Blessings are Headed Your Way
Blessings are Headed Your Way
Everything's spiritual if you want it to be.
I have recorded seven- to nine-minute Expanded Audio Horoscopes that report on the big picture of your life in 2022. See the details below on how to hear them.
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I've also written other horoscopes that forecast your long-range destiny in 2022. Read them here:
https://tinyurl.com/YourFinestLife
https://tinyurl.com/YourDeepestLife
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EXPLORE YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE
with my 3-Part EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for the Coming Year.
Who do you want to become in 2022? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? My reports can stimulate and inspire your meditations about the interesting possibilities.
This week, my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES feature Part 2 of my long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2022.
Part 1 of your Beginning-of-the-Year Predictions, which I offered last week, is also still available. Part 3 will be ready for you on January 11.
What will be the story of your life in 2022? How can you exert your free will to create adventures that'll bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?
To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, go here: https://RealAstrology.com
Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Range Prediction, Part 2"
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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $6 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)
Each forecast is 7-9 minutes long.
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P.S. You can also still access my Sneak-Peek at 2022. In these Expanded Audio Horoscopes, I describe some major themes I think you'll be working and playing with in 2022. After you register and/or log in, click on "Two Weeks Ago (Dec 21, 2021)."
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ANTI-RESOLUTIONS
In early January every year, many people make New Year's resolutions, promising to embark on programs of self-improvement. But your assignment now, should you choose to accept it, is to create a list of ANTI-resolutions.
Here are some questions to guide you:
1. What outlandish urges and controversial tendencies do you promise to cultivate in the coming months?
2. What nagging irritations will you ignore and avoid with even greater ingenuity?
3. What problems do you promise to exploit in order to have even more fun as you make the status quo accountable for its corruption?
4. What boring rules and traditions will you thumb your nose at, paving the way for exciting encounters with strange attractors?
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MEDITATIONS ON HOPE
Sometimes hope is an irrelevant waste of time, even a stupid self-indulgence.
Let's say, for instance, that I'm intently hoping that a certain disagreeable person I've got to communicate with won't answer when I call on the phone. That way I can simply leave a message on his voice mail and avoid an unpleasant exchange.
But it doesn't matter what I hope. The person will either answer or not, regardless of what I hope.
But there is another kind of hope that's potentially invigorating. Let's say I hope that we humans will reverse the environmental catastrophes we're perpetrating.
Let's say that my hope motivates me to live more sustainably and to inspire others to live more sustainably. Then my hope is a catalyst.
I invite you to identify two examples from your life about the two kinds of hope.
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Quote by Jane Hirshfield
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MORE MEDITATIONS ON HOPE
Hope "is not the conviction that something will turn out well," wrote Czech writer and politician Vaclav Havel, "but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
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"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
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"Aren't we privileged to live in a time when everything is at stake, and when our efforts make a difference in the eternal contest between the forces of light and shadow, between togetherness and division, between justice and exploitation? Oh, be joyful that you are a warrior in this great time!
"Will we rise to this battle? If so, we cannot lose, for rising up to it is our victory. If we represent love in the world, you see, we have already won."
—Doris "Granny D" Haddock, political activist
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WHAT IS PRONOIA?
Pronoia is fueled by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well.
But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions.
It's not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness.
On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it. We understand that the best way to attract blessings is to grapple with the knottiest enigmas.
Each fresh puzzle is a potential source of future bliss—an exciting teaching that may usher us to our next breakthrough.
Do you want to be a pronoiac player? Blend anarchistic rebelliousness with open-hearted exuberance. Root your insurrectionary fervor in expansive joy instead of withering hatred. Enjoy saying "no!" but don't make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses that rip against the grain of comfortable ugliness.
More on this subject: https://bit.ly/W8Iian
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If you haven't read my book Pronoia Is the Antudote for Paranoia: How the Whoe World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings, you can buy it here: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaLove
And/or you can read a bunch of the book for free here: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaPreview
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THE BIG SHIFT
Many visionaries and prophets expect there to be a huge and sudden shift in the world's story sometime soon. Whether it happens on in the next three years or at later date, a sizable proportion of them even predict that it will be "in the twinkling of an eye"—a sudden cascade of events that completely changes everything everywhere.
Some paint the scenario in broad, catastrophic strokes, expecting something—they're not sure what—that will have the impact of a large meteor strike or a nuclear war or a new and even worse pandemic disease.
Others harbor a more benign but equally fuzzy expectation, speculating that maybe some higher psychic powers will kick in to the multitudes all at once, or that benevolent extraterrestrials will arrive to solve our energy crisis.
What very few of the prophets do, however, is make a precise prediction about exactly will happen. Their visions contain no assurances, no specifics. And in my view, that's worse than useless. It fills us with a vague buzz of fear or amorphous sense of hope, but offers no concrete directions about what to do to prevent the dreaded thing or help create the hoped-for thing.
And the fact is, as I see it, they can't possibly know what the Big Shift is—if, that is, a Big Shift is really looming. The very nature of any Big Shift will be so unexpected, so beyond our imaginations, and so utterly alien to what we understand, that we can't possibly delineate its contours in advance.
I'm reminded of Jung's formula, which is that we don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.
This theory can be applied in reverse: If we have not yet grown wiser than our current predicament, then we can't see what the evolved state is beyond the predicament. Our minds are as-yet incapable of embodying the vision that will catapult us beyond the problem we're stuck in.
When the Big Shift comes, whether or not it comes in the twinkling of an eye, it will be something that no one foresaw, let alone described in detail. It will be beyond our comprehension, unlike anything we could have visualized headed our way. (Thirty years ago, did anyone imagine the Internet or the impact it's having?)
And if that's true, then the inescapable conclusion is: There's no use trying to plan ahead for it. It's counterproductive to hold a particular scenario in our mind as the likely development. And it's downright delusional to harbor a chronic sense of dread about an unknowable, unimaginable series of events.
The best way to prepare for a Big Shift is to cultivate mental and emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:
a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;
a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, and worries about the future;
a trust in empirical evidence over our time-worn beliefs and old habits;
a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast and tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner's mind fully engaged;
and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease and teach us.
Everything I just described also happens to be an excellent way to prime yourself for a chronic, low-grade, always-on, simmering-at-low-heat brand of ecstasy—a state of being more-or-less permanently in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone.
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REBECCA SOLNIT ON HOPE
Rebecca Solnit wrote all the words in this section.
I use the term "hope" because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both.
Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing.
Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.
Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it.
Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections.
It means not being the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us.
Read the rest of this essay by Rebecca Solnit: https://tinyurl.com/y38m3sbu
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More thoughts on hope by Rebecca Solnit from her book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities: https://tinyurl.com/2p8vxjff
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction.
The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.
Hope is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
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Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed.
How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power.
Changing the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious.
Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.
A victory doesn’t mean that everything is now going to be nice forever and we can therefore all go and lounge around until the end of time.
Some activists are afraid that if we acknowledge victory, people will give up the struggle. I have long been more afraid that people will give up and go home or never get started in the first place if they think no victory is possible or fail to recognize the victories already achieved.
Marriage equality is not the end of homophobia, but it’s something to celebrate. A victory is a milestone on the road, evidence that sometimes we win and encouragement to keep going, not to stop. Or it should be.
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EVERYONE WORSHIPS
David Foster Wallace: "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
"And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.
"It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
"On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."
—David Foster Wallace
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MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:
Monkeys That Soak in Hot Springs to Lower Their Stress: Japan’s Bathing Monkey Mystery. https://tinyurl.com/349zhp9b
Hedgerows Are 2,000 Times More Valuable For Ecosystems Than We Could Imagine. https://tinyurl.com/y3mpnw3k
Cardboard Habitat Pods Give a Fighting Chance to Animals Displaced by Wildfires. https://tinyurl.com/2p8je7tk
Jet Flown by United Airlines Entirely Powered by 100% Plant-Based Fuel from Corn Stalk Waste. https://tinyurl.com/3d63edrr
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For a lot more pronoiac resources and ideas, read my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Available at Bookshop.org: https://tinyurl.com/548hp8y8
Available at Powells: https://bit.ly/PowellsPronoia
Available at Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaBN
Available at Amazon: https://bit.ly/Pronoia
A free preview of the book is available here: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaPreview
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Please tell me your own nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES: Truthrooster@gmail.com.
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning January 6
Copyright 2021 by Rob Brezsny
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn-born Muhammad Ali was far more than a superb professional boxer. He was an activist, entertainer, and philanthropist who gathered much wisdom in his 74 years. I've chosen one of his quotes to be your guide in the coming months. I hope it will motivate you to rigorously manage the sometimes pesky and demanding details that will ultimately enable you to score a big victory. "It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you down," Ali said. "It’s the pebble in your shoe."
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): At a pivotal moment in his evolution, Aquarian playwright Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) swore an oath to himself. I'll tell you about it here because I hope it will inspire you to make a comparable vow to yourself about how you'll live your life in 2022. Author Robert Greene is the source of the quote. He says that Chekhov promised himself he would engage in "no more bowing and apologizing to people; no more complaining and blaming; no more disorderly living and wasting time. The answer to everything was work and love, work and love. He had to spread this message to his family and save them. He had to share it with humanity through his stories and plays."
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Here's what Piscean author Anais Nin wrote in one of her diaries: “When I first faced pain, I was shattered. When I first met failure, defeat, denial, loss, death, I died. Not today. I believe in my power, in my magic, and I do not die. I survive, I love, live, continue." According to my analysis of the astrological omens, Pisces, you could claim her triumphant declaration as your own in 2022, with special emphasis on this: "I believe in my power, in my magic. I survive, I love, live, continue." This will be a golden age, a time when you harvest the fruits of many years of labor.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the fantasy tale The Wizard of Oz, a tornado lifts the hero Dorothy from her modest home in rural Kansas to a magical realm called Oz. There she experiences many provocative and entertaining adventures. Nonetheless, she longs to return to where she started from. A friendly witch helps her find the way back to Kansas, which requires her to click her ruby slippers together three times and say, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home." I suspect, Aries, that there'll be a different ending to your epic tale in 2022. At some point, you will decide you prefer to stay in your new world. Maybe you'll even click your ruby slippers together and say, "There's no place like Oz, there's no place like Oz." (Thanks to author David Lazar for that last line.)
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Fifty-five percent of the people who live in Toronto speak primarily English or French. But for the other 45 percent, their mother tongue is a different language, including Portuguese, Tagalog, Italian, Tamil, Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin. I wish you could spend some time there in the coming months. In my astrological opinion, you would benefit from being exposed to maximum cultural diversity. You would thrive by being around a broad spectrum of influences from multiple backgrounds. If you can't manage a trip to Toronto or another richly diverse place, do your best to approximate the same experience. Give yourself the gift of splendorous variety.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): One of your primary meditations throughout 2022 should be the following advice from The Laws of Human Nature, a book by motivational author Robert Greene. He writes, "In ancient times, many great leaders felt that they were descended from gods and part divine. Such self-belief would translate into high levels of confidence that others would feed off and recognize. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You do not need to indulge in such grandiose thoughts, but feeling that you are destined for something great or important will give you a degree of resilience when people oppose or resist you. You will not internalize the doubts that come from such moments. You will have an enterprising spirit. You will continually try new things, even taking risks, confident in your ability to bounce back from failures and feeling destined to succeed."
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WHAT'S YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE?
Would you like some inspiration as you muse and wonder about your upcoming adventures in 2022?
In this week's EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, I offer you Part 2 of a long-term, in-depth exploration of your destiny in the coming year.
Part 3 will be available next week. Part 1 is still available.
To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, go here: https://RealAstrology.com
Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Term Prediction, Part 2"
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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $6 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)
Each forecast is 7-9 minutes long.
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Sending you a variety of blessings:
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CANCER (June 21-July 22): I would love to unabashedly encourage you to travel widely and explore wildly in 2022. I would rejoice if I could brazenly authorize you to escape your comfort zone and wander in the frontiers. It's not often the planetary omens offer us Cancerians such an unambiguous mandate to engage in exhilarating adventures and intelligent risks. There's only one problem: that annoying inconvenience known as the pandemic. We really do have to exercise caution in our pursuit of expansive encounters. Luckily, you now have extra ingenuity about the project of staying safe as you enlarge your world.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I suspect that your life in 2022 might feature themes beloved by Leo author Emily Brontë (1818–1848). "No coward soul is mine," she wrote, "No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere." I suggest making that one of your mottoes. Here's another guiding inspiration from Emily, via one of her poems: "I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: / It vexes me to choose another guide: / Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding; / Where the wild wind blows on the mountain-side." Here's one more of Brontë's thoughts especially suitable for your use in the coming months: "I'll be as dirty as I please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty!"
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): What reversals and turnabouts would you like to experience in 2022, Virgo? Which situations would you like to transform dramatically? Are there imbalances of power you would like to rectify? Contradictions you'd love to dissolve? Misplaced priorities you could correct? All these things are possible in the coming months if you are creative and resourceful enough. With your dynamic efforts, the last could be first, the low could be high, and the weak could become strong.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): "Everything good I've ever gotten in my life, I only got because I gave something else up," wrote author Elizabeth Gilbert. That has often been true for me. For example, if I hadn't given up my beloved music career, I wouldn't have had the time and energy to become a skillful astrology writer with a big audience. What about you, Libra? In my reckoning, Gilbert's observation should be a major theme for you in 2022.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Author C. S. Lewis wrote that we don't simply want to behold beauty. We "want to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it." If there were ever a time when you could get abundant tastes of that extravagant pleasure, Scorpio, it would be in the coming months. If you make it a goal, if you set an intention, you may enjoy more deep mergers and delightful interactions with beauty than you have had since 2010.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian singer-songwriter Tom Waits began his career in 1969. He achieved modest success during the next 11 years. But his career headed in an even more successful direction after he met Kathleen Brennan, who became his wife and collaborator. In a 1988 interview, Waits said, "She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her. She pushes me into areas I would not go, and I'd say that a lot of the things I'm trying to do now, she's encouraged." In 2022, Sagittarius, I'll invite you to go looking for the deep dark forest within yourself. I'm sure it's in there somewhere. If you explore it with luxuriant curiosity, it will ultimately inspire you to generate unprecedented breakthroughs. Yes, it might sometimes be spooky—but in ways that ultimately prove lucky.
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Homework: What problem are you most likely to outgrow and render irrelevant in 2022? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
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Submissions sent to Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter or in response to "homework assignments" may be published in a variety of formats at Rob Brezsny's discretion, including but not limited to newsletters, books, the Free Will Astrology column, and Free Will Astrology website. We reserve the right to edit submissions for length, style, and content.
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Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright 2022 Rob Brezsny
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