Returning to ourselves. To yourself. Over and over, after all the small and large abandonments we are taught, we learn, we unlearn.
This week take note of when you have the impulse to look outside of yourself to understand your life, to feel better, to change your situation. Of course we are deeply connected and dependent on each other! But right now return to yourself and see what it feels like to ask yourself the questions you might want to be asking others.
How long has it been since you were quiet with yourself? If it has been a while don’t waste time judging yourself for this. Just come back to your breath, right now, close your eyes, give yourself a few moments to let whatever is there be there.
Building trust with yourself involves coming back to yourself an infinite amount of times, no matter how long you have been away, or how far.
ARIES | March 21-April 19
Question - What’s your relationship to your environment?
Meditation - place as nourishment.
Assignment - Spend time noticing the place you are in, the places you spend time in this week. How do they sustain your life? On a physical level and also emotionally and spiritually? What is nourishing about where you spend time? How can remembering this ground you and help bring some slowness in?
TAURUS | April 20-May 20
Question - What are simple ways you can integrate more balance?
Meditation - cat and cow pose.
Assignment - The image for you this week is this gentle movement, of cat and cow, pictured in the link if you don’t know it. It’s a physical experience that practices balance, and the more you do it, the more you invite balance in other areas, in your mental, emotional and spiritual state. Use your sensory sensitivity to focus on the body and shifting the stuck places there. When you do this, the rest will follow. It’s simple, but so profound. Let this be your simple and profound job this week.
GEMINI | May 21-June 20
Question - How do you mark time?
Meditation - time markers.
Assignment - Marking time can be a cage if you get too obsessed with it, but it can also be so grounding. Keeping track of what you’ve done on a given day, or in an hour, or week, can help ground you and remind you of all the things that are happening in your life. So that when you look to the future and see all of that possibility and curiousity you still have, you don’t feel quite as overwhelmed. Write these things down, what you have done, what you want to do. Write down the ways you understand and feel time in your body, and see if this helps your grounding.
CANCER | June 21-July 22
Question - When do you allow yourself to not feel?
Meditation - differentiation as love
Assignment - Just because you can feel it, doesn’t mean you have to, or you should. Cancer is so absorptive, it’s hard to even slow down the process enough to become fully aware of what is happening. You absorb all the feelings, your own and other people’s, the collective feelings, in a way. The feelings are SO compelling, they pull you with their song. So the more you see this process, and slow down enough to notice what is happening, the more you can choose when and how to absorb. Absorption is your super power, but it takes a lot of discernment to learn what to absorb. This is a lifetime process but this week, try out the mantra - Just because you can feel it, doesn’t mean you have to, or should.
LEO | July 23-August 22
Question - When do you spend time with the birds?
Meditation - being with the birds.
Assignment - If you don’t feel drawn to birds it can be another life form, but something that connects you to freedom! Remember that this still exists for you, even when you feel weighed down by your daily tasks, work, etc. Freedom is available close by, right here, in a breath or two of remembering that you are divine, you have a right to creatively live your life, and that includes creatively remembering your own freedom and noticing it when it’s present! The more you remember it as it appears right now in your life already, the more you will allow in more future freedom that you are craving. Look to the birds to remind you of the freedom that is right here.
VIRGO | August 23-September 22
Question - What is true exercising to you?
Meditation - exercise
Assignment - Exercising your mind, your body, in whatever way feels right to you. Try to let go of the definition of exercising that’s about rules and shoulds, and focus on what type of movement and rigor your body is asking for right now, this week. Do this with your mind too - what types of thinking and activities activate your mind in pleasurable ways? Where does the pleasure of the mind reside? Give yourself permission to reclaim exercise as a vital and freeing experience, not one of inherited obligations to other people’s definitons of ‘fitness’.
LIBRA | September 23-October 23
Question - How often are you aware of what you’re saying?
Meditation - mindful speech
Assignment - Spend time noticing what you say, and when you say it this week. How much of your speech is urgent? How much of it is idle? How much is it to fill the space? How much of it is about other people? How much of it is to soothe others, or yourself? How much of it feels good, in your body, to be speaking?
SCORPIO | October 23-November 21
Question - How do you relate to food and eating?
Meditation - food as life!
Assignment - There’s a tendency for you to preoccupied with lots of things other than food, unless you have earth signs in your chart. The water in you wants to engage with emotional intensity or feeling itself, and often food doesn’t fall into that category. It can feel more like a nuisance - so give yourself the gift of attending to it this week, and see how a lot of attention to food and nourishment affects your emotional state. I want you to care for yourself with reverence.
SAGITTARIUS | November 22-December 21
Question - When is your vision expanding and when is it narrowing?
Meditation - narrowing the focus
Assignment - Let your focus narrow this week, toward what you really want to do. Pull back from that tendency to overdo it and see what happens. Imagine a steady energy washing over you. What would it feel like to apply more sustained effort and less bursts (a fire tendency)? Narrowing your focus can bring clarity and insight into how to apply your efforts more sustainably.
CAPRICORN | December 22-January 19
Question - When and how can you connect to plants this week?
Meditation - vital energy
Assignment - Look for these connections to plants, to any phenomena of nature that is comforting to you. It’s great if you can go away to a place where there are more other species than humans per square mile, but if this is not available to you, just look for where and how this is available to you wherever you are. It’s the same as with the breath - plants - as soon as we turn our attention to them, we find life wanting to live everywhere. Affirmations of life. As soon as we turn our attention to our breath, it changes, we see how dynamic it is.
AQUARIUS | January 20 to February 18
Question - What changes are taking place in your life right now?
Meditation - winds of change.
Assignment - These winds are always moving through us, around us. When you are feeling overwhelmed by change, write down a list of the major changes that have happened so far in your life that you identify as beneficial. Then write about how you felt at the time about those changes taking place. Are there any that you resisted at first that now you see ended up being good? What do you notice in this process? How can this hindsight vision inform your approach and attitude to the current changes in your life?
PISCES | February 19 to March 20
Question - What is on the other side of your fear?
Meditation - embracing fear.
Assignment - Remembering that you have inner wisdom. That you have a vast sense of intuition. That fear can guide us or control us and this is the opportunity we have when it arises. We can use it as information - fear asks us to pay close attention! What is it asking you to pay attention to? What is it asking you to learn more about? You don’t need to go looking for fear, but just take note when it arises and then listen for opportunity within it instead of ignoring or escaping it. Fear drains us so much when we let it run the show by trying to ignore it or escape it.