Annual Horoscope for 2011

ARIES (March 20-April 19)
How many commercials have we seen promising some version of “the new you,” whether it was for a workout gadget, hair color, or a mental outlook offered in a self-help book? Despite our collective obsession with personal renewal, this seems to be something that rarely works. Part of why involves our attachment to the past, and the typically human fear of change. Yet these tumble when we have a vision that we want to create with passion.

With Uranus entering your birth sign for the next seven years, your sense of self becomes something entirely flexible, and you may have the feeling that anything is possible. That is true: Yet what, exactly, do you want to be possible? Over the past few seasons you’ve had a clue. It may have seemed like something too good to be true, or impossible because it was so amazing. That’s the thing to guide yourself with. Don’t worry about whether it seems possible, or concern yourself with plotting every step in the process. You grew from a zygote into a fetus into a child and then into an adult understanding nothing about how that worked on the anatomical level. Thank goodness for DNA.

The DNA of Uranus in your sign suggests not merely personal renewal but rather ongoing personal revolution. It may take a while to figure out what I mean, but it will become obvious. From the inside, this may feel like the desire to burst free even though you did precisely that yesterday; to drop every pretense you ever put up; to act boldly and immediately, instead of taking years to plan things that rarely happen. Something inside is seeking to set itself free. In short, this transit brings out your true nature, as if a veil were being lifted off of your psyche.

Your inner awareness is being joined closer with your daily expression. You will tap the rich potential even of what seemed like negative developments. Whatever may have happened during the past four seasons, trust that the world has made room for you, for the work you want to do, and the person you want to be in your deepest relationships. Patience may be the most challenging virtue you can muster in these seasons of your life. This is a new kind of patience—one based not on waiting, but on cultivating trust in yourself, practiced like yoga from day to day.

TAURUS (April 19-May 20)
Though most descriptions of your sign cast you as practical, grounded, and organized, you have one of the dreamiest minds around. This is why you can find yourself getting caught in fantasy, and it’s why material things often take so long for you. The story of your astrology for 2011 and well beyond is about gaining clarity. Most of that clarity is to your emotional nature. You are sensitive; the solution is about enhancing that sensitivity rather than toning it down. Though it may seem odd to say, your true liberation will come from fully honoring your inner life. That will set you free to act with confidence in the world.

One of the most exciting aspects of your journey through the next four seasons involves discovering that you create who you are as you go. At times this may feel like a path of discovery, but that’s an illusion of time. This is true to the extent that, for the sake of grounding and a sense of stability, you’ve often preferred to depend on who you were yesterday, but your imagination is way too rich for that. The thing about having a lavish imagination is that it truly helps to be disciplined about it.

As part of that discipline, you must turn to everything you ever considered as a fault and turn it into an asset. For example, if you consider yourself a procrastinator, you can discern the thing you’re most motivated to do at any given time—such as choosing the thing on your “to do” list that’s the most fun. If you do that consistently, you will get everything done. If you are a raging idealist and don’t think the world is ready for you, then test out your own belief and try something specific and see what happens.

The trend of your life is moving away from theorizing and into action; away from guilt and into pleasure; away from being concerned about risks and toward being a kind of test pilot of the soul. As you experiment in all these ways, remember: Manifestation always proceeds from an idea into tangible form. And the one thing between the idea and its expression is, most often, what you believe. So if you want to make real changes that are 100 percent certified by the cosmos, change what you believe. It’s easier than you currently believe.

GEMINI (May 20-June 21)
It can be challenging maintaining a balance of power between you and the people in your life. That is especially true when so much in the world seems to come down to a question of power or control. The essence of balance, in that case, is making sure your life has a different theme and a different purpose. To do that, you need more creative concepts, but the first thing to do is to respect power for what it is. This way, you can enter a direct relationship with it; from here you will have the feeling of dancing with destiny rather than merely being subject to it.

That is a big difference, yet it only becomes clear through experience. Now, the question is, how do you get there? At the essence of your growth mission is freeing yourself from emotions that tend to lock you into certain relationship situations “against your will.” First among these is guilt. Next on the list is your sense of obligation. Then comes a tendency to honor the status quo. You may experience a value that says someone with more money is a better person than someone with less of the stuff. All of these notions are ideas you have inherited rather than invented—and what you are doing at this stage of your life is giving back that inheritance. To whom? To the ancestors; to a culture that defined your relationships before you had a chance to; to your family for the examples it set.

You have your own ideas, and this is the time in your life when you get to express them—if you want. As you take apart the ideas from the distant past that don’t work for you, the next step is to evaluate people and events on their own merits. That implies applying your discernment to every situation in your life. This is more than most people are willing to do, because if you’re wrong, then the error is all your own. Yet if you’re correct, then you have nobody to thank but yourself.

You are seeking more social freedom than most people would ever dream of. One of your most cherished dreams is that of absolute individuality. Thus, never apologize for being yourself. And remember that embracing what works for you always involves letting go of what does not.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
It is truly amazing what we take on faith, and what we reject supposedly on the basis of rationality. How many people bite into a hamburger assuming that it’s wholesome food? How many times have you decided that there isn’t a place for you in the world? How often have you feared you were incapable of something, then turned around and did it well? It’s time to put your faith where it belongs—in yourself.

While you often seem at the mercy of external influences, your program of self-mastery involves turning those influences to your advantage, rising to the occasion of whatever you’re presented with. Other times you’ll need to recognize something is a projection of your own fear rather than an actual factor of your environment.
Indeed, rising above fear is the greatest gift you can give yourself. You don’t need it. In truth it has never served you; it’s neither protected you nor nourished you. Fear gives bad information, and so does guilt. You have been feeling the calling to set your own goals and define your own purpose. To do that, you need to feel bold and, in a sense, innocent.

Be aware of the rules and affinities created by your loyalty to groups and organizations, whether they are as far-reaching as national identity or religion, or as close to home as your family and your most intimate relationships. Often we don’t see these for what they are until we make some attempt to define ourselves as an individual. That’s when it becomes obvious that something seemingly external may be standing in the way of being real. As it turns out, it’s actually not external—it’s something within our own minds and beliefs that we can change, and this is what is gradually dawning on you.

You may not consider yourself a rebellious person, but you are stepping into a bold phase of your life where, in actual truth, you can achieve anything you want. Define this by a tangible purpose. Focus on that. I don’t mean a principle, such as “helping people,” but rather a direct goal of some kind. There will be a strong temptation to rebel against, which doesn’t get anyone so far. Therefore, create in the affirmative. Create a vision and if you have to rebel on the way to getting there, go for it. Most of that rebellion will consist simply of being yourself.

LEO (July 22-August 23)
The concept of belief is one of the most significant and invisible issues of consciousness. Belief—not truth—often runs the world, and tends to run our lives. What we believe becomes what is true for us, and then that perceived truth reifies itself. This is how people come to believe many things that have no basis in reality. You’re in the process of having all—and I do mean all—of your beliefs about yourself up-ended, which I would say is some of the best news in years. This may feel like it’s happening overnight, though it’s part of a long process of figuring out where you stand with yourself.

That is another way of saying you’re discovering your potential, and I dare say that as this happens, the feeling will be shocking. You may find yourself exploring entirely new domains of possibility on a daily basis. For a measure of distance, consider how far your ideas are from the ones you were raised with. Meanwhile, you may feel like you’re under some kind of odd spotlight that is making your soul visible to the world. The concept “original intention” comes to mind, in terms of your sense of remembering what you came here to do, and why. It would be healthy for you to make friends with how little money means to you, when you get to the bottom of your values system. It’s not that you don’t enjoy or appreciate money, but rather, it does not serve as a direct motivator in the way that you so often see in the world around you.

Rather, you are driven by your devotion to service, to excellence and most of all to community. Make friends with that. As you connect with and draw strength from your true values, you will find that money is much more abundant and, indeed, more useful.

The thing to place emphasis on is time. Your perception of time is changing, and that includes the value of time. The time deficit that the world seems to be experiencing is happening in the midst of a world obsessed with planning and speculation. You have little need to do either of these things. Your power, your deepest contentment, and your knowledge of your actual potential are available right now. If you feel that your ideas lack solidity, remember that it is you who gives them life the moment you think them.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22)
Always give yourself a third choice. Whether you’re deciding where to go on holiday or looking at a seemingly complex dilemma, if you see two possibilities, create a third. While you’re creating extra possibilities for yourself, meditate on the idea that everyone is learning, you among them. It’s the happy, conscious learners who are the most successful and who make the most out of their experience in the world. One of the most meaningful things we are learning here is how to make choices and see options.

With Chiron entering your opposite sign, Pisces, you may at times have to face an unusual kind of directness in certain intimate partnerships. This may feel like a plunge into intimacy and at other times like you must get serious, and at others like being backed into a corner. If you react defensively, you will validate negative emotions and compound them; if you respond with awareness and creativity, you will figure out that in the process, you create your experience of life.

You may occasionally have this feeling of not knowing who is a friend and who is a foe. I would suggest, in this case as in many others, you go for a third option. Your old definitions of ally and enemy have not served you so well, as you’ve shown some extraordinary allegiance to people who have harmed you and turned your back on those who would help you. In truth the roles that certain individuals take will be more complex than ever, and this will summon an ever-increasing level of discernment.

The most valuable kind of discernment is emotional rather than intellectual. You will know who someone is by how you feel in their presence. You will know that a task or goal you set out for yourself is worthwhile because you  feel an opening and a pleasant sense of rising to a challenge. The challenge represented by Chiron is always some form of integrity.

Yet it will benefit you immensely if you don’t seek outside validation. Experience that validation when it’s there; see it for what it is but don’t go after it. Rather, affirm your own talents, your existence, your desires and your dreams. Be the one who comes through with assistance and affirmation for yourself before you expect or even desire anyone else to. Others are eager to support you, but for the moment, the first move is yours.

LIBRA (September 22-October 23)
You have yet to discover yourself as the source of traditional wisdom that you are. While most of humanity is busy living in a world that makes no sense, you’ve been cultivating contact with the firm ground of reason and sanity. I realize your life may not always feel like this, but even incidents that provoke you serve to support your goal of mental and emotional grounding. It would be fair to say that your deepest goal is to be emotionally autonomous. This provides a value in itself, and it gives you a sane point of observation when the world around you goes a bit mad.

One thing you are doing is tapping deep into the knowledge of the past. I don’t mean “caught in the past” but rather having access to a rich mine of forgotten ideas that will serve you well, as you bring them into a modern context.

Yet at the same time you may be experiencing something stirring in your ancestral past. Skeletons may be chattering in the closet. Certain members of your family of origin showing their true, and perhaps weird, colors. What you have here is an opportunity for transcendence. You are no longer beholden to their emotional ways, customs, or rituals. Let everything in the world be a reminder of who you are.

This year is likely to develop into some unusual, even extraordinary, experiences of relationships. You may not be able to tell right away if something is innovative or disruptive; if the energy is about rebellion or innovation. It may be all of the above, in the most productive and positive sense of the concepts. While you may feel like you have to be forward-thinking to handle what you’re experiencing, remember that in many ways you are practicing time-honored traditions. One of those traditions is about how, in truth, the experiences of human relationships is one long experiment.

The story of human relationships, taken as a whole, is anything but the story of monogamy. In our natural state, we people are tribal, inquisitive, explorers and inventors. If in the midst of any situation you need a reality check, here is a simple one. Can you tell the whole truth about your experience to everyone around you? Can the people you know do so? You are safe where you can be honest. Honesty is a sign of wholeness and the most fertile ground of intimacy and freedom.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 22)
While few would call you meek, there is a thin line between a man and a mouse. Remember that if you hear yourself state some of what you want rather than all of it; if you express part of what you feel rather than your actual feeling; or if you censor yourself because you’re worried what someone might think. Speaking from the core of your values will get results—indeed, results far beyond what you ever expected. It’s also true that to the extent that you have not had the results you wanted, you were denying something you know is true at your core.

I recognize that this is an ongoing quest, and yet it takes on particularly strong meaning this year—and will do so increasingly.

One thing you seem to be figuring out is how toxic guilt is. That is a discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The question then shifts to: Once you get clear about that fact, and you discover that the opposite of guilt is love, what is the most loving action to take? Guilt supports many other seemingly unrelated thought systems and ways of organizing reality. When you divest your loyalty from guilt, those thought systems can collapse—that is, within your own psyche—and you may for a moment have the sensation of having no bearings.

You obviously want to make changes in your immediate environment. You need a more passionate, alive, and exciting climate in which to work and play. You need the rules of life to reflect current reality rather than what reality is “supposed to” be. Your environment will, over and over, send you this message. It may come in the form of “unplanned” disruption to things that were not working for you. You may discover that you’re extremely restless or fed up with your life and need to try something different. If you do, this experiment will be a potent source of vitality for you. In short, everything about your chart describes a person craving the unfamiliar.
Don’t worry so much about others. They each have their own agenda, and they care less about what you do with your time and energy than you think. But whether you allow yourself to be free comes back to the question of guilt, which is why I suggest you become genuinely clear with yourself about this. Sanity is freedom. You need both.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 22)
While most descriptions of your sign cast you as freewheeling and a bit over the top, you know how deeply you adhere to certain core principles that have always served you well. Now those principles are changing as fast as the times in which we live. This is not to say you’re going to fly off the rails, but rather that you don’t need to cling to concepts that have worked for you in the past, and that you are now abundantly ready to let go of.
Just as any tradition must change in order to be alive, one’s personal ethical principles go through an evolutionary process, if we are actually feeling and thinking. For many this means growing more conservative as they get older, which typically means frightened and disgusted. You seem to be growing in precisely the opposite direction—refusing to let fear run your life, and embracing the human condition in total. It’s a great gift that you are big enough of a person to do so. In the process you will gain authentic independence from mainstream views that, in truth, seem to serve very few of the people who adhere to them.

Chiron entering Pisces suggests that you are gaining profound sensitivity to your environment. This is true on every level—be it your home environment, the ecology of the planet, or the emotional weather in any situation that surrounds you. Your enhanced sensitivity is likely to have two distinct effects: One is to shift your relationship to your family, in any form that concept takes. Certain things that were bearable will no longer be acceptable. Certain things that are toxic will actually feel that way. And you will seek emotional grounding to a depth that is unusual and, in fact, may be unprecedented in your life. If you find yourself in an emotional crisis of any kind, remember that. Getting in or even near water will help, be it a bathtub or Lake Tahoe.

This year, take another step toward a highly specific mission. In Western terms, we usually call this a career. That’s not necessarily the right word. What I am describing is bigger and more important; it’s a quest that combines your most “extreme” and unusual skills with the single-minded determination that is the hallmark of your sign. What I am describing is not a role and it’s not a job—it’s the thing you came here to do.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 20)
When I was about 22, a friend took me to meet his guru. I had about five minutes with her. We sat down on a yoga mat in a big, empty room. She looked at me and said instantly, “You have maturity. You lack confidence.”
Your charts this year are all about gaining confidence that you may not know you lack. Maturity is something you’ve possessed very nearly forever and could frankly do with a little less of; confidence is a challenge in a world that always seems to have the upper hand. The basis of confidence is within, if we’re to learn anything from the lives of people who have had absolute power but who were totally insecure. You are having to learn this confidence as you go, even as you encounter experiences that keep shaking you up, rattling your sense of identity and, in the end, serving to push you out of your shell.

I suggest that you begin to associate confidence with vulnerability. I know that all the common “wisdom” goes the opposite way, that the more piled on with defenses a person is, the more confident they seem (to some). Yet that’s not actually true; it’s an illusion, at best. True confidence arises from being close to your edge, and willing to stay there—and that is a vulnerable place. As you get to that spot where you realize you’re not emotionally secure, slip into it like a hot bath. If you reach the spot where your concept of your identity is crumbling, allow the concept to fall away and your true self to come through.

When you find yourself tasked with a challenge that calls on you to take leadership but don’t necessarily feel qualified, remember that most of leadership is about responding to an authentic calling, and listening to people as much as you might speak to them.

As for being able to do with a bit less maturity: Gradually, as the years press on, you’re figuring out that a deep element of the meaning of life is your ability to enjoy and appreciate each moment as it passes, each human encounter, each small step toward freedom. That’s what we usually think maturity specifically denies. In the subtle words of the poet Ginsberg, remind yourself: I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 19)
The inner life of an Aquarian is complex, and I trust that you are finally seeing the need to simplify. These mazes in which you get caught, the ones that have the names of family members scribbled in lipstick or shaving cream all over the mirrors and walls, take up space, and wandering through them takes up energy. The thing about a maze is, once you’re in, you’re in—so how do you get out?

Well, you can memorize the pattern from within and navigate toward the exit. You can try the psychic equivalent of pushing on one of the walls. If the walls are solid, you can climb on top to change your perspective and look around. You might call out to see if anyone else is in there with you someplace. When you find your way to the exit, keep going in some direction other than back in. Just remember—whatever the maze represents, it was there before you were born, and part of your quest for freedom involves going beyond the drama and futility that certain of your ancestors thought was normal. What is this structure made of? In a word, fear. And you have some awesome incentives for not being caught in something that has served humanity so poorly for so long.

You must know you’re on the cusp of a big event or adventure. You may have the feeling of having endlessly prepared for something that you are now waiting to happen. Using birth as a metaphor, you’re at that stage of the process where it’s time to push. Initially, this will involve pushing your vision. That might mean writing the first draft of a new concept, rough as it is. This is about taking the initial tangible step toward creating something. Working with imagery will be genuinely helpful: imagery, that is, instead of a concept or idea. Describe in visual detail what you want to create. Don’t worry about how, or what might go wrong—focus on what is affirmative. This may take some daily discipline. Create a space and make it happen.
When, suddenly, the momentum of your life shifts and events proceed faster and more tangibly than you imagined, these drawings or descriptions will prove to be vital. Don’t be surprised if what you actually create far exceeds your initial concept.

PISCES (February 19-March 20)
This is going to be an unusual year. I mean that in the best sense of the word. In one of the most touching Sun-sign horoscopes I’ve ever read, Rockie Gardiner in the mid 2000s made a comment to Pisces about how the distances you are crossing are so vast, you may have no sense of where you’re going or whether you’re ever going to arrive. You are now in a phase of arrival. Like most things in astrology, this happens in phases and in layers, though at this time, you are well into the process.

The journey has changed you. Being in a constant confrontation with the unknown, you’ve learned what to do in an environment of uncertainty. That’s been a little like learning to walk across a high wire, which is not such a useful skill until the day comes when you have to walk across a narrow ledge, and then it’s easy. You’ve learned to exist in an environment that is only marginally supportive of who you are. You’ve learned to breathe air instead of water—a good trick for a fish.

And what now? The world taking shape around you is responsive to your ideas. You are able to grasp where people are coming from and respond to them accordingly. It is mysteriously easier to manifest resources. You have some radical ideas, and you can get them going. As regards ideas, don’t just “try” them—become their very embodiment.

The single most significant thing you can take with you as you dance with your transits through 2011 is: Be bold about being different. I don’t mean different for your own sake. I mean as different as you are, with courage and curiosity in your heart.

Chiron is going to be the most prominent energy in your chart, and Chiron is always different for a purpose. The most vital skill you can develop is mindfulness. That is the art of being aware from moment to moment, and experiencing life as a constant dynamic between your feelings, your thoughts, and your choices. This is also the year to get very good at taking care of your health.

I state these things not so much as goals but as essential tools you have unusually direct access to, and can cultivate—tools that will serve you well in the wild and unknown country you are about to enter.