Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
In the small hours of Wednesday morning, Jupiter’s four-month retrograde begins. While the planet of expansion moves backward through Gemini, take time to reflect on the big-picture arc of your life. If you’ve gotten off track or lost faith in yourself, this retrograde can offer the courage and perspective to set things right. Then, on Friday night, Pluto retrograde ends. Because the planet of transformation is so far from earth, you’re less likely to feel its effects on a personal level; even so, now that it’s moving forward again, you can expect endings — and new beginnings.
Your days have been busy lately — enjoyably full rather than hectic. You’re meeting interesting people, learning things, discovering new parts of the world (or your neighborhood). At a certain point, however, it all begins to seem like more noise. Chatting with people is fun, but isn’t there anything deeper? This week, you might finally discover what it all means. Your actions aren’t isolated — they’re part of a larger story.
Some people might pretend that money doesn’t really matter, but you know better. You see the way it (or the lack of it) shapes your life. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and focusing on money or the security it provides, at the expense of everything else in life, will only make you unhappy. If you’ve been neglecting your relationships, your hobbies, or your higher principles to focus on work, this week is your chance to reset and find a better balance.
In order to live the life you truly want, it can be necessary to disappoint others, even — maybe especially — those who love you most. You have to learn to say “no,” to walk away from the people and situations that are wrong for you, to prioritize your own judgment. It’s possible, of course, to take this too far. Sometimes you step on others’ toes; sometimes you ignore the people who are trying to look out for you. This week, you have the opportunity to make amends with anyone you’ve accidentally hurt along the way.
Maybe you’ve been feeling overlooked lately — your best efforts don’t seem to earn you any recognition, and it feels like nobody has your back when you need it most. This week, though, you might be surprised to discover how many people have been rooting for you and quietly working behind the scenes on your behalf. The care and support you’ve been yearning for haven’t been loud, maybe, but it’s been there all along.
Most of the time, you have a healthy level of confidence that carries you through life. Sometimes, however, you hold yourself back without realizing it. It’s not that you refrain from going after what you want — it’s that you stop yourself from even wanting too much, persuading yourself instead to desire “normal” things. This week, your job is to take the reins off your imagination. What would you dream of if you weren’t bound by convention? What would you work toward if you truly believed that more was possible?
You’re probably not someone who’s naturally comfortable with self-promotion or setting pie-in-the-sky goals; you’d rather just put your head down and get solid, steady results. But even so, your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed, and sometimes big opportunities seem to find you. It’s important to take advantage of good fortune when you can — but make sure they’re aligned with your goals and ideals. Every big break isn’t the big break for you, so be discerning.
In order to live fully, it’s sometimes necessary to take big, scary leaps — sometimes before you’ve done all your research and before you feel truly ready. This week, take stock of the chances you’ve taken recently. It’s easy to feel proud of the ones that panned out and ashamed of the ones that didn’t, but that’s missing the point. It’s always worthwhile to make a devoted attempt to find happiness or love, or to make the world a better place.
While some people seem fine with relationships that stay on an easy, surface level, you’re always yearning for depth and intimacy. So, when people in your life don’t reveal enough about themselves, you tend to start reading into their words and actions, looking for deeper meaning. Sometimes, though, there is no deeper meaning. This week, your challenge is to stop prying and be patient. If you keep showing up, intimacy will develop over time.
This week, you may see your closest relationships in a new light, for better or for worse. You could discover that you were idealizing someone in a way they could never hope to live up to — or, conversely, that you’ve been judging someone too harshly. Your instincts about people are usually good, but even you can sometimes be dazzled by wishful thinking or overly critical. The key is to take in new information when it comes, and to be willing to change your mind when the situation calls for it.
Your routines bring structure to your days and stability to your life. Sometimes, though, they get too entrenched and you lose the ability to think outside them, to be spontaneous, or to ask yourself whether this is how you really want to be living. This week, think about which of your habits genuinely help you to live the life you want, and which you only cling to because they’re familiar. If you need to make a change, you don’t need to wait for some special occasion.
You’re hard on yourself over your “failures,” real or perceived. All the rejections — the relationships that fell apart and the projects that never came to fruition — linger in your mind; it’s easy to imagine that they point to something irredeemably wrong with you. This week, though, try to be more generous with yourself. There’s no shame in experiencing breakdowns and false starts. Trust that none of your experiences have been wasted: They were all steps along the way to something better, something right for you.
There’s a part of you that always wonders about the other lives you could have lived: The ones that would have been possible had you made bolder choices instead of sensible ones. It’s easy to imagine that these other lives would be grander and more exciting than the one you’re actually living. But this week, it’ll become clear that you haven’t been missing out at all: You’ve been building a wonderful life all this time, and while those other imagined lives might be different, they’re no better than the one you’ve created.
Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of September 29. The weekly horoscopes for the week of October 13th will be online next Sunday.
Buy Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, here.