Horoscopes for November 2011

by Eric Francis Coppolino, October 26, 2011

Aries (March 20-April 19)
This month, your ruling planet Mars enters Virgo, where it will be for about nine months. This involves Mars retrograde, which is a long process—but this is especially long for Mars to stay in one sign. This is an extended opportunity to rethink three things. One is your idea of work. Next is your idea of your health. Last is your idea of well-being. You may be filled with the inspiration to start fixing your life, and embarking on every conceivable self-improvement plan. I suggest you start with evaluating how you evaluate things. Your mind tends to be impetuous and you have a way of snapping to judgments, then sorting out whether you were right or wrong the next day or the next week. Even then, you’re trying to apply some logic, and the time has arrived to figure out just what that logic is. By that I mean, what is your concept of “better”? What is your idea of “fair”? How do you discern whether you’re coming from your mind or your emotions when you make a decision? Mars retrograde is going to put you in a position to review many, many facts of your life, and many past decisions you’ve made—and how they impact you. I suggest you begin this process well in advance. But while you’re doing that, notice how you size up those decisions. This is a process of becoming conscious even as you observe how conscious you were when you decided certain things.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
You have a right to be picky about who and what you want, but if that is true, you may as well be specific. You have a tendency to tell yourself what you don’t want rather than to affirm what you actually want. The two sides of this equation—negating things and affirming things—are not equivalent values. Yes and no are both important, but yes implies making a choice, which is a commitment, and then following through on it. This, in turn, calls for a deeper level of self-awareness, and also knowing that you will live with your decision. One more point: If you say no to something, that implies that you’re keeping your other options open. If you say yes, you are in theory passing by those other options (which is not usually true but many people believe it is). Much of your hesitancy comes from this one notion. In any event, I suggest you consider all of your options and choose consciously from among them, affirming what you want. Know good fortune when you have it, and know good times when you’re in them. It may be little comfort to say things can always be worse, but it takes an open heart to know that you’re taking care of yourself, and that others have your best interests at heart. Sooner or later, we all must learn that life is not about survival, even contrary to what plenty of people with a wine cellar would tell you.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
What do you have in common with your father? Said another way, the question your astrology is asking now and for the foreseeable future is, do you feel safe? Do you have any sense of the protection that your father and the space he provided was somewhere you could be yourself? Or is that space tainted by some sense of narrowness, threat, or judgment? I suggest you consider this for a while, because the answer to your question will tell you about your relationship to all men, and give you a clue as to your ideas of relationships between women and men. I believe that trust is the fundamental value in any relationship, and this relates directly to whether there is the sense of a safe container. What you may discover is that any threat to your safety lurks within your own consciousness. But these thought forms don’t just end up in our minds and emotions by accident; they are put there by others, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes just because that’s how things are done around the parts where you grew up. Now is the time to review your tendency to be self-critical, and to count the cost of any such habit. You may notice a little surge in narrow or judgmental thought patterns, and I suggest you stalk them till you understand from whence they come. It’s actually not your material; it’s ancestral residue, and once you’re aware of that fact, you’re free to cast it off.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Though your sign has a reputation for being emotionally driven, you have a knack for deep and original thought. However, I suggest you not push that too far at the moment, or get too carried away. Beware of mental obsessions and thoughts that think themselves. Rather, when working out problems or developing ideas, check in with your intuition and emotional process regularly. An unusual development in your solar chart suggests that you might have a tendency to overthink, when the solution or central concept to any circumstance you might face is likely to be intuitive or even obvious. There are two likely sources of distraction. One is conformity. It’s harder than most people think to do what you actually want rather than what everyone else thinks you should do. If someone is giving you heavy-handed “advice,” check their motives. Second, watch your tendency to be defensive, including knowing more about what you don’t want than what you do want. You often cast this as pragmatism, when in fact the more pragmatic approach is to keep your fields of desire wide open. Now is the time to stretch into what you want, and to give yourself the freedom to dream. Doing this, you might have the feeling of remembering old dreams, which will have more life in them than you might imagine. A broad-minded approach to life is your path to making those dreams real, which is why staying open is the way to get where you are going. And you’re definitely going somewhere.