Your Triumphant Life

Experiment: Review in loving detail the history of your life and remember why you came to be where you are now -- and where exactly you want and need to go in 2020.





EXPLORE YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE

Explore your long-range future
with my 3-Part EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for the Coming Year.

Who do you want to become in 2020? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? My reports might stimulate and inspire your meditations about the interesting possibilities.

This week, my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for the Coming Year feature Part 2 of my long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2020.

Part 1 of your Beginning-of-the-Year Predictions is still available. Part 3 will be ready for you on January 14.

What will be the story of your life in 2020? 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.

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Range Prediction, Part 1"

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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $6 per sign. (Discounts are available for multiple purchases.)

Each forecast is 7-9 minutes long.

P.S. You can still access the SNEAK-PEEK AT 2020 from two weeks ago. In these expanded audio horoscopes, I describe some major themes I think you'll be working and playing with in 2020. After you register and/or log in, click on "Two Weeks Ago (Dec 24, 2019)."





Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other stuff, including good news, lucky advice, and tender rants. It arrives every Tuesday morning.

Read past issues of the newsletter.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





WHAT ARE YOUR RELATIONSHIP GOALS FOR 2020?

What are your relationship goals for 2020?

To stimulate your imagination, I offer below some of my ideas on relationship.





CAST A LOVE SPELL ON YOURSELF

Experiment: Compose and cast a love spell on yourself. There's no need to consult pagan books about how to proceed. It may even be better if you improvise homemade conjurations and incantations. Be sure to formulate a clear intention of what you want to accomplish with your mojo.

Example: "I want to make myself irresistibly lovable." For best results, stand naked in front of an altar crammed with magical objects that symbolize both lust and compassion.





WHAT'S GETTING IN THE WAY OF ROBUST INTIMACY?

A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don't ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can undermine the most promising alliances.

To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.




THE SKILLFUL AUDACITY TO SHARE AN INNER LIFE

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.

Comments? Examples? Refutations? Action steps?





YOU CAN NEVER 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?

Describe how you could get the hang of putting this tricky wisdom into practice.





LOVE IS BEING SMART TOGETHER

"Love is being stupid together," said French poet Paul Valéry. While there's a grain of truth to that, it's too corny and decadent for my tastes.

I prefer to focus on a more interesting truth, which is this: Real love is being smart together. If you weave your destiny together with another's, he or she should catalyze your sleeping potentials, sharpen your perceptions, and boost both your emotional and analytical intelligence. Your relationship becomes a crucible in which you deepen your understanding of the way the world works.

Give an example of your closest approach to this model in your own life. Then formulate a vow in which you promise you'll do what's necessary to more fully embody the principle "Love is being smart together."





LOVE NEEDS IMAGINATION

"For a relationship to stay alive," writes James Hillman, "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."

Make this your hypothesis. The next time you sense that you're about to say the same old thing to your closest ally, interrupt yourself and head off in the direction of storyland.





AN ALLIANCE OF EQUALS

A heterosexual man who is seeking a partner often doesn't want a woman to be complete unto herself; he hopes she'll feel inadequate and lost without him. Similarly, many hetero women demand that their men be absolutely dependent on them.

Those of the gay persuasion aren't necessarily any different; quite a few also prefer their consorts to be unable to thrive alone. But there are also plenty of people who want their intimate relationships to be an alliance of strong, equal, independent partners.

Where do you stand on this issue?





"TELL ME THE STORY OF YOUR SCARS"

Play the game called "Tell me the story of your scars." It's best to do it with a skilled empath who is curious about your fate's riddles and skilled at helping you find redemption in your wounds.

"How did you get that blotch on your knee?" he or she might begin, and you describe the time in childhood when you fell on the sidewalk. Then maybe he or she would say, "Why do you always look so sad when you hear that song?"

And you'd narrate the tale of how it was playing when an old lover broke your heart. The questions and answers continue until you unveil the history of your hurts, both physical and psychic. Treat yourself to this game soon.





WHAT'S YOUR TYPE?

Some hetero men believe they won't find romantic happiness unless they hook up with a woman who resembles a supermodel. Their libidos were imprinted at a tender age by our culture's narrow definition of what constitutes female beauty. They steer clear of many fine women who don't fit their ideal.

The addiction to a physical type is not confined to them, though. Some straight women, for instance, wouldn't think of dating a bald, short guy, no matter how interesting he is. And there are people of every sexual persuasion who imagine that their attraction to the physical appearance of a potential partner is the single most important gauge of compatibility. This delusion is the most common cause of bad relationships.

The good news is that anyone can outgrow their instinctual yearning for a particular physical type, thereby becoming available for union with all of the more perfect partners who previously didn't look quite right.

What's the state of your relationship with this riddle? Describe how you might ripen it; speculate on how you can move it to the next level of maturity.





YOUR BROKEN HEART

Even if your heart's not exactly shattered at the moment, it has no doubt been so at some time in the past. I invite you to feel a wave of sadness about your suffering, then move on to this possibility: that having a broken heart is one of the best things that can happen to you.

Why? Because it strengthens your humility, which makes you smarter. It demonstrates to you that you have a tremendous capacity for deep feelings—far more than you're normally aware of. It breaks down defense mechanisms that have desensitized you to the world's secret beauty. It may also inspire you to treat other people's hearts with greater care, making it more likely that you'll be able to create intelligent intimacy in the future.

That's why I say, celebrate your broken heart. It's a gift the world gives you to awaken you to the truth about what matters most.





THE MANY NAMES FOR LOVE

"The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them," wrote novelist Margaret Atwood. "There ought to be as many for love."
Here are a few that the ancient Greeks devised, according to Lindsay Swope in her review of Richard Idemon's book "Through the Looking Glass."

1. Epithemia is the basic need to touch and be touched. Our closest approximation is "horniness," though epithemia is not so much a sexual feeling as a sensual one.

2. Philia is friendship. It includes the need to admire and respect your friends as a reflection of yourself—like in high school, where you want to hang out with the cool kids because that means you're cool too.

3. Eros isn't sexual in the way we usually think, but is more about the
emotional gratification that comes from merging souls.

4. Agape is a mature, utterly free expression of love that has no possessiveness. It means wanting the best for another person even if it doesn't advance your self-interest.

Your assignment is to coin three additional new words for love, which means you'll have to discover or create three alternate states of love that have previously been unnamed. To do that, you'll have to put aside your habitual expectations and standard definitions of what constitutes love so that you can explore an array of nuances, including varieties you never imagined existed.





Robin Norwood's self-help book "Women Who Love Too Much" deals with a theme that has gotten a lot of play in recent decades: If you're too generous to someone who doesn't appreciate it and at the expense of your own needs, you can make yourself sick.

An alternative perspective comes from philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said, "When one does not love too much, one does not love enough." He was primarily addressing psychologically healthy altruists, but it's a fertile ideal for pronoia lovers to keep in mind.

Decide whether you need to move more in the direction of Norwood's or Pascal's advice. Develop a game plan to carry out your resolve, then take action.





THE MYSTERY OF YOUR THIRST

Imagine this scene. You're really thirsty—so dehydrated that you're feeling faint. Yet here's the weird thing: You're walking along the bank of a wide river that's so clear you could see the bottom if you looked. But you're not looking. In fact, you seem oblivious to the surging force of nature just a few yards away.

Is it invisible to you? Are you so preoccupied with your suffering that you're blind to the very source that would end your suffering?

Up ahead you see a man. As you approach, you realize he's holding a bottle of water. You run to him and beg him to let you drink. He readily agrees. Gratefully, you guzzle the precious liquid, then thank him profusely.
As you walk away, he calls after you, "By the way, there's a lot more water over there," and he points to the river.

Do you hear him? If you hear him, do you believe him? Or do you keep walking, hoping to find another person with another bottle somewhere up ahead?





ALL I ASK OF YOU

1
Be my slow­motion dance.
Be my birthday earthquake.
Be my spiral marble staircase
in the middle of a Vermont meadow.
Be my handstand on a barstool,
my whirlwind week in clown school,
my joke shared with a Siberian shaman
while shopping for T-shirts at Sears.
Be my last because.

2
Be my puzzle with one piece missing.
Be my ripe pomegranate
floating in a blue plastic swimming pool
on the first day of ­winter.
Be the imaginary conversations
I have with Thomas Jefferson
while watching the news on TV.
Be the waves crashing on my beach
in the south of France in the 22nd century
and the song
that my great-grandmother wrote for my great­granddaughter.
Be my golden hammer resting on a mossy rock
I've known for 10,000 years.





YOUR VOWS

I invite you to say this:

I love everything about me

I love my uncanny beauty and my bewildering pain

I love my hungry soul and my wounded longing

I love my flaws, my fears, and my scary frontiers


I will never forsake, betray, or deceive myself

I will always adore, forgive, and believe in myself

I will never refuse, abandon, or scorn myself

I will always amuse, delight, and redeem myself