurus (April 19-May 20) — I’ve often wondered from where Taurus draws its power. By that I mean the unusually mighty creative fire, the persistence of effort and the enduring quality of the work that so often comes out of people born with the Sun in Taurus. The enduring bit is worth bearing in mind: whatever you do with your life is likely to get lasting results. The one writer that everyone, as in everyone, can name was a Taurus.
We do get one clue from your sign being part of the fixed cross, the backbone of the astrological system. The old-religion holiday Beltane, the high sabbat of the Pagan year, takes place when the Sun reaches the midpoint of your sign. If the tree of life is planted in any one sign, I would propose yours is the one.
If you’re one of those Taurus people who struggles with your own resistance, you have a sense of the opposite of your natural strength: when you use it against yourself, or when it’s used against you (though this rarely happens without your cooperation). To do Taurus well demands a significant degree of mindfulness. As a sign associated with wealth and investment, you must invest in yourself to get any real results from your efforts.
Most of that investment needs to be on the spiritual level: in conscious growth, training, study, yoga and pursuing artistic and intellectual discipline. You must cultivate both strength and flexibility. You are called upon to work and develop the mind-body nexus. These things pay you back many times over. Anything that cultivates or deepens your thought process is particularly necessary for you.
Book of Your Life for Gemini:
Fire in the Mind
Gemini (May 20-June 21) — One thing you can do for yourself is to maintain a sense of order in your physical space. It would help not to get obsessed, and to go with the flow somewhat, but you might maintain a habit of cleaning your desk after every major project, and generally keeping things tidy. Your state of mind is influenced by your space.
That works the other way, too: the condition of your space will tell you something about your state of mind. As you notice the correspondences, you will make some interesting connections that will help guide you through your inner and outer environments.
If you have some persistent struggle with keeping on top of your space, one thing you might do is make sure you have cleaning and organizing help. It’s worth asking for, and worth paying for, because you will make a profit on it, emotionally and financially. You will feel better, which is especially important in a ridiculously busy time like now. Cleaning and organizing, even with help, is a form of therapy for you, which will teach you more than you might believe, and will provide an orientation point for your happiness, stability and productivity.
Here is the thing to remember: chaos and order work together, and the creative process stirs up some disorder. You must leave yourself some room for this. Actual creativity relies as much upon random chance as it does any kind of planning — many successful artists, producers and authors would say the chance factor is far more important. In a similar way you need to make space in your psyche for what I think of as fertile chaos. You need to be able to make a mess, and see what happens.
Book of Your Life for Cancer:
Of Intellect and Spirit
Cancer (June 21-July 22) — We’re not living in an easy time to make plans, especially long-range plans. We’re living through an era where it’s questionable whether there is a future, though of course, there is one. Yet among the many things being deconstructed are obvious and logical paths to get places, such as how one builds a career. The days of the “career book” are over. We keep hearing experts say that schools are attempting to prepare young people for jobs that don’t yet exist.
And this is relevant to you, because one of the boldest and most illuminated angles of your chart is indeed the professional one. Yet the planets you have there seem to be taking you on a wild and at times erratic ride, with very little you can actually predict. This is a fact, one that you would be wise to reckon with.
Even so, in times of profound change, there are certain time-honored methods for keeping your bearings. And there are other methods for seeing opportunities in the midst of the chaos; an ability that, if you cultivated it, would give you a genuine edge over the competition. There is indeed some competition in your chart, even if you want to do a little better than yesterday or, for example, if your line of work is one that requires you to have a new idea every day.
Book of Your Life for Leo:
Earth, Sky and Creative Transformation
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You are now in a moment where you get to review, rethink and recreate just about anything you want. This may involve any facet of your life. You have the opportunity to work from the roots of your existence upward, and outward. For now, stay close to the ground and work from your core reality.
Your astrology does not describe “things” changing; it describes you going through a transformation process that calls for your close involvement.
The more you take a proactive and creative role, the less it will feel like changes are happening to you and the more it will feel like you are working with the incoming forces to create the change that you want. Therefore, pay close attention to just what that is: know what you want to change. I suggest you work with two lists: what you want to resolve or eliminate, and what you want to create. Both will happen as part of the same process. You might think of this as a displacement process, where what you desire will supplant what is no longer working for you, no longer serving your purposes.
It’s time to recognize that your purposes have changed. Purpose is one of the very roots of existence, and you must stay up to date with what is motivating you: what is driving your choices. Ideally, this would be a day-to-day, hour-to-hour meditation on what moves you to make every single decision, right down to “paper or plastic?” What you are destined to discover is that your decisions matter. Not just the big ones. Small decisions matter more than you may think. Not deciding is a form of decision; you are exercising an option. However, you’re past the time when doing nothing or choosing not to act is a reasonable default position.
Book of Your Life for Virgo:
At Home in the Universe
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — It’s necessary to see that different external relationships have different purposes. There’s just one all-purpose relationship in your life, which is the one that you have with yourself. You might say that all of civilization was constructed to help us avoid this relationship. The obsession with what is exterior, and a general state of panic over what is interior, within consciousness, is the prevailing state of the world.
Most people are curious but not committed. You must be both.
One way to look at this is to see that all of your relationships are extensions of your own consciousness. This is true on its face: your relationships would not exist without you. But when you add in the factor of projection, that context miraculously vanishes. Now, however, you have the perfect storm pointing you back to your own consciousness at nearly every turn.
This looks like an evolutionary project on a multiple-lifetime scale: as if you’ve reached a point of growth where you are ready to engage the fact that your mind creates your reality; and your relationship to your mind, and your reality, are the only actual relationship that you have. It’s worth considering this as a proposition, as a potential that you test out. It will be especially worthwhile if you’re not having the kinds of relationships that you want, or if you have some persistent theme to your relationships that you want to change.
Let everything point you back to you, as the focal point of your existence. This will enhance your capacity for relationships rather than diminish it. The more solidly you are present for yourself, the more solid you can be for others. But that’s really beside the point; focusing your intimacy with yourself is its own reward.
Book of Your Life for Libra:
The True Mirror
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Generally speaking, the more mindful a person is, the more interested they are in their relationships, and the more meaningful those relationships seem. Yet here in our dualistic world, we have yet to reconcile the ways in which relationships are supposed to be about others, and the ways they end up being about ourselves. Where this starts to work is when we discover the ways in which the interests of others are not separate from our own. This concept of seeing mutual interests is so basic that it’s the very definition of healer in A Course in Miracles.
The other often unrecognized situation involves projection. This is seeing in others what you contain in yourself. Rather than being a clear mirror, relationships can often feel like a house of smoke and mirrors. This is especially a concern due to the experience of projection: ascribing to others feelings that are actually your own. Anais Nin is credited with saying, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
This is, of course, maddening when you don’t like what you see, feel or experience. And it can be just as challenging to know that you’re growing and changing, and not see the change in your relationships. The human dimension is not easy to navigate. We are all complex beings; we must negotiate with, tolerate and embrace one another. We must decide what to do when it becomes clear that a relationship is not working for us.
Book of Your Life for Scorpio:
Of Water, Fire and Self-Respect
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — To my eye, the profound underlying theme of your charts involves self-worth. This issue goes by many names, though I consider it one of the most serious problems vexing people in our time of history. Self-esteem, self-respect, self-love, the quest for personhood, developing your human potential: they are all related.
Throughout the Scorpio solar chart, the idea of SELF pushes its way into many facets of your existence. The essence of this message is that you must express your true self in every facet of your being, particularly in the work that you do. The tangible contribution you make to your community and the larger society is your single most dependable way to develop yourself, and to cultivate respect for yourself, and these angles of your chart are coming under strong, creative aspects this year.
Yet at every turn, it’s essential that you keep your focus on the matter of self-respect. It’s not possible to fake this. It’s also not necessary to be all the way there in one go. Self-respect is a process of cultivation. There are many facets, from seeing honestly who you are, and what you contribute, to the willingness and motivation to change what you don’t like about yourself. In this process, one must give up a lot of excuse-making, denial, intentional naiveté and rosy-glasses thinking. It’s necessary not just to stop believing your own press releases, but also to stop sending them out.
Book of Your Life for Sagittarius:
Learning to Fly
Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — One thing to be mindful of is some past parental influence that has you feeling so self-critical about the work you do, or want to do, that you falter merely due to a kind of constriction. You dearly need to step away from your family’s influence to set yourself free from this. There is something that may be vexing you about specialization, or the need to specialize. Nobody is really a specialist anymore. For one thing, the world is moving constantly in the direction of integration. Not generalization, but rather integration. Work for that. Look for the many ways you can express your talent rather than the one special way.
Yes, it may happen that you’re called to take on a specific task, or get an opportunity that allows you to express your talent in a focused way. Make sure that’s the right thing for you. Remember that you can, in fact, go back to what you were doing previously if you choose to take this assignment. Notably, it might be an assignment that seems to have nothing to do with what you’re currently doing. I’ve heard many success stories involving people who were highly skilled in one field, and took up work in a field they had never planned, intended or trained to work in — and they did brilliantly.
You will thrive if you maintain a spirit of exploration and play in the work that you do. You might explore the idea that no matter what you do, you’re doing the same thing: expressing your energy and love. If you discover that you don’t feel so energetic or so loving, that’s the time to consider why you’re doing it. However, remember, many facets of your current astrology call for patience.
Book of Your Life for Capricorn:
Subterranean Soul
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — It’s easy to go retro and wish things were the way they used to be. Nostalgia, one of the most popular sports of our era, is not a form of progress. Many people are responding to Pluto in Capricorn by grasping onto the past. My take on why we live in such reactionary times involves the depth of changes that people are being summoned to confront. The integrity loss here is about not honestly addressing the needs, and the unique opportunities, of our actual moment. It’s also potentially about a reconstruction of history rather than getting underneath what happened and resolving any pain that you’re carrying from the past.
Along these lines is one other significant risk of Pluto in Capricorn, and many related transits: that of making changes only on the personality level. Though Pluto would seem to inevitably go deeper, it’s possible to be moving around the more superficial elements of personality and lifestyle rather than doing the deeper work.
We can, at least, admit that the kinds of effort and progress Pluto is demanding you exert can be lonely, the process can be exhausting, and it can always seem that there is more work to do. Here close to the midpoint of Pluto’s journey through Capricorn (the process is half complete), I would offer that while Pluto transits can be difficult, we miss them when they’re gone. Pluto provides drive on a deep level that really can motivate you, if you allow yourself to move.
Book of Your Life for Aquarius:
A Conspiracy of Faith
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — There is some discussion in astrology about whether Aquarius is the altruistic, peace-and-love sign that it’s made out to be. Much of that mythos comes from the idea of the Age of Aquarius, popularized by the Broadway musical Hair. You know, harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abound.
However, Aquarius is a sign ruled by the often-frugal planet Saturn, which does not really deliver those properties. And Aquarius is a fixed sign, given to crystallization and the formation of patterns that are rather difficult to change. These patterns can become instruments of tyranny, much like the current digital environment that is indeed related to the energy of Aquarius.
Harmony, sympathy and empathy are more the properties of Pisces, the sign that follows yours, and which plays a significant part in your astrology this year.
What we do get from Aquarius is eccentricity. Within the morphogenetic fields of your sign is an inbred rebelliousness of mind. This comes with the refusal to accept patterns imposed by others; the capacity to hybridize one’s views and have original positions on social and political issues; which in turn leads to a kind of eccentricity that is very much a quality of your nature. So too is a distinct inventiveness, if you can keep your mind awake, alert and young.
Book of Your Life for Pisces:
Before and After Chiron
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — It’s much easier to live as a whole and integrated person than it is to be someone whose parts are isolated from one another. It’s easier to live in harmony with yourself than it is to live in conflict, and you have made significant progress toward this goal that you may not have noticed was so vital to your happiness.
To celebrate the beauty of this moment, however, calls for total commitment to yourself and to what you are called to do. We live in a time when many commitments are faltering, when the social contract is unraveling, and when the values of society seem to be crumbling. Yet you are in a position to rise to the occasion of your existence. You can answer your calling to live not just with purpose, but also in full accord with your deepest values. That is what it means to be a solid person. Once you’ve experienced that, there’s no turning back because there’s nowhere else to go.
One discovery you may be making is just how radical you’ve become. By that I mean the astrology of recent years has fitted you with advanced bullshit filters and a commitment to truth. You are less afraid than ever to express what you genuinely believe. In fact, you may be bolder than ever about expressing who you are. Experience has taught you not only that this is safe, but that it’s the only sane way to proceed through life, especially in times of chaos, strife and deception.
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