This month begins in a fog, and as the fog clears we may feel like sleepers who have overslept our alarm and wake up in a panic. Best practices? Don’t leap out of bed and trip over your slippers. Stay in bed and remember your dreams. Take some time to adjust to the new reality before rushing into action.

First, we begin in Pisces season. Pisces rules mist, dissolution, and oceanic feelings. When the Sun is in Pisces we are more attuned to merging and meandering, less attuned to individual actions and agency. Piscean experiences can be heart-piercingly tender, transporting, and expansive, dissolving the boundaries between self and other. With Saturn also in Pisces we are at a cultural moment that’s beginning to take seriously (Saturn) Piscean social issues: psychedelic assisted therapy, universal basic income, forgiveness of loans and prison sentences, healthcare as a human right, etc. As we move through this Pisces season we’re holding dreams of how things could be—but it’s hard to focus on plans and actions clearly. Light filtered through Pisces has a smeary, sparkly quality like the lenses used by old Hollywood starlets for their close-ups. In Pisces, we live in the magic and the mystery.

Pisces season is usually a time of dreaminess, introversion, moving a little more slowly before the rushing momentum of Aries ushers in the springtime. Most of this month we are steeped in Piscean sensitivities and inspiration, and this kind of sensitivity usually requires some heart protection. But at the Vernal Equinox the entire vibe shifts: As the Sun moves into Aries (either the 19th or 20th depending on your time zone), our collective hibernation ends. The energy shifts toward clarity and action, though a few planets remaining in Pisces call us to keep up with our energetic practices for grounding, clearing, and shielding.

Staying grounded this month will be especially important because we are in eclipse season. The Pisces New Moon on the 10th opens the door to this season and our first eclipse will be a Lunar Eclipse in Libra on the 25th. Eclipses are times when the ordinary progress of light and dark (sunrise, sunset, moon waning, moon waxing) gets interrupted. In this state of interruption we are able to see—like overexposed Polaroids, like images frozen in a strobe light’s flash—surprising information. Most of us don’t enjoy this sensation of surprise, especially as what we’re learning can be painful. Often, the information we learn during an eclipse requires us to reorient toward a part of our lives we’d been overlooking or assuming would keep humming along regularly. In that reorientation there is the potential for healing and positive change, but receiving the information can still be startling and dysregulating.

I say this with full acknowledgement and respect for how many of us feel disregulated as a matter of daily life right now. We are living in times where we see many social protections disappearing, against the backdrop of all the other geopolitical and environmental crises that make a livable future seem unimaginable. Moreover, the last eclipse season began in October of 2023. Our world is still shattered by the escalation of violence that began that month in Israel and Palestine. We are still in the same eclipse cycle, with Aries and Libra calling us into dynamic tension between who is Self and who is Other, who deserves protection, who we claim as family and who we reject and dehumanize.

Eclipses can bring startling events and information but they don’t create something out of nothing. How we respond to the information is always up to us; our response is what we can control. Working with the energetic shift this month, from dreamy and sensitive Pisces to full-on eclipse season in Aries, can leave many of us defensive and overreactive. My horoscope advice for this moment is to keep protecting your hearts—taking time away from crisis to process and release feelings, setting boundaries with people who activate or drain you—while moving bravely toward whatever information this eclipse season wants you to focus on. Pisces is a sign that can become easily overwhelmed and just check out—retreating to fantasy, imagination, or dissociation. Aries is a sign that can become easily agitated and lash out, quick to believe something is a threat. Moving between these energies with care during an eclipse season requires grace and a sense of humor. Eclipses distort our sense of perspective—if anything seems to good to be true or like your worst fears are actually happening, hold that story with a grain of salt. Come back to it in a few hours or days or weeks and see if you’ve got more information. Don’t let the urgency of this time and the pressure of this astrology push you into either hasty action or complete withdrawal.

For more detailed horoscopes including Astro Weather for significant days and creative and relationship advice, join me on Patreon for only $2 a month. I’m also available for readings, so please reach out if you need support or accompaniment. For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram. May you tap into the kind of love that gives you courage this month, and have the discernment to know when you need to retreat and regroup.

Aries

Focus your mind: Relationships are tugging at your attention this month, especially on the 25th. Focus on where you can restore balance—have you been too dedicated to your friend’s/lover’s/partner’s wellbeing over your own? Have you been pushing everyone away because you feel suffocated or misunderstood? What can you learn in this moment about how to better balance the dance of self and other that all relationships call for? With the eclipse affecting your sign personally, take this month seriously as a wake up call but don’t jump to conclusions yet about what you’re going to do once you’re awake. Stay grounded in the here and now. Keep your future planning day-by-day for a few weeks.

Protect your heart: Your need for retreat and rest is real. Prioritize experiences that don’t have an end goal or deadline, like making music for yourself instead of recording an album. Notice what’s flowing and don’t push anything that feels blocked.

Taurus

Focus your mind: Who and what do you want to show up for? If you’re devastated by the news, what sustainable, local action can you take that’s in service to what you care about? The eclipse may call up fears around how much you can’t control in the world (or in your physical body and health)—keep focused on what you do know and what you can do.

Protect your heart: It can be hard to be in love with the world when the world seems so intent on its own destruction. If you believe your activism—or healing skills or group facilitation skills or whatever it is you offer to your collectives—should be making things better dramatically and immediately, you will be consistently heartbroken. Practice revolutionary patience to keep your heart open for the ones yet to come, the ones you’re planting seeds for today.

Gemini

Focus your mind: Your creativity is calling and wants your full attention, which may be tricky right now. So much else is calling you in other directions—obligations and endorphin hits from small accomplishments—but this eclipse is lighting up your need to reconsider your voice, your talents, and how you use them. Take your own potential seriously.

Protect your heart: In whatever ways you are called to make public statements, to represent your business or organizations, or merely to express your own opinion to strangers—take care this month that you’re doing so thoughtfully and not off the cuff. When you are in your feelings or following a new line of thought you are likely to be misinterpreted. Protect your emotional integrity by typing up notes for anything you need to do publicly.

Cancer

Focus your mind: This eclipse is calling you home, in a way. It’s at least calling your attention to how supported and grounded you feel in your current home—be that a literal house, your chosen family, your birth family, or a movement or identity that feels like home. Don’t be afraid to uncover new information. You may need to make changes, but if you do you’ll be glad you started that process earlier rather than later.

Protect your heart: Getting out of the grind and away from your daily routine is medicine for your heart right now. If you can’t travel far away, at least let your mind wander and get lost in some epic novels or plan a future trip. Remember that the world is bigger than your small corner of it.

Leo

Focus your mind: What you say and how you say it means the world right now. Be careful with your words and listen closely when people are telling you something you think you already understand—ask a few questions and you’ll learn a lot more. You may need to choose your language (and your moment) with more precision than usual, as much is open to misinterpretation right now. If everyone is showing up in good faith, it’s worth it to keep trying to communicate.

Protect your heart: You’ve got some grief to move through, my friend. What’s your favorite way to do that? Alone? With friends or a therapist? In nature? In bed? Watching a sappy movie? Raging with loud music? Whatever your mode, find a way to move and release what’s been weighing on you.

Virgo

Focus your mind: In a time of so much change, your attention is being drawn to where you are trying to create abundance and stability. Something foundational may need shoring up or replanting. Keep an eye on what’s nourishing and stabilizing for you. Practice staying grounded even if you need to do some digging up and rearranging of your gardens.

Protect your heart: Partnership can be a prickly topic right now, whether you are partnered or want to be or don’t want to be. Protect your heart by reminding yourself that having high standards is perfectly acceptable, but that demanding perfection from yourself or others is a recipe for loneliness.

Libra

Focus your mind: Much of what’s becoming clear for you this eclipse season is facets of yourself that you have pushed away. These probably include unmet needs and unstated boundaries. You’re getting a big life lesson in learning how to claim, name, and meet these needs. Doing so may mean running into some friction with people you love, but don’t be scared to bring up differences and disagreements. If you don’t risk conflict you can’t do real intimacy.

Protect your heart: Being kind to your physical body will ground you through this time of change. Routines are your friend unless you use them as a method of self-control or self-punishment. Aim for movement, rest, and eating that feel refreshing, nourishing, and fairly effortless to keep up with. Forgive yourself for occasional lapses. This is also a good time to remember what you feel devoted to in the larger world.

Scorpio

Focus your mind: What you’re learning right now is arising from your own subconscious—from dreams, old journal entries, buried memories, fantasies about the future. You need adequate space and silence to plunge into these realms of the unreal. Give yourself regular time this month to let your mind wander and see what it brings you.

Protect your heart: The heart wants what it wants and there’s something (or someone) you want very much right now. Is the timing right? Are you ready to be more vulnerable, more self-expressive? How can protect your heart and reach out toward risk at the same time? There’s probably no easy answer, so stay attuned to what feels right in the moment.

Sagittarius

Focus your mind: I think it’s safe to say most of us have a fraught relationship to collectivity right now. We can blame the pandemic or social media or deeply polarized politics, but many of us don’t have the daily sense of communal life that we might have just a few years ago. This month’s eclipse is highlighting questions for you about how you fit into the collective and what it means to be part of (or not part of) groups. Are you burnt out and doing too much? Are you alienated from people you used to love? Are you hiding away and going full hermit? What’s unsustainable in your current mode? What you’re learning now is important and can help guide toward a future where your connection to those you love is stronger.

Protect your heart: For you to be grappling with any of this effectively, you need to know when to stop. Give yourself a daily curfew for existential crises or moral injury review. Return each day to something restorative and truly restful, ideally in your home, ideally with a lot of blankets and pillows.

Capricorn

Focus your mind: This is a month to wrestle with your ambitions and how close or far you feel you are from where you want to be. Maybe you wanted to have a PhD by now or be living on a queer commune with friends and goats. Maybe you hoped you’d have kids or be in a stable polycule. Maybe you wanted to be in better mental or physical health, or more recognized for your organizing talents. Whatever standard you’re measuring yourself against right now, cut yourself some slack for what you haven’t yet achieved. Focus, instead, on the core question beneath this all: What is a good enough life for you? What changes do you need to make to reach for the life you want?

Protect your heart: In this mode of self-assessment you may be extra-sensitive to critique, or anything that could possibly be interpreted as critique. Tell people if you’re feeling sensitive and ask for gentleness. Also remember to offer yourself some gentleness, while you’re at it. And if someone needs to tell you you’ve actually messed up, find a way to take in that information without using it to beat yourself up.

Aquarius

Focus your mind: Is it time to go back to school? Time to learn new skills and switch careers? Time to take a ceramics or Shibari class? Some new educational horizon is calling you and it may take some time to discern what to do about it. Begin by just letting yourself notice what’s interesting to you now. Take notes. Make plans. Dedicate yourself to a new process of growth and learning, even if you can’t begin it right away.

Protect your heart: With so much changing right now, lean into the comfort of routines. Make your favorite breakfast everyday. Eat it for lunch, too, if you want. You make the rules. Stay well fed, sleep enough, and keep small decisions low-stakes. Remind your body that it’s okay to be here.

Pisces

Focus your mind: Pay attention to how you’re feeling, especially if you’ve been overwhelmed by all the crises in the world. We can often feel hustled into urgent responses and the need to take action. This month you need to slow down and process your own feelings—grief, rage, and even hope. The information this eclipse season brings you is coming from your depths, from where you’ve stashed all the feelings you didn’t have time to feel. Find safe ways and times to let them in.

Protect your heart: To do this introspective work you need to turn inward a little bit, for a span of time. This isn’t a free pass to ghost everyone or drop all your responsibilities, but it is permission to say: “I have limited capacity right now,” “I have no time for that this week,” “Is there someone else who can help?” and other boundary-setting phrases. You are one amongst many. Cut yourself some slack.

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