Want To Get Your Astrological Chart Read?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. We've been enjoying regular conversations about astrology since 1989!

Her website's here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and a high degree of technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. This enables her to integrate psychological insight with the cosmological perspective that astrology offers.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.





The quirky and elegant Conduit did a ten-page interview with me in its recent issue. Here are excerpts:

CONDUIT MAGAZINE: Rob, can you guide us in ways we might get more in touch with our creativity via some of your approach to the world?

ROB BREZSNY: The most important thing that I can do as someone who aspires to be a creative person is to listen and to be receptive. And that entails cultivating the skill to tune in to all the different kinds of intelligence there are around us, not just the human intelligence, although that?s crucial, but also all the non-human intelligences: the animals, the plants, the elemental intelligences. The wind, the rain, the sun. The critters that live within us. The cells, the bacteria.

I regard the entire world as crammed with all these kinds of intelligences. As a creator, my job is to be eternally curious, to be alert, to tune into what all these intelligences are telling me. It?s overwhelming if you take this practice seriously, so there?s certainly some aspect of being a creator that involves discernment and the formulation of intention: "What is it that I need to learn now?"

For instance, I?m working on a book about how the collapse of the ecosystem is impacting us personally ? on a psychological level, on a psycho-spiritual level, not just how it?s causing changes in weather and shifts in climate. As I do the research and writing for this book, there are lots of different questions that come up, and I formulate those questions and I present them to the creatures of the world, and I ask, "What do you have to say?" It?s this blend of formulating intuition and being a good listener that?s at the heart of my creative practice.

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CONDUIT: Can you give an example or two of our psychological reactions to climate change?

BREZSNY: The one that I will say impacts me most directly is the fact that we?re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, that we are losing species at a rate that?s unprecedented since the dinosaurs disappeared. It means we?re losing all of the intelligences they have and their power to inform us about the truth of reality.

And, of course, it also means we?re losing biodiversity. The biologist E. O. Wilson says that this is the most damaging thing that?s occurring, the loss of biodiversity, because the loss of any particular species in any particular ecosphere sends ripples across the entire ecosphere and shrinks the way that the entire ecosphere works. So for me there is a constant awareness of the death of long-term life-forms on this planet that is devastating to me.

There?s a kind of constant funeral ? I don?t mean to say that I?m depressed and demoralized all the time ? but I do tune into this on a regular basis, and the parade of death that?s going on in the natural world is very sad to me.

I think people don?t realize that they?re experiencing the same thing that I am. They don?t understand that the sadness in their life has to do with these extinctions. They think it?s something more personal. It helps to know that there?s this collective grief that we?re not fully tuned into that?s interfering with our ability to enjoy life.

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BREZSNY: To return to the issue of mass extinction: I?m interested in a hypothesis articulated by Jonathan Zap and Daniel Pinchbeck.

They propose that being on the verge of an ecocidal catastrophe may be a disguised opportunity for the human race to expedite the evolution of consciousness in ways that would not otherwise happen. With the possibility of doom hanging over us, we must get smarter faster in order to ensure our collective survival.

Zap and Pinchbeck invoke the ancient Roman legend of the Sword of Damocles, which they interpret to mean that when we are in great danger, and therefore our motivation to solve our predicament is heightened, as is our power to outgrow the habits that got us into this pickle.





CONDUIT: Can you talk about your relationship with intuition?

ROB BREZSNY: One reliable source of intuition is formulating good questions and having an intention behind the questions: "What is it that I need to learn today?", "What is it that I need to learn today?", "What is it that I need to learn to live my life better?", "What is it that I need next to write my book?"

My sense is that intuition often reveals what you need to do next, although not necessarily the big picture. And if we're content with not pressuring intuition to always give us a mountaintop perspective, but rather just to answer for us, "What happens next? What do I need to do next?", I think that's a better relationship with intuition.

Four more things I'll mention about intuition: Working with dreams is fraught with the possibility of descending into chaos, but with practice and the development of skills, it can become a crucial source of intuition. I really value my ability to do one of the primary Jungian practices, which is shadow work -- dealing with those aspects of me that are unripe and dumb. Dreams have been crucial in helping me unlock the magic of dealing with my shadow and transforming my shadow.

Another good practice for intuition is to ask the question, "What does my death say?" On one's deathbed, what does one want to look back at and say, "That was important. That was important. That was important. No, that wasn't so important." So one's death can be a tonic informant that helps intuition really focus and come into maximum usefulness.

The other thing is that intuition is aided immeasurably by moving, by walking. I don't know if that's true for everybody. Walks and nature are important for me being able to tune into intuition that turns out to be useful and enduring. So often I'll take a notebook with me, or a recorder with me, to capture those intuitions that come to me while I'm walking.

There's one other thing. The practice of intuition takes place best when you have gone as far as you can with your intellect. In other words, I can't skip the stage of the process of research, of thinking hard, of using my logic, of being reasonable. That's crucial for generating intuition that's accurate and useful.

And once I've done the research, once I've tried to think my way to being as objective as possible -- and that involves using the scientific method -- then I hand it over to intuition and say, "Well, what more can you tell me, given that I've come this far with all this analysis? What can you add to it?"





Here's more of the interview that Conduit magazine did with me.

CONDUIT: Can you say what you mean by "Free Will Astrology"? It sounds like an oxymoron.

ROB BREZSNY: My approach to astrology is quite different from a lot of mainstream astrologers. I'm not alone in that. There are a few colleagues who share what I might call an allergy to how traditional astrology is practiced. I already had that allergy when I was young, when I first began writing the column many years ago.

Back then, I didn't like astrology columns, and I didn't like a lot of the ways astrology was practiced. Then as now, astrology in the hands of many practitioners tends to make people afraid of the future, fills them with ideas about there being some sort of fixed destiny that they're being pulled toward and that they're helpless to resist. That kind of thinking was and still is repulsive to me.

I didn't like astrology columns, because they were watered-down versions of the complex art of astrology, which was practiced, after all, by seminal psychologist Carl Jung.

So when I first got the opportunity to write an astrology column -- I was dirt poor and didn't have a job -- I decided if somebody's going to do it, it might as well be me, someone who's trained in poetry, loves language, and respects the free will of the people who might be my audience.

The bedrock of my practice has always been the idea that the planets may impel, but they don't compel. A study of the configurations of planets shows us the archetypal forces that are coalescing, dissolving, and becoming active in our lives. That can instruct us on how to use our free will to best activate the best versions of those archetypal forces as they coalesce and dissolve.

So for me, "free will astrology" conveys the notion that we have far more power than we might imagine over the way that we express the bigger forces that are at work in our lives.

My aspiration is not to condemn my readers to a particular fate that they can't avoid, but rather to show them the options that are available: the higher level, the mid-level, and the low-level ways in which they might express the archetypal forces, and to nudge them in the direction of finding where the highest-level expression of those forces might be.





For more of my description on how I got started writing my column "Free Will Astrology," go here.





For more of my views on the difference between fearful fantasies and accurate intuitions, go here.





MUTUAL AID SOCIETY

If you would like to support my ongoing work, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal.

You can also contribute to my well-being by buying the Expanded Audio Horoscopes I create every week. These forecasts are different in tone and content from the written horoscopes I provide here. They're my four- to five-minute-long ruminations about the current chapter of your life story. They're available here.


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Here's a testimony from one of my readers: "Dear Rob - I appreciate that you have never sold out to advertisers. I've been reading you since 1996. I don't know how you manage to make a living from doing Free Will Astrology! - Grateful Reader"

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If you don't use Paypal, and would like to contribute to my cause, you can mail a check to me at 454 Las Gallinas Avenue, #255, San Rafael, CA 94903.





My book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia is available at Amazon and Powells.

Below are excerpts.

You don't have to be anything you don?t want to be.

You don't have to live up to anyone?s expectations.

There's no need to strive for a kind of perfection that's not very interesting to you.

You don't have to believe in ideas that make you sad or tormented, and you don't have to feel emotions that others try to manipulate you into feeling.





RADICAL LISTENING

Alert, relaxed listening is the radical act at the heart of our pronoiac practice.

Curiosity is our primal state of awareness.

Wise innocence is a trick we aspire to master.

Open-hearted skepticism is the light in our eyes.





MANY DESIRES VERSUS A FEW DESIRES

I don't agree with Jenny Holzer, who wrote "If you have many desires, your life will be interesting." I find that as I have developed fewer but stronger desires, my life has become more interesting. What do you think?





GOD SHMOD

There is no God. God is dead. God is a drug for people who aren't very smart. God is an illusion sold to dupes by money-hungry religions. God is a right-wing conspiracy. God is an infantile fantasy favored by superstitious cowards who can't face life's existential meaninglessness.

JUST KIDDING! The truth is, anyone who says he knows what God is or isn't, doesn't really know.

Now read Adolfo Quezada's prayer, then confess what you don't know about God. "God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."





SACRED PRACTICE

Tell jokes to clowns.
Cook gourmet meals for chefs.
Show babies how to crawl.
Sing to the birds.

Play a joke on your fear.
Honor your anger.
Capitalize on your guilt.
Kill your own death.





DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES

Some people don't know that I write daily horoscopes, available as text messages sent to your phone. They're shorter than the weekly 'scopes, but on the other hand they're more frequent -- every day of the week.

My weekly horoscopes are free, but the dailies cost about 67 cents a day if you sign up for a subscription. If you think you might enjoy getting regular bursts of inspiration from me to illuminate your adventures, check them out.

Go here. Register or log in. On the new page, click on "Subscribe / Renew" under "Daily Text Message Horoscopes" in the right-hand column.





CAN YOUR RELATIONSHIP HEAL THE WORLD?

Andrew Harvey says: The crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it.

There are seven requirements necessary for a vision of evolutionary love to emerge into the world.

1. Both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved, by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle.

2. Both beings must develop a mastery of solitude.

3. There is an equality of power, and that equality is born out of a profound experience of the sacredness and dignity of the other person?s soul.

4. If you are going to have a beloved-beloved relationship, you have to center your whole being and work and evolution in God. You must also bring the sacred practice of prayer and meditation into the very core of your life, so that the whole relationship can be enfolded in a mutually shared sacred enterprise.

5. Both lovers completely abandon any Hollywood sentimentality about what relationships actually are. Each person is the safe-guarder of the other?s shadow?not the judge of the other?s shadow, not the denier of the other?s shadow, but someone who recognizes where the other has been wounded, and safeguards and protects them with unconditional compassion without allowing themselves to be mauled or manipulated by the other.

6. If you are going to enter into the evolutionary process, you have to accept that it never ends, never stops unfolding.

7. You must make the commitment for your relationship not to be just a cultivation of an oasis of private pleasure. You must engage consciously in this relationship to serve the planet, to recognize that it is a relationship not only grounded in God, not only infused by sacred practice, but it is from the very beginning dedicated to making both people more powerful, more reflective, more passionately engaged with the only serious truth of our time: The world is dying, and we need a major revolution of the heart to empower everyone to do the work of reconstruction and re-creation that is desperately needed.

Read the entre essay.

An Excerpt From Evolutionary Love Relationships: Passion, Authenticity, and Activism





ELATIONSHIP LOVE SPELLS FOR BEAUTY AND TRUTH LAB ALLIES

The Beauty and Truth Lab's rapturists have formulated a batch of personal ads for you to borrow. If you're a Crafty Optimist or Mystical Activist or Ceremonial Teaser who aspires to put the elation back in relationship, check them out here.





THE ORGASMIC ROOTS OF PRONOIA

"The Orgasmic Roots of Pronoia" is one of the few NC-17-rated pieces in my book. Read it here.

NSFW! PROCEED WITH CAUTION! This material has graphic references to love, lust, tenderness, bliss, and rapture.




CLUES TO YOUR LOVED ONES' MYSTERIES

"Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else's puzzle." So wrote Lawrence Kushner in his book, Honey from the Rock.

In other words, you have in your possession certain clues to your loved ones' destinies -- secrets they haven't discovered themselves.

Wouldn't you love to hand over those clues -- to make a gift of the puzzle pieces that are most needed by the people you care about?

Search your depths for insights you've never communicated. Tell truths you haven't found a way to express before now. More than you know, you have the power to mobilize your companions' dreams.





YOU CAN'T OWN LOVE

You understand that you can never own love, right? No matter how much someone adores you today, no matter how much you adore someone, you can't force that unique state of grace to keep its shape forever. It will inevitably evolve or mutate, perhaps into a different version of tender caring, but maybe not.

From there it will continue to change, into either yet another version of interesting affection, or who knows what else?

Are you making any progress in getting the hang of this tricky wisdom?





ACT LIKE YOU'RE IN LOVE

I invite you to act like a person who's in love. Even if you're not currently in the throes of passion for a special someone, pretend you are. Everywhere you go, exude that charismatic blend of shell-shocked contentment and blissful turmoil that comes over you when you're infatuated. Let everyone you meet soak up the delicious wisdom you exude. Dispense free blessings and extra slack like a rich saint high on natural endorphins.





THE ANGEL OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP

Imagine that the merger of you and your best ally has created a third thing that hovers near you, protecting and guiding the two of you. Call this third thing an angel. Or call it the soul of your connection or the inspirational force of your relationship. Or call it the special work the two of you can accomplish together. And let this magical presence be the third point of your love triangle.





LOVE NEEDS IMAGINATION

"For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."

- James Hillman





SKILLFUL AUDACITY

Gertrude Stein defined love as "the skillful audacity required to share an inner life." It suggests that expressing the truth about who you are is not something that amateurs do very well. Practice and ingenuity are required.

It also implies that courage is an essential element of successful intimacy. You've got to be adventurous if you want to weave your life together with another's.





YOU ARE MY INSPIRATION AND FOLLY

"You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you."

- George Bernard Shaw





SOLO INTIMACY

Whenever I write about romance and togetherness, I attract a storm of complaints from readers who are solitary. "How dare you imply that everyone has or should have a partner!?" is a typical protest. "I'm quite content being alone!" is another.

Let it be known that I do not believe your happiness depends on having a spouse or lover. What I do suspect, though, is that your soul needs some sacred relationship in order to thrive, whether it's with a good friend, a beloved animal, a beautiful patch of earth, the Divine Wow, or anything that's not you.

Whenever I invite you to seek deeper, wilder communion, feel free to interpret it as a call to explore any kind of intimacy that draws you closer to the secret heart of the world.





EXPLORE YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE

I've gathered together all of the Long-Range, Big-Picture Horoscopes I wrote for you in the past few weeks, and bundled them in one place. Go here to read a compendium of your forecasts for 2018:

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In addition to these, I've created EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES that go even further in Exploring Your Long-Term Destiny in 2018.

What will be the story of your life in the coming months? What new influences will be headed your way? What fresh resources will you be able to draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here.

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then access the horoscopes by clicking on "Long Range Prediction." Choose from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Each part is a standalone report, not dependent on the other two.

If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.

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Each of the three-part reports is seven to nine minutes long. The cost is $6 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week.





WHAT DID I FORESEE FOR YOU A YEAR AGO?

A year ago, at the beginning of 2017, I wrote big-picture horoscopes that envisioned the opportunities and challenges you?d face in months to come. I thought you might like to re-read them and see how apropos they turned out to be: Big Picture 2017





WHAT'S WORKING WELL AND GOING RIGHT

Nicholas Kristof says: Every other day this year, I promise to weep and scream in outrage at all the things going wrong. But today, let?s consider what?s going right.

Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000.

Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.

As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty.

In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.

In the 1950s, but not today, the U.S. had segregation, polio, and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex, and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history.

Read more





NINE WAYS THE WORLD GOT A LOT BETTER IN 2017

1) There was less famine

2) There were fewer war deaths

3) Fewer deaths from natural disasters

4) Progress against pestilence

5) Greater life expectancy

6) More democracy

7) Expanding rights for women and sexual minorities

8) Fewer people living on $2 a day

9) Greener energy


Read about the details.





THE 99 BEST THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2017:

Read all about it.





DIMINISHING POVERTY

In 1981 more than half of the world population was living in poverty. In the 19th century, the figure was close to 95 percent. Today the proportion of the global population living in poverty is down to 21%.

Read about it.





BEAUTY MAKES YOU SMART?

Do you have an unconscious belief that the forces of evil are loud, vigorous, and strong, while good is quiet, gentle, and passive? Gather evidence that contradicts this irrational prejudice.

Are you secretly suspicious of joy because you think it's inevitably rooted in wishful thinking and a willful ignorance about the true nature of reality? Expose these suspicions as superstitions that aren't grounded in any objective data you can actually prove.

Do you fear that when you're in the presence of love and beauty you tend to become softheaded, whereas you're likely to feel smart and powerful when you're sneering at the ugliness around you?

As an antidote, for a given amount of time, say a week or a month or a year, act as if the following hypothesis were true: that you're more likely to grow smarter when you're in the presence of love and beauty.





THE JOY OF INSURRECTION

I like to complain and be outraged as much as the next aspiring bodhisattva. I derive a not-so-taboo pleasure from railing against racism, sexism, misogyny, plutocracy, bigotry, and militarism.

But I'm also passionate about crafting a new world that will bypass the vortex of nonsense, that will render the institutionalized mayhem defunct. I value Buckminster Fuller's perspective: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Another favorite counsel comes from sociologist David Cooperrider: "Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing."

And that's why I like to commune with idealistic yet practical futurists who envision the best possible civilization we can create.





THE DOWNSIDES OF NEGATIVE THINKING

From The New York Times: "All humans have a tendency to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It?s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis.

"But constant negativity can also get in the way of happiness, add to our stress and worry level, and ultimately damage our health."

Can we do anything to diminish the power of negative thinking? It's a complex, nuanced subject, but: here's a good start.





THE MAGIC OF YOUR WORDS

"The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words," said Terence McKenna, "and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish."

Here's my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your use of language.

Do you want to move and breathe amidst infertile chaos where nothing makes sense and no one really loves anyone? Then speak with unconscious carelessness, expressing yourself lazily. Constantly materialize and entertain angry thoughts in the privacy of your own imagination, beaming silent curses out into eternity.

Or would you prefer to live in a realm that's rich with fluid epiphanies and intriguing coincidences and mysterious harmonies? Then be discerning and inventive in how you speak, primed to name the unexpected codes that are always being born right in front of your eyes. Turn your imagination into an ebullient laboratory where the somethings you create out of nothings are tinctured with the secret light you see in your dreams of invisible fire.

Hear this as a spoken-word piece.





STORYTELLING THAT DOESN'T RELY ON CONFLICT

It's hard to find modern stories that don't depend on endless conflict to advance the plot. I understand the attraction to such stories, but I don't understand why they dominate storytelling.

Are authors and filmmakers really unable to conceive of the possibility that entertaining adventures might emerge from pursuing discovery and excitement and joy as much as from overcoming difficulties?

Ursula le Guin writes: "The Hero has decreed . . . that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of the narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

"I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

"One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I once read a how-to-write manual that said, 'A story should be seen as a battle,' and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.)

"Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, stress, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag / belly / box / house / medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process."