We move from the initiatory energy of Aries, the beginning of the zodiac, the flint that starts the fire, into the earth (wood) that keeps the vision going. Taurus is an earth sign, the most slow-moving, steady energy of the zodiac. Trees, roots, work, orienting, chores, chopping wood and carrying water.
How can we use this energy as a metaphor and a guide - a blueprint for an approach to life right now? We could think of it as one way of Nature asking us to enter the flow of change and try on this energy. If you have planets in Taurus this way of being might be familiar to you and take the shape of digging your heels into the earth, resisting change and newness.
The daily heart. The steady, daily energy of Taurus can remind us of our daily hearts. Especially in remembering that we need connection to the divine, the unnameable, EVERY DAY. And not just that but it needs to come through the physical, through the tangible, through the everyday itself. When we don’t get this, we lose the heart part of life, and if we lose this, then the chores become emptied out, just reinforcing our place as a cog in the capitalist wheel. What are our work, our efforts, our earth embodiment and manifestations - what ways are we living as earth bodies on this actual earth? These are the questions Taurus can help us access - what is your daily heart and what does it need right now? How can you nurture it. When we live our lives in the everyday while we notice what is alive, what is divine, not waiting for some imagined future, we claim the power of a daily heart.
ARIES | March 21-April 19
Question - What about beginning again even when you’re doing the same thing?
Meditation - every moment is a beginning, and an end.
Assignment - Look to Taurus as the sign that follows yours, after your birthday. Each sign is said to be a response / reaction to the one before it. Which is why there can be tension between these signs next to each other but also much to learn. Taurus can teach you about: roots, your feet, peace and pleasure at slowness instead of frustration! Study Tauruses this week. What do you notice about them? What does it feel like to imagine their perspective? What does it feel like to try to get this in your body?
TAURUS | April 20-May 20
Question - What patterns and habits do you want to invite in during your birth month?
Meditation - the sun returning to you.
Assignment - Reclaim your birthday as a moment not to be missed - as a celebration of the present as the seed of all past and future time. This is when the sun comes back to the place it was at the moment you were born - this is a time not to be missed out on. Nothing big needs to happen but don’t let it go by without some reflection on what you are doing. And what you are not doing. And your mortality and how this can be awakening, not depressing. What can the passing of time awaken you to? Give yourself the gift of time this week, to not miss the celebration of your existence.
GEMINI | May 21-June 20
Question - What is beyond your conceptualizing of everything?
Meditation - sand as physical time.
Assignment - A step toward earth in the form of air - the space between sand. Sand as all the particles of stone which used to be a wall. A canyon. A volcano. These earth energies as worn and changed by air and water. I want you to put down your thinking and connecting and scrolling for 4 minutes each day. Just put it down and let go of connecting anything to anything else, including yourself. Be a grain of sand. See what it feels like. 4 minutes. Sand. All of time contained in each element, each moment. Let yourself let go of the burden of logic for a moment. Arrive already.
CANCER | June 21-July 22
Question - What are your assumptions about what information you need to take in?
Meditation - a still lake surface.
Assignment - Give yourself permission to limit your intake of media, and of information in general. There’s a lake, and you’re standing next to it, and you get to decide if and when you dive into it. It’s still and beautiful and full of life. Remember that you can go in, and you can also come out. This is so important - differentiating! You do not have to receive information without meaning to. It just involves intention, and giving yourself permission to not receive it. This is not about blocking out or turning away. It’s just about discerning. When you are discerning, you’re much more effective because what is yours is clear, and you feel so much better.
LEO | July 23-August 22
Question - When do you notice the season and what does that noticing do for you?
Meditation - spring green.
Assignment - There’s a flow of the brightest neon green, all the greens actually, just flowing through your field, especially around your heart. Don’t miss spring (or fall) because you are getting stuff done. I repeat: don’t miss the magic of the change of season! You’re a fixed sign so the change can be hard, but if you get into the dynamic color of it, the movement as evidence of life, you will love it. And it really is all about love for you, dramatic brimming spring green love. Ground your not missing of this season in at least one hour this week when you go outside and appreciate whatever evidence of life in transition is available.
VIRGO | August 23-September 22
Question - When do you give yourself permission to be a troublemaker?
Meditation - rules are made to be broken.
Assignment - If you’re wondering if your perspective is skewed toward always thinking you need to improve more than you do - it is. And when you realize this, don’t go up in your body toward your brain and more thinking - move down, toward less thinking and more feeling. Not emotional feeling but physical. As the most mentally-focused earth sign, you need reminders to bring your busy mind back down to earth. Put your mind in your feet. Then ask it questions about what to do next. Your feet are better at listening to the earth than your mind, your feet are much closer to the earth. Nothing needs to be fixed, it’s just a matter of changing the order - instead of thinking first and then perceiving, perceive with your feet and then see what thoughts arise. Another way of saying this would be: let yourself break your own rules this week. It’s imperative to your breathing in the long term.
LIBRA | September 23-October 22
Question - When is your curiosity real and when is it fake?
Meditation - turquoise.
Assignment - There’s a softness that arises when you are asking questions, when you are in a space of not knowing. And this softness is like water, because when you’re uncertain you can move in all sorts of directions, in any direction that is necessary, and that is real power. The turquoise arises for you as a guide this week - the soft coolness of the color and the power of its stone hardness. It’s sort of like water, slowed down enough to appear as a color. Remember it’s not the answers to the questions that matter, or we don’t want to get too sucked into finding the answers - and Libra likes to know! It’s the magic of the stance - the position itself - in which asking questions places us, that is true power.
SCORPIO | October 23-November 21
Question - Where can you go for perspective?
Meditation - a view with a horizon line.
Assignment - This week your figure appears at a wild cold beach, standing in the wind. The wind doesn’t bother you in this dream, because you understand the very human and very natural experience of roughness. Textural roughness, emotional roughness, human roughness. You are comfortable in intensity. Standing in the wind, looking magnificent, letting your hair be anywhere, letting your clothes be a mess. In this dream, do you sink your feet into the sand further? Do you lean back and sit down? Do you lie on your back, not caring that you’ll get sandy? What is the body position which will be most conducive to you connecting to your own true knowing? How does your body connect to the horizons you look at? Find the body position that allows you to feel most open, and from this place, let your knowing about your next move come in.
SAGITTARIUS | November 22-December 21
Question - What are you dreaming lately?
Meditation - soft and light and bouncing.
Assignment - Color keeps arising for you, this week it’s pink. The soft, the light, as in light in relation to gravity, asking this color about how to be soft and light and bounce. You can be so loud / big in your approach (not necessarily volume). So this color is a guide for an approach that’s not a direct opposite (quiet / small) but instead just less subject to gravity. What would a soft and light and bouncing approach look like for you? What would that do to your thoughts especially? What would it do to waht you do with your hands? If you don’t understand, if the lack of rationality here is frustrating, just roll your eyes (in a pink and light and bouncing way) and move on. I’m not talking to your brain.
CAPRICORN | December 22-January 19
Question - How consciously are you choosing ‘rationality’?
Meditation - color as life.
Assignment - So much of the time you can’t see the ways your ‘practical’ thinking forecloses on possibility. Let yourself perceive as if your vision is a bit blurred, so that you can see the colors - the emotional and spiritual landscape - instead of getting so sucked into the content of the physical. Often for Capricorn the problem is seeing with too much rational clarity. It’s too wed to rationality. Make a list of five things you would be doing if you weren’t being ‘practical’ and then make a promise to yourself that you’ll do at least one of them this week.
AQUARIUS | January 20 to February 18
Question - What is your relationship to time?
Meditation - stone as congealed time
Assignment - Hold stones this week. Contemplate geologic time. Geology is congealed time. Consider this in relation to the timeframe of your own body. How do they relate? What kind of time is beyond your scope of awareness? How might it change your life to include geologic time, the time of stones, the time of rock walls, of land plates? What would this kind of time, as a thought experiment, do to your daily life, your daily decisions? Contemplate this, and then ask your intuition to give you a daily practice to perceive time through in a new way this week.
PISCES | February 19 to March 20
Question - Where is your intuition located in your body?
Meditation - the relationship between feeling and seeing.
Assignment - Sometimes you rely on your intuition so much that your intuition itself gets fatigued. Sometimes you need to experiment with moving your awareness up in your body, from feeling to seeing, as a way to practice not having all of the feeling run through your body. What are the practices that help you still perceive with your intuition but not rely on it to do all of your work? This is where earth energy can be a helpful guide for you. Setting up rhythms, a regular schedule (of something! At least one thing per day!) which you can rely on to do every day, instead of having to access your intuition to make every decision. That is a lot of energy for the body to run. Earth rhythms and plans can be helpful because they are grounding. We set them using our intuition as if setting up a system, and then let them run.