December provides a different quality of high octane energy than November did. The planets are reflecting excitement, nervous tension, and popular impatience with the status quo. Acting urgently on these impulses will be tempting, and easy to do. However, there is a concurrent influence of caution, deliberateness, strategy and far-sightedness available to rope in to any impulse to create radical change. The astrology suggests radical change is called for, but not without considering what structures from the past would be wisely preserved.
Coming into the first week of the month, the Sun shines a spotlight on Saturn. This is an annual event, and it highlights the nuts and bolts work each of us is engaging in in our lives. This is important because it is an opportunity to know with a sense of clarity, what that work is, where there are support beams that need to be constructed, or strengths that need to be further supported. Saturn will be in Sagittarius until the end of 2017, so this is a good time to take notes and apply the awareness and clarity of insight available now to the year to come.
Mercury goes retrograde this month, from December 19 – January 7th. This is a potent retrograde cycle. The mind is compelled to new depths of insights. The beware is to watch for paranoia, rigid thinking, and defensiveness. The gift is to do the deep thinking and re-structuring asking to be done, and watch how the truth is available in an almost holographic way, across differing situations in life. Take the first few weeks of the month to address your technological concerns. Postpone purchasing new electronic devices until after the retrograde is over. Think back to January 2016, when a similar pattern of retrograde constellated, for clues about how to make progress with this one.
By the time the solstice arrives on the 21st, the landscape is beginning to morph, and the natural inclination is to go within to take stock of inner resources and how they can be put to use. Life enhancing activities in the last couple of weeks of the year are those that provide the kind of stimulation that is subtle, that deepen the soul, and are creatively nourishing. I am wishing you wonderful December.
Warmly,
Ichrak
Aries
Here are a few things to keep in mind when dealing with forces larger than you. The truth that guides your efforts should come from a place of expanded perspective. Think about how much seems possible, more important or less important on the scale of infinity. What if you literally had all the time in the world to accomplish what you are here to do? Does thinking about that prompt you to reprioritize your most urgent restructuring efforts today? Second, truly, things need not be done the way they have always been done. However there is nothing new under the Sun. Everything old is new again. History repeats itself in cycles. After the past several years of your life though, you have gathered the insights, experience, and fortified tenacity to add to the wisdom that has survived the ages. You may even be in a position to resurrect a foaming primal ancient wisdom that we all need access to now. In this moment, the trick is to go out of your way to walk the neural pathways of those who, by being in such contrast to you, can help you sharpen your position, and to notice how the quality of clarity of vision within your inner space directly influences the tangible effects produced in your outer world. Be deliberate about creating awareness of the levers of power, and ask yourself how you want to shape your world with respect to those, then act accordingly. This month is about the long game.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Taurus
The process you are going through is about vital life force, and what in your life changes you with respect to that. Consider the fact that money is a stand in for fairness in exchange. Ideally, things purchased using money are nourishing, in concert with, and feed us in proportion to what we have paid for them. In your life, money as a tangible and measurable thing now benefits from also being understood as a metaphor for other kinds of exchanges. These ideally should be clean, and straightforward and fair above all. Taurus is known to rejoice in quality. Take that as a reason to audit the exchanges of life force in your life, especially with others. This is also about fusion and union. In the most intimate scenarios of your life, in a marriage, in shared money, in partnership, the idea now is to strive for fairness, even if it takes a bit of deep thinking, uncomfortable conversations, and slow but steady recalibration to achieve this. Listen to voices that offer perspectives outside your routine point of view, in the interest of bringing into adjustment anything that may have become too extreme. This month’s Mercury Retrograde will help you to bring in a sense of far sightedness as you consider this deeper process.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Gemini
You are learning about integrity in relationships. As long as you proceed with the attitude that any challenges you experience in your intimate partnerships are designed to ultimately equip you with a new sense of solidity, clarity, and reliability in partnership, you will be fine. The best shortcut I can offer you is to encourage you to sink into the granular details of the storyline, take the long way, and to ask all the questions that need to be asked. The process you are going through is learning about relating to others, and teaching others how to relate to you. You may have to create new standards here. You may have to excavate old stories, rinse them off, pop them back into place and give them a fresh paint job. You have support in this process. Whether you’re single or partnered, taking the time to deliberately go through this kind of mental mining will both bring excitement into your life, and bring you closer to crossing off some long held bucket list items. Your astrology suggests that it is conceivable that you are creating a way of relating that will remain with you for the foreseeable future. This month’s Mercury retrograde begins with a deep dive into thinking about the global systems that affect all of us. On a personal level, you will want to bring order to ways your life is woven in with and dependent on other people – financially, emotionally, sexually. Come at this with a sense of bringing clarity and uprightness to your closest bonds. Also you are starting a several week long energization of your career. How you feel emotionally and how well you care for your body affects your performance in this area.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Cancer
On the surface it seems like there is more intensity underway with someone close to you. Together you are being called to explore heavy material, unearthing unspoken dynamics between you, making explicit work of thinking through the underground highways and tunnels in your relationship. This month’s Mercury retrograde is a good time to think about this extended long-churning process of purging and purification happening in the realm of partnerships. It could play out any number of ways. You come head to head with powerful people and learn something new about yourself in the process. You become better skilled at wielding your own power when dealing with powerful people, organizations, or institutions. You recognize the power and influence you bring into your relationships, and the power you absorb from directly dealing intimately with others. You recognize how much more sheer energy, fearlessness, and empathy for others’ suffering emerges in you, when you honestly grapple with all the inner debris that arises as you butt heads with how you are when standing face to face with those who represent formidable forces in your life. To give you a general sense of the timeframe you are working wit, this is a process that has been happening for a while and will continue for a while yet. You have plenty of time. This month, this process is accessible to your conscious mind, and you have the opportunity to put energy into it. The yield on the energy you invest into this process is the kind that, while certainly noticeable to yourself and others, can’t be measured in human-created units, but has wholly to do with what you can take with you for many thousands of years to come.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Leo
This is a month of taking care of the practical ins and outs of day to day life. As you go through the month, you will be invited to make it a point to tune up the most basic parts of your every day life. You want to be thinking about how much sleep your getting, whether your body is receiving and absorbing all the nutrients it needs to function optimally, what your diet and digestion are like, if your exercise needs are being met, and how much you are doing things you enjoy – happiness bringing activities – in your every day experience. There are benefits for giving energy to this kind of work, namely having the structures in your day to day life give you the energy, space, and time to do the work you are here to do. Your astrology suggests that there is someone you can hire to help you with this, perhaps someone you already know. Pay attention to the energy you give to others and how you support them. There is a lot you can give freely and selflessly, and that would benefit your soul. Ideally, in very close relationships, you want to see a nourishing and fair exchange. This dynamic will invigorate you, and enable you to advance your cause and give more to everyone you touch in your life.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Virgo
Romantic overtures, salacious sexual conquests, and the amorphous fluidity of a gentle partner are nice, but wouldn’t it be better if everyone were on the same page? If there were trackable, identifiable agreements in relationships, and if your partners were not so fiercely determined to be so vague? This month’s Mercury retrograde says it is your task to do some re-structuring within the agreements of your closest relationships. The way you share love needs to undergo an explicit re-visioning process to accommodate a life change. Intricately folded in with this is a literal or figurative change in the very foundation of your life. The boots on the ground process of moving house or renovating has begun. While you are in fact making real and tangible shifts at home, your astrology suggests that what you are unearthing is a process of mending the story of your bloodline, your ancestry, the family constellation you orbit in this lifetime. This is a long term process that will become more clear and gain more traction in the months to come. For now know that you have a strong influence supporting the deep changes you are making. One more thing, a measured and paced approach when it comes to your money and shared money is the intelligent one to take this month, especially where it seems alluring or exciting to to act before thinking all of the steps through to the very end.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Libra
After the influx of information, work, new projects that have flooded your life over the past year, it is time to move forward and solidify the structures that are a testament to all the ways your palette of possibilities has definitively grown and expanded. You now have more influence as a leader, and people are looking to you to demonstrate the best of what your sign has to offer. The Libran qualities of fairness, objectivity, and always taking the other person’s position into account, are more valuable in environments that are increasingly erratic and unstable, and they are also available to you in greater supply than usual. It is as if, for the time being, everything about you is magnified in proportion to your environment. That means that your gravitational field carries more sway, people are more likely to notice and act on what you bring attention to, and they are more likely to follow the example that you set. When others around you want to go off on a hare-brained bender of an idea that might be insane or might be genius or both, you have the ability to bring perspective to what they are offering and ground their high-flying schemes into defined ideas that are flowing sustainably into a suitable structure for the long term. This month’s Mercury Retrograde cycle provides an opportunity to re-think what sustains you on the most essential levels – home, family, security of and legacy of clan. Your job is to look through the biggest, brightest, most expansive, most emotionally nuanced and satisfying view of your situation, then work diligently to make it a reality in your life.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Scorpio
It’s really a mystical process you’re going through. Mystical means that the process it encompasses are outside the rules of time, logic, or space, but are deeply profound and meaningful. Consider that in seeing signs or omens, these bends and junctures in the fabric of time are meaningful to you where the same sign might not be for another. And, where there might usually be pain in solitude or retreat, for you there is now peace, a recalibrating expansion of your inner space, and an ability to access an inner wisdom, or deeply acquaint yourself with an outer one. This month, these processes are consciously available to you. You may get a lot of use out of them if you engage them fully, exploring all their facets, and then share your insights with others. In another part of your life, you are learning about your relationship with money. This is an extended process of creating structures in your life that can serve as material supports of the kind of liberation you want to achieve and disseminate in your day to day life. The New Moon at the end of November shone a spotlight on a new beginning with this, and you’re well positioned to gain solid traction on it, starting now.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Sagittarius
Turn the beat around. That is the theme song for you this month. What you are turning around is your approach to your finances. Something is to changing in the way you earn or structure your money, and this is an area you could give devoted attention to for much of this month. You may wish to also consider ways that you can use the systems already in place to make your money work for you. But all this money stuff comes as the surface development to the longer term changes you are going through in your own self identity and self conception. This month presents you with the opportunity to make concretized work of all the ways you are emerging into new facets of yourself. Think, how do the children in your life offer you liberating ideas of how to be. What growth would you personally take on if you knew you had a safety net of support, and in what ways can you drum up that support. What inner movements of your soul would benefit from being put on creative display and shared lavishly with others. This is a moment of self reflection, and the first responsibility you have is to yourself. When you do what’s right for you, it winds up being right for everyone else too. Everything else flows from there.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Capricorn
This time of year every is usually more reflective for you. However, this year (and next) is special because the sun is illuminating Saturn, shining a spotlight on the deeper emotional folds and facets of the rotundas of your soul. You can access the kind of insights that a devoted monk deep in meditation receives. There is an unspoken understanding in certain spiritual and mystical circles and gatherings. That is, in ritual, no one will explicitly tell you what are the most important things to pay attention to. An enumerated list of guidelines for best practices would be helpful, but you won’t find them hanging on the wall, or handed out in a pamphlet. You are expected to have created a space in yourself for the insights to flow into, and refined your perception of the seeing in dark enough to be able to descry the shapes that live there. If you are in the know, it is because you became that way through observation, appreciation for subtlety, and a fine sense of discernment. Further, these processes are not undertaken because they’re easy, but because they improve the quality of the soul. The truest honesty you could ever gift the world is the honesty you share between you and yourself.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Aquarius
This month’s Mercury Retrograde may look this way for you. You think about something that needs to be revised or changed, and you think about it long and hard. Yet the more devoted logical, linear, rational attention you give to it, the more the solution eludes you. The flip side to that is to try a bit of an experiment. Try creating as clear as possible a definition of what it is you want clarity on. Once you have that, drop thinking about it consciously. Do things that intentionally remove you from the space of linear thinking – sitting on a canoe and letting your thoughts drift where they may, drinking mugwort tea to induce more vivid dreams, free-associate with your creative method of choice, taking intentional and conscious retreat from the popular thought fault-lines of day to day life. I think this approach will get you solid progress during this Mercury Retrograde. Remember the core idea of the sign Aquarius. You are represented by the water bearer. One of your core purposes is to take the insights to which you have markedly crystal clear access, and to find interesting ways to share those with the rest of us. In this way you water the body of humanity, creating a ripple effect that benefits all of us.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Pisces
Pisces is the sign of reflexive emotionality. They have the ability to expertly adjust their response to the world, day to day and hour to hour. Pisces people seem to take sincere interest in everyone, and people who orbit Pisces’ effusive creativity feel the expansion that this interest creates. The thing to know about Pisces is that unlike their sister water signs Cancer and Scorpio, they don’t have a hard shell to protect them, so in one sense they are defenseless, and in another sense the love that they emit is unqualified. This is as close to Love with a capital L as you can get. This month, your evergreen ability to see reality in a slightly different way than everyone else can very well open up doors, whether they are the doors of connection and achievement or the doors to other people’s hearts. For the next several weeks you possess an ability to surgically, expertly recalibrate your actions so as to flow in concert with the forces in your environment. Defending your position is yielding to the truth that you swim in an ocean of love. This will fuel your spirit and fill your wallet. Where you may wish to bring a more goal minded approach is to aspirations you have for yourself that you’ve allowed to get dusty while you were doing other things. You will certainly find momentum backing a re-visioning and re-structuring of your long term goals, and you may find plenty of reflection in your environment to push you along the lines you are already considering. You could tap those closest to you for a joint re-visioning process, and the truth is they would be as invigorated by you as you would be inspired by them.
Get a personal reading with Ichrak and get your planetary weather report for 2017.
Monthly Horoscopes by Ichrak are also published in the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog.
