Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Gemini is one of the three human signs (the first in the zodiac, in fact), illustrated by a person rather than some other kind of critter. And when a human appears, he/she appears in a pair. Isn’t that interesting? This comes with a question: what are the two sides of your nature? You’ve obviously identified a tendency to what’s called ‘dualism’ — the simultaneous expression of opposites.
This is challenging, but it helps to have some self-knowledge and ongoing self-awareness. Are the two sides of your Gemini nature about the immortal soul coexisting with the mortal ego? Are they about the relationship between mind and body? Are they the good twin and the evil twin? Whatever the case, you need many modes of expression and you may have three computers.
You may have a special gift of creative collaboration, because you can shapeshift and respond to any human situation as the person you’re needed to be. Use this skill and it will get stronger. You also need a diverse group of friends to stimulate the many sides of your mind. And you need to turn your nearly obsessive inner dialog into something creative; capture it in writing, turn it into a play or TV show; explore your psyche in a therapy process.
The challenge that most people feel with Gemini is that they ‘don’t know who they’re talking to’, since you are so multifaceted. But the better you know yourself, the more trustworthy you’ll be. If you’re aware of how people respond to you, and do your best to bridge this perception gap, your relationships will go more smoothly. You can also keep your friends guessing. I consider Gemini the kinkiest sign. It’s got to do with the whole twin thing — if you find your twin, you know how to make him or her feel good.
Gemini is an air sign, and the first of the four mutable signs, which come at the end of a season. The planet associated with Gemini is Mercury, which is fast-moving and androgynous. If you want to learn more about yourself, look where Mercury is placed in your chart.
PERSONALITY
In Alice A. Bailey’s Esoteric Astrology, Bailey holds Venus as the esoteric ruler of Gemini. Like all the esoteric rulers, this one makes perfect sense if you give it a moment of thought. Venus is extraordinarily mental, intelligent and perceptive — like Gemini. But also she is creative, steady and fierce. She represents the hidden dimension of Gemini.
Geminis ask a heck of a lot of questions, and the personalities of many are defined by their obsessive curiosity. And much of what you are curious about is yourself.
That is the thing about you: one born under an air sign, ruled by a planet (Mercury) that switches directions six times a year (three times retrograde, three times direct, with other fancy maneuvers) is going to be restless, and consistency toward your goals presents a special challenge.
You are highly subject to guilt, which is a form of denial. Part of your setting free and taking back process involves dismantling that particular apparatus, which is ancestral in nature.
One reward of this will be that it provokes you out of victim mode. The guilt complex you were raised with, presumed to be as natural as a meadow, is really an artificial, toxic environment that has served to hold you down much of your life.
Remember this, because to create the success or fulfillment you want — including the fulfillment of a mission — you need to be able to address, sidestep or remove these potential obstacles.
There is one last part: the role of leader that you assigned to others in the past is now yours to take on. You need to be the one who keeps the big picture, and who strives to understand the whole system of anything that you are involved with.
CREATIVE PROCESS
It’s something of a stereotype that Gemini likes words, but it’s one of the true ones. This has as much to do with Mercury ruling your sign as it does with what appears in your solar 3rd house (the house of writing, ideas and communication): which would be Leo. It’s not just Mercury working here, or the airy nature of Gemini. It’s that you seek identity in the 3rd house; and you have most of your power of expression focused there. This 3rd house/Leo direction is where you go when you want to feel like someone; to feel like you have a place on the planet.
Artists and writers don’t just make products that are ‘apart’ from them. That which is produced and therefore communicated is their entire existence. Creative process is holistic. Ideas have a source, and that source is you, or something coming through you.
Words, ideas and emotion evoke one another for you; there is no special order of operations; this can work in any order. Regardless of what influences what, you experience a continual quest for integrity.
The ways in which you seek unity, clarity and personal expression could be called ‘correct speech’. This connects to your mind and your environment; but words have special value to you, as a focal point of your identity. The Bible talks about how in the beginning there was the word; this has a deep element of truth for you, and is a concept revered by our culture. Images also have special influence, a balancing influence — and I will come to that topic shortly.
Your words have value. They may be the most valuable asset you possess. I don’t mean this only in the sense of their monetary value (though this would hold true, by extension), but more in their relational value; as a measure of your integrity; as a measure of your mental wellness.
You may be aware of the phenomenon of when your thoughts turn on you. They can go dark and can seem to take on a life of their own, seizing control of your mind. This is such a common human struggle that we really need training for what to do when it happens; for how to get out of negative mental thought loops. It’s worth mentioning the cost to you who can create your reality using words like cells or seeds: you can hurt yourself with your mind. You can direct anger at others unnecessarily. And finally, you can lose any clear sense of your creative power if you get caught in one of these negative or cynical loops.
Both your talents and your frustrations with words resemble those of a child. That is the gift you possess: a stark freshness with ideas that can be blunt, funny, wise and provocative.
We’ve already talked about how you are your art. You are the ‘product’ of what you produce and it is the ‘product’ of you. ‘It’ is not separate from you. There is nothing to divide off. You are not separate from yourself; you are the same person all the time.
We both know that you desire; we both know that can put you into conflict with yourself and others. But remember, once you know what you desire and then give yourself permission to want it, life gets much simpler.
How much of your ‘failure’ to get what you want is associated with confusion about what you want? I would take a guess and say very nearly all of it.
Can you imagine a life where you don’t fight yourself? Can you imagine a life where you are who you are, and nothing else, no matter what anyone else thinks? To manifest this you will need to maintain balance, and keep your focus on the many seemingly different angles of integrity maintenance. Yet these are designed to get one result: you admitting to, and living, your personal truth as a fully open gesture in the world.
MENTAL PROCESS
You don’t need to be right; you don’t need to be exact; you merely need to experience what you’re feeling and express yourself directly. All of your best virtues stem from simple authenticity.
The first of those may be insecurity: the feeling that beneath the appearances you present to the world, you live in a maze of doubt. Doubt for you is like an echo chamber; the more you question, the more questions you hear. This condition alone can cause you significant distress: in short, that results from the fear that you are not authentic enough, not worthy enough, not brave enough.
I would propose that you were seen one way (by the adults in your family, and possibly your siblings), and felt a different way — and this created tension in your psyche, such as the fear of being ‘found out’.
Or, you were seen as talented in one way but felt that your deeper attributes were missed by those who you really needed to acknowledge you. Your charts suggest that you were more mature as a child than the adults around you noticed; but since that maturity was not rewarded, you began to doubt its meaning and its value. If you took on this perception, you may have judged yourself as immature, losing certain attributes of being a child while secretly taking on adult mental responsibilities.
For you, speaking, writing and moreover thinking well are the marks of an adult, and I want to remind you how vital it is that you feel competent and aligned with yourself in these aspects of life. It would be fair to say that this contains a holistic key for you: a key to your total well-being. That does indeed depend on the thoughts you think about yourself, which is your first environment — your mental environment. This extends from your senses to your psychological patterns into your immediate physical environment, such as your dwelling space and the neighborhood where it’s situated.
Just like many speech impediments have their roots not in an ‘inability’ but rather in childhood emotional material, your struggle with words works in a similar way. You move between two layers: an expressive layer and a perfectionist one; or a layer of image and a layer of doubt; a layer of child and a layer of adult. Yet it is the space between them where your power, healing and talent reside.
In many ways your mental pattern is who you are — or rather, you become it, and it becomes you. Because your mind is a particularly vivid, even tactile space, maybe you can even feel the power of your thought to synthesize reality. It may even be that you can actually hear the voices of your imagination as sound, and sense the things you think even though they are not actually solid.
To imagine may at times feel so much like experience as to render the difference between the two meaningless. That is, until you want some actual reality, which you’re not so bad at conjuring. But there are other times when it doesn’t seem to happen. And those times can be frustrating, because the tangible detail with which you’re able to sense your thoughts cannot always find a place on Earth.
RELATIONSHIPS
One of your talents is compartmentalizing your situations. You feel this way about this person, and you’re this way with them. You feel that way with that person, and you’re that way with them. This can manifest many ways, from differences in ‘who you are’ in friendships and business arrangements that exist independently of one another; to multiple ‘monogamous’ relationships that are kept in their own little cells, which can contain many different versions of who you are.
This works fine, until you come to the point where you have to reconcile ‘this’ with ‘that’. It works till the cell membranes start to break down and you cannot keep situations separate, because you are not separate.
This ‘division of self’ is an integrity issue; integrity means integration of the seemingly separate parts of who we are.
This divided quality tends to manifest as situations competing with one another. Your usual intention is to keep them separate, but to do this is to play divide and conquer with yourself. Then the world seems to play it with you. Competition is a sure way to tie up creative energy.
Your sign is associated with seemingly fast transitions, decisions and moving circumstances. The deeper reality is that you often find yourself embedded in situations that, no matter how progressive they seemed at first, quickly take on the characteristic of being hung up in the past. It often seems like you agree to one thing and get something entirely different.
Any contact that you have with the world around you depends irrevocably on your inner sense of yourself. The older readers of these pages have probably figured that out by now. To the younger ones it may seem like mere words, but check back over your experiences and try testing the theory. Your life starts with you. It obviously goes further than you, but you’re the thing doing the sensing, the experiencing, the decision-making and the setting of events into motion.
The thing about your emotional reality is that you have so many ideas about it. This has more to do with the influence of Virgo on your chart than the fact that you are an extremely mental person born under the sign of the Twins. You have ideas, and they are often self-critical ideas. It’s almost like you never feel good enough, therefore you are convinced you would never feel safe.
Again, consciously integrating — developing a cohesive inner sense of self, no matter how many facets it has — helps. It can become a lens through which to view self-critical ideas for what they are: a dialogue between the opposites you embody, not a single, absolute truth.
SPIRITUALITY
Gemini’s main job is to reveal consciously the relationship between spirit and form.
We live in a world that is hung up on forms. We have different names for them: status, appearance, perception, roles and so on. Within the forms is the content, the essence of life, but we tend not to notice. Indeed, the world is all about not noticing, and what we call the spiritual path is all about going beneath the surface (of oneself and of others) and experiencing what is below.
As a Gemini, you are acutely aware of the opposites you contain below your surface, inside your form. You can use that intellectual awareness to perceive it elsewhere in the world, and to articulate it.
CAREER/MONEY
It is one thing to be intuitive, but that is different from emotional — and indeed, you can be quite intuitive when it comes to finances. This is not always true, however, and the ebbs and floods of your financial life need some stabilizing.
Sacrifice seems to have been pre-programmed into you from a young age, and connected directly to the value of your efforts. I have had a discussion a number of times with young people considering going into the esoteric arts as a profession, who often say some form of, “Yes, but is it right to charge money to help someone?” to which I reply, “Would you rather charge money to hurt them?”
Perhaps this is the working of my twisted mind, but I love the expression on people’s faces as they work this concept out. The logic, though, is impeccable. At some point, you’re going to need to feel great about being paid to help people, and getting paid well. This is your natural mode of expression — you were indeed born to help.
Use your mind; use the opposites you contain; use your need to create and to ‘be one’ with your creations; use your words; and as you get better and better at your setting free and taking back process, you’ll be able to share it, model it, and lead in a way that lets others emulate it.