Think with Your Heart?
Bonus Boon
In this bonus newsletter, I offer a free excerpt of my book ASTROLOGY IS REAL above the paywall — and an excerpt from my upcoming trilogy of novels below the paywall.
First, here’s an excerpt from ASTROLOGY IS REAL. These oracles are not like my regular weekly horoscopes. Rather, they are lyrical meditations on the natures of the signs. ASTROLOGY IS REAL has 15 additional sections like this one.
ORACLES FOR YOU #6
ARIES: Afrikaner author Laurens van der Post told a story about a conversation between psychologist Carl Jung and Ochwiay Biano, a Pueblo chief.
Jung asked Biano to offer his views about white people. “White people must be crazy because they think with their heads,” said the chief, “and it is well known that only crazy people do that.”
Jung asked him what the alternative was. Biano said that his people think with their hearts.
That’s your assignment, Aries: to think with your heart. Not all the time, necessarily. Try doing 20 percent of the time and see how that works for you.
For extra credit, you could also try feeling with your head.
In my opinion, you Aries people have a special potential to develop these capacities.
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TAURUS: I invite you to dream and muse about your true sanctuary; your sweet, energizing, love-strong root-source, the haven where you can freely be high and deep, vigorous and tender, flexible and rigorous; the oasis where you are the person you have promised yourself you can be.
To stimulate and enhance your insightful feelings about these matters, experiment with the following activities.
• Visualize memories that empower you. Regularly dose your imagination with images and scenes that evoke calm and joy.
• Seek out adventures and situations that imbue you with confidence and poise and self-possession.
• Keep reinventing and reinvigorating your vital traditions. Shed traditions that have lost their meaning for you.
• Cherish and foster your reliable sources of inspiration.
• Continually renew and redefine and refine experiences that enrich you emotionally
• Identify influences that nurture you. Treasure your relationship with them.
• Tend tenderly to your web of close allies. Take care of whom and what takes care of you.
• Practice the arts of adoration and reverence and awe.
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GEMINI: "When I grow up, I'm not sure what I want to be." Have you ever heard that thought bouncing around your mind, Gemini?
How about this one: "Since I can't decide what I want to be, I'll just be everything."
If you have been tempted to swear allegiance to either of those perspectives, I invite you to update your relationship with them.
It's not unhealthy for you to have some ambivalence about commitment, nor is it pathological to be receptive to myriad possibilities.
But if you hope to claim your birthright as a Gemini, if you long to ripen into your authentic self, you will have to become ever-more definitive and specific about what you want to be and do.
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CANCER: In your mind’s eye, drift back to a turning point in your past that didn’t go the way you’d hoped.
But don’t dwell on the disappointment. Instead, change the memory. Visualize yourself then and there, but imagine you’re in possession of the wisdom you have gathered since then.
Next, picture an alternative ending to the old story—a finale in which you pull off a better result. Then bask in this transformed state for five minutes.
Will this change the past? Not in a literal way. But it may rearrange your feelings about the past, and that could transform how you’re affected by it in the future.
Here’s a related exercise: Drift back to that historical turning point. Use your imagination and ingenuity to recast the plotlines that have unfolded in your story since then. Come up with alternate meanings for the old event, including at least one redemptive interpretation.
Is it possible that adventure cracked open opportunities that would not otherwise have come your way? Did it alter your understanding of how life works in ways that made you more effective and soulful?
The exercises I’m describing here are especially felicitous for you Cancerians. Of all the signs in the zodiac, you have the most power to reshape your memories.
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LEO: You can listen a person's soul into existence. Your receptive interest in the inner life of those you love can awaken their dormant potentials.
The teacher Richard Moss says, "The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention."
Early in life, some Leos regard this activity as at best irrelevant to their life's work. They are more focused on being listened to than listening.
But as Leos mature, many see the wisdom of developing an active investment in listening. They realize that the influences of potent individuals can serve as magic spells that help activate their own treasures.
Here's Leo philosopher Paul Tillich's counsel: "The first duty of love is to listen." I'll add that a prime duty of loving yourself is to listen.
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VIRGO: Capricorns may be the hardest workers of the zodiac, and Tauruses the most dogged. But you Virgos have the potential to be among the smartest workers.
When you're at your best, you efficiently surmise the precise nature of the tasks at hand, and you do what's necessary to accomplish them.
There are no false starts or reliance on iffy data or slapdash trial-and-error experiments. You have an elegant touch as you find innovative shortcuts that produce better results than would be possible via the grind-it-out approach.
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LIBRA: Experiment: Present the following dare to a person or persons with whom you would like to go deeper: "You think you know me, but it's possible you know just a tantalizing fraction. Would you like to experience the rest of the story?"
If anyone expresses interest, take them on a tour. Reveal the sides of you that are too mysteriously interesting to show the general public, or too intimate to reveal to anyone you don't trust, or so potent they might intimidate those who aren't poised or self-possessed.
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SCORPIO: Is it really love? That's always a good meditation for you Scorpio passion connoisseurs. Here are some rigorous, vigorous, Scorpio-style guidelines.
• Love asks you beautiful, unanswerable questions. —Carl Sandburg • Love brings to life whatever is dead around us. —Franz Rosenzweig • Love works best when two solitudes welcome and respect and nurture each other. —Rainer Maria Rilke. • Love is the only game where two can play and both win. —Erma Freesman • Falling in love is a lot like dying. You never get to do it enough to become good at it. —my Scorpio friend Elise • Love is like a shrine in the wilderness where eternity adores the lightning as it roves. —mash-up of me and Pablo Neruda
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SAGITTARIUS: How do I love thee, Sagittarius? Let me count the ways.
First, I adore it when you give your companions a personalized dose of the primordial force of nature described by French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin.
"Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity," said de Chardin, "we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.”
Here's another way you please me, Sagittarius. More than any other zodiac sign you put into action the ideal expressed by author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but looking outward together in the same direction."
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CAPRICORN: When the young Capricorn director Richard Lester got his big break, he took full advantage. It happened in 1964, when the early Beatles asked him to do their first movie, A Hard Day's Night, Lester's innovative approach to the project propelled his career to a higher level that brought him many further opportunities.
Writing of Lester's readiness, critic Alexander Walker said, "No filmmaker appeared more punctually when his hour struck."
That capacity to be in the right place at the right time is one of your great potentials, Capricorn.
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AQUARIUS: Of all the signs in the zodiac, you have the greatest potential to be a psychonaut: a feisty explorer of consciousness.
With this in mind, I invite you to cherish this counsel from Aquarian anthropologist and author Walter Evans-Wentz:
Accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
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PISCES: Sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso described one of love's best blessings. He said your lover can reunite you with "a piece of your soul that you never knew was missing."
You Pisceans have great potential for finding and creating such relationships. It could be your specialty.
Have you met such wonders? Can you go deeper with allies who could become such wonders?
BELOW THE PAYWALL are chapters 53 and 54 from my upcoming trilogy of novels, collectively called Love Stories for the Earth: Holy Rivers, Lucky Storms, and The Other Real World.
Below are links to previous installments:
Here’s a link to the first 41 chapters.
A link to Chapter 42