Your Best Life, Your Best Love

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

with my MID-YEAR AUDIO PREVIEW of YOUR DESTINY
for the REST of 2024 and beyond.

This week my Expanded Audio Horoscopes explore themes that I suspect will be important for you during the coming months.

What areas of your life are likely to receive unexpected assistance and divine inspiration?

Where are you likely to find most success?

How can you best cooperate with the cosmic rhythms?

What questions should you be asking?

To listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE during the next six months, go here, then register and/or sign in.

After you log in through the main page, click on the link "Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2024."

You can also listen to your short-term forecast for the coming week by clicking on "This week (June 25, 2024)."

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The Expanded Audio Horoscopes cost $7 apiece. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.




Devotional Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming a gracefully probing, erotically funny, shockingly friendly Master of Orgasmic Empathy

1. 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.

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2. "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.

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3. Robin Norwood's self-help book Women Who Love Too Much deals with a theme that rightfully gets a lot of play: 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.

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4. 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.





5. 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 gender and sexual preference who imagine that their attraction to the physical appearance of a potential partner is the single most important gauge of compatibility. This delusion is a 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.

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6. While loitering on a sidewalk outside a nightclub in San Francisco on a September night years ago, I found the cover of a booklet lying in the gutter.

Written by Marilena Silbey and Paul Ramana Das, it was called How to Survive Passionate Intimacy with a Dreamy Partner While Making a Fortune on the Path to Enlightenment.

Sadly, the rest of the text was missing. Ever since, hungry for its wisdom, I've tried to hunt down a copy of the whole thing, but to no avail.

I'm hoping that maybe you will consider writing your own version of the subject. If you do, please send it to me.

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7. I swear the strange woman standing near me at Los Angeles' Getty Museum was having an erotic experience as she gazed upon van Gogh's Irises.

She was not touching herself, nor was anyone else. But she was apparently experiencing waves of convulsive delight, as suggested by her rapid breathing, shivering muscles, fluttering eyelids, and sweaty forehead.

Fifteen minutes later, I saw her again in front of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Fountain of Love. She was only slightly more composed.

In a friendly voice, I said, "This stuff really moves you, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yeah," she replied, "I've not only learned how to make love with actual flowers and clouds and fountains, I can even make love with paintings of them."

Do you have any interest in mastering the method in this maestro's madness? Where will you begin?

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8. In his book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, historian Thomas Laquer suggests that the clitoris may have been unknown to male anatomists until 1559.

In that year, Renaldus Columbus, a professor at the University of Padua in Italy, announced his discovery of the "seat of woman's delight," and declared his right to name it the "sweetness of Venus."

Is there a sublime pleasure whose existence you haven't discovered? Where is it? How can you find it?

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9. Once upon a time, you asked a certain someone for a blessing. Instead, he or she blasted you with a curse. The debilitating blow of that bad juju hit you right in the place that was ripe for the blessing you requested. What a tragedy!

Do you understand that the seed of the blessing you once needed (and still need) is hidden within the curse? If you figure out what that blessing is, you'll find the cure.

(PS: The French word for "wound" is blessure, which suggests that blessing can come from wounding.)

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10. Ruminate about the sublime prototypes that might be hidden within the longings you're not so proud of. Dream of the noble purposes that lie beneath the plaintive cries of your heart.

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11 "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.