Horoscopes for October 2010

ARIES (March 20-April 19)
There’s only so challenging a relationship should be; only so many times that the same thing happens before a conscious attempt is made by both parties to shift the pattern. Yet you could say that within the seemingly endless workload that we create in our relationships, consciousness is the number one item on the agenda. Add a little of that and you are likely to notice that most of your struggle is pointless; that is to say, it lacks a tangible agenda, goal, or orientation. This is true particularly if the pattern is repetitive or if there seems to be some lesson that you’re not learning. The futility is veiled by everyone’s investment in the situation: it’s likely to be some combination of emotional, sexual, and financial, though lodged in what seems like an intractable place. It looks like you’re the one who has the power to move on, and the desire to let go of the past. It also looks like, as usual, you’re the one who is impatient and who is less willing to wait for something to happen, and more willing to work for a result. Yet a partner or love interest has a need to investigate a past issue. You may be too biased or too close to the situation to help out, but that does not dismiss the relationship. But it does emphasize the fact that a relationship is the meeting of two individuals, not two halves of a couple.

TAURUS (April 19-May 20)
The presence of another person in your life may feel so strong that you’re wondering whether contact on any kind of equal terms is possible. Yet there is no contact with another without contact with yourself. The deeper you go into your own sense of presence in your world, the deeper you’ll delve into your experiences of others. Your solar chart suggests that you’ve been keeping secrets from yourself. These secrets involve your relationship history, and in particular, what your values about deep connection are and where they came from. More specifically, Venus retrograde in Scorpio suggests that you’re deeply involved in a process of understanding your sexuality and how it manifests in your relationships. This is as much a quest for understanding the past and its influences as it is about letting go of out-of-date ideas and emotional responses—which in part means letting go of your attachment to them. This is not as difficult as you may think, particularly when you assess the cost of the attachments and get a feeling for the benefits that can come when you take your life into your own hands. I would offer these queries. What is the meaning that you put on sex, and how did it get there? What is the value you ascribe to it, and has it actually demonstrated that value? And, what did you leave behind in the distant past that you want dearly to retrieve?

GEMINI (May 20-June 21)
There are times when we take a risk and seem to hit a wall, a limit, or a restriction. Sometimes a seeming authority figure renders an opinion that something isn’t good enough. Other times, the idea of a risk is met by the response of fear. If any of that occurs in the next few weeks, remember: How you respond is more important than what happened. Your responses can range from discouragement to resentment to renewed determination. Yet once you go past the level of emotional impulse, there is a question about how you relate to your environment. What supports you, and what interferes with your creative process? I suggest you investigate everything from how your desk is arranged to the structure of your day. In considering people, are you seeking the approval of someone who seems incapable of offering it? The thing about any form of creative process is that it depends on answering to your inner authority; the notion of “authorship” is about you being the one to grant yourself authorization. If you are caught in a loop where (for example) you’re seeking the approval of an actual person in your life, or covertly striving for the approval of parents who never gave it to you, that is something to look at closely. The clue would be that you tend to go in circles specifically where you put in enough love, energy, and talent to make actual progress.