Forecast for week of May 14-20, 2012

By Kathy Biehl

Fasten your seat belts and tie down your grounding cords: One of the most intense phases of our lives is here. For many of us, it’s the most intense yet — and, brace yourselves, that’s not backing down anytime soon.

Don’t freak; keep breathing (and reading). You’ve been preparing for this. Whether you knew it or not, you’ve been staking out a place of power, support and refuge. Plant your feet firmly onto that turf you’ve been tending, cleaning up and cultivating for the past year. It’s your platform for the dynamic, exciting and, let’s be honest, challenging pressure that’s both bearing down on and rising up in us.
 Signs become unmistakable this week of just how many areas of life are heating up at once. Relationships, finances and values are up for reconsideration, with Venus retrograding in the communication and gadget loving sign of Gemini (May 15-June 27). This review isn’t a good-time free-for all, with flings for old-times’ sake; it resounds with issues of permanence and commitment, because Venus does her about-face just a smidgen shy of an exact link to structure-loving Saturn.

All manner of communication and transportation issues are hitting a power-up, too, from Sunday’s Gemini solar eclipse — from the nature, quality and content of our thoughts and information flow, to the tools we use to receive and transmit and get around this planet, to our dealings with neighbors and outsiders, to the educational and belief systems we create from all that data. (Read more in my mooncast, which will be posted on my site by Saturday.)

As if those influences wouldn’t be intense enough by themselves, a cosmic doorman is pointing and pointing into an opening for making peace with long-standing issues of separation, wounds, sacrifice and self-sabotage. (This one’s with us all month, the gift of a helpful link between Pluto the transformer and Chiron, who challenges us to turn wounds into badges of our humanity and settle into the physicality of existence. ) But wait! There’s still more, lots more, the biggest source of intensity of all, and the one that will be with us for years: the epidemic of chicken-or-egg situations involving previously secure structures collapsing because of strikes by, or triggering responses from, revolutionary, individualist, impassioned-to-angry impulses. (Noticed any in, say, the national news lately?) Personally and collectively we’re feeling tension escalating and accelerating as the two cosmic change agents, Uranus (sudden and unpredictable) and Pluto (deep-rooted and unavoidable), move into position for a fight that’ll go seven rounds from next month into 2015.

So: intensity every which way you look, and the heat’s not going down. What’s the takeaway?

For starters, forget about pulling the covers over your head and hiding. That tactic won’t work. Besides, incentive abounds to dive in and actively grapple with all of this. And the payoff will propel you into living honestly and boldly.

Notice who and what pops up now, as well as who and what depart. With Venus retrograde, people and themes from the past will resurface — maybe to reconsider, maybe to resolve, maybe to remind you of how much you’ve grown or where you would benefit to revamp your thinking. Doors will slam shut, too, some breathtakingly and unexpectedly. Do not grab the ankles of anyone walking away. It’s futile. Major comings and goings are part of the eclipse process. You can’t stop anyone, and if someone did happen to turn around, you would not really want them at this point.

Notice your thinking, too. That goes for your habitual patterns (calling yourself stupid if you forget something) as well as statements of what you believe to be true. The Gemini/Sagittarius eclipse cycle is bringing mental filters up for cleaning out. You can reboot your attitude about pretty much anything if you apply yourself now. I have two resources to help you pull this off. My article “Know Your Mind: The Potential of May’s Gemini Solar Eclipse” has tips for working with the eclipses, and my 2-mp3 set on the eclipses discusses how they affect each sign (and gives strategies, too).

When the pressure really bears down on you, work with it. What are you fighting? What are you resisting? How are you making situations harder for yourself or rewounding yourself? The potential is great to dump decades of relationship, financial and self-worth baggage, clear outdated programming from your thinking and data flow and let yourself off the hook as you have never before. You’re human. That’s not only okay, it is also the truth.

Whoa, right? Wow, right? This is an enormous opportunity. Forgive yourself for what you perceive as shortcomings. Purge the resentment and the chains of living by other people’s standards. Embrace who you really are. Plat your feet firmly on that patch of ground you’ve been cultivating. Keep your knees loose and hang on tight. The adventure of a lifetime is underway.

My five-minute podcast offers another, shorter take on this week’s events. If you like it, please give it five stars on iTunes! (Don’t want to use iTunes? Visit my Podcast/Video page.)

Want to understand how all this is affecting you? Book a reading with me!

In New Jersey or New York? Join me in Montclair, NJ next week on Tuesday evening the 22nd for simple but effective tools for clearing out the energy that you pick up from others in the course of life. Tonight’s session will have a focus on reclaiming your energy from relationships. Please arrive by 7:15 for a 7:30 start. $ 20. At The Goddess in Eden, 20 Church St., Montclair. Phone 973-919-3600 to register.

Monday: An incredibly active overnight starts the week. Our psyches are pushing back against restrictions, stretching, focusing, clarifying, purging and growing. Check in with your mental ramblings as you arise. Your mind got on board with something major (a decision? realization?), and your heart grew a couple of sizes to boot. Explore what you find. The daylight hours bring only two aspects, neither major and both involving the Sun. One puts you to a choice involving responsibility and commitment, which you are free to make based on new-and-improved thinking and feeling. The “Jaws” theme signals the other one. You’re responding subliminally to a perceived but vague threat. Power games are afoot; the question is to what extent (or whether) you care to engage.

Tuesday: The predawn hours are active again. They’re opening us to wanting more, shaking loose constraints and hesitations, pointing out arrangements that aren’t working for us and requiring choices about responsibilities and commitment. End result: awakening sensitized to where you’re getting the short end, and resolved to what you’re willing to do about that. What’s best for you is the measuring stick, and you’ve got the bulk of the day to let that sink in. The Moon is void of course from just after 8 AM to just before 6 PM EDT. Venus stations retrograde within the void. Treat old loves and friends who reappear in the void as fodder for contemplation and musing, but don’t change your position relying on anything that happens before evening. Then there’s motivation to buck your status quo, motivation that comes from the desire to not feel so antsy.

Wednesday: Yet again, the night is not restful and refreshing. Your particular species of monsters of the deep are on the prowl. A predawn confrontation with them could rev your engine before it’s refueled. This is one of those mornings when you jump into action as if a starting gun had gone off (and not one that you were expecting, either). What follows is not running in all directions, but focused, effective, efficient action. This is the week’s high productivity day, equally suited to clean-up jobs, lasting changes in habits and phenomenal results. Teamwork, cooperation, collaboration and just plain getting along make the whirlwind of activity all the more satisfying. When the fun stops, that’s the signal to pack it in for the day. (Or keep pushing and feel cranky and overburdened and put upon. Is there really a choice?) Give in to a second wind in a few hours but otherwise, consider yourself to have earned down time, and claim it.

Thursday: Today brings more getting things done, together, playfully, listening to music, while talking to folks and generally having a good time. Until a switch flips like lights going out in a bar sign and signaling that it’s time to go home. Let pending matters hang this evening; plodding onward is counterproductive and fraught with complications, given the dicey atmosphere that’s unfolding. The Moon is void of course from 5:46 PM to 6:04 AM tomorrow. She’s at loggerheads with Saturn when it starts, which puts a somber to sobering to depressing cast on the evening. Those monsters of the deep are on the prowl again. Don’t listen to their whispers of worst-case scenarios, and don’t buy into other people’s gloom talk. Keep your glass half full at minimum.

Friday: A quiet day, at last, for winding down the week. Proceed from moment to moment. Sink into each experience. Smell the coffee (in a good way); smell the flowers; really taste the food you eat; sense the energy in everything around you. This evening, take the road less traveled by you.

Saturday: Today is quiet, too, and nicely sociable at that. Good connections and conversations are the point of the day; give yourself slack on the errand-running and housekeeping fronts. Much is brewing as we move toward tomorrow’s super-charged New Moon. You can feel what’s important. Simply observe what’s not.

Sunday: Hang loose. The energies are uncomfortable enough to be motivating, but you can’t work out anything, much less resolve it. The Moon is void of course from 8:35 AM to 7:06 PM EDT. As much as you can, treat the day’s developments as information. There’s certainly lots of that flying around. Inside the void, the Sun moves into yak-happy, fleet-footed Gemini mode, while Gemini’s ruler Mercury shakes it up with Uranus. Minds, words, messages, even the air itself are charged with electricity, nervous and edginess; everything vibrates with meaning, and not comfortably so. The New Moon solar eclipse takes place at 7:45 PM EDT. This is a power-up in rebooting our relationship to our information flow and means of getting around. It’s hitting the early degrees of the mutable signs particularly hard (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces). Ready (or welcome) or not, all are up for huge growth spurts. Read more in my mooncast, which will be posted on this site by Saturday.

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