Virgo Birthday Reports 2005

Aug. 26, 2005
Happy Birthday, Virgo!

YOU RUN THE RISK of missing the point of how good your life is if you don't step firmly into your own existence. This is not as hard as it seems, if you'll only unplug the various denial mechanisms that so often overwhelm you. Please, identify them and know when they are talking, and ask different voices to guide your way through this lifetime on the Earth.

Virgo (among other things) is the sign of the Perfect World Incarnate; it's also the archetype of the Goddess (you might say human perfection, in one of its forms). When that energy is turned inward, the result can be a mighty struggle with self-criticism, as neither humans nor the world we live in are perfect. Indeed, we all live in a fairly chaotic experience much of the time, and the world around us is struggling for any sense of reason or order.

Yet there is something perfect about your life right now, if you will perceive it that way — and you can. Maybe you have perfect potential or maybe it's a perfect opportunity; maybe it's just the resources you need, or maybe it's an idea. Maybe it's the way you've turned so many corners you're nowhere near your old, difficult neighborhoods and you can finally be a little more free.

Perhaps it's that you're starting to identify yourself as pure energy, not a bunch of ideas, or worse, conflicting ideas. In any case, there is something very right going on; you are in possession of something, and I think you know it; and if you will shift your identity to that something, that quality, that sense of growing inner reality, you will begin to relate to that more than anything else; and this, my friend, would be very helpful. You will be happier.

Because so far as I can tell, all your struggles with self-judgment really got you nowhere, and did not win anyone's approval, much less your own.

Approving of yourself is about just that. And if you can do that, you will see that the resources you have are yours to apply to your life, to your objectives, to your personal affairs, and to the world around you.

Once you've made sure your own needs are taken care of, and by that, I mean emotional needs, basic comfort, sane work, and taking care of your health, you can take another step. You can acknowledge yourself by offering who and what you are as a gift to the people with whom you're most intimate. You just do it; don't wait for permission, and don't expect approval. You would simply live as if life is yours to live, and give from yourself as if what you have is truly your own. This is a presumption, and I am encouraging you to make that presumption. If you don't, you may never know what you have to offer. And when you find out you will have a rather big clue to who you are.

What happens, or what can happen, this year is something rather different than the past two or three. Your energy then was set up such that you needed a lot of stimulus from the outside, which arrived in the form of people and situations designed to wake you up, shake you up, and set an example of what was possible. And you got it. You may, at first, have resented the shocks to your orderly system of arranging the linens, not realizing that what was really being taken apart was your orderly system of thinking of yourself as something other than a free being.

Having endured more than two years of high-voltage energy input, you have accumulated some of your own, of an entirely new variety than you've ever been used to. More than any other result, you are able to admit some authentic love for yourself. As I have said before, in our demented world love is based on trust, and the trust for yourself that you've gained is no small thing — rather it is the heart of the matter, and the greatest gift you have to offer yourself and the world.

Sept. 2, 2005
Happy Birthday, Virgo!

You may finally figure out that your beauty and love are the real riches that you give the world, and if you do, you will be a lot happier. You have learned so much, yet there remains a little piece of self-knowledge that seems to be hiding from you — and if you want to find it, you're going to need to look, within. You have every reason to give up the voices that have offered their criticism of who you are for so long, and this, too, is a decision you need to make. It starts with the awareness that you owe people nothing, and they owe you nothing.

Monday, September 05, 2005
Happy Birthday Virgo!

VERY LITTLE IS CERTAIN in the world or your world, but there are times when uncertainty is an asset. For one thing, it's the prerequisite for change. Among the things you can call your own this year is your ability not to know, and the resulting ability to make up your mind when you are ready.

From the time we're young, we are indoctrinated with ideas about what's supposed to be important, what we're supposed to do, and who we're supposed to be. Everything from the Girl Scouts to church to what our parents lay down as the incontrovertible law accumulates as a kind of database of personal values, which after a while may not be so personal at all. But deep inside is who we really are, and that may be very different than what we were told — and thus is the stage set for a lifetime of inner conflict.

This is particularly true for Virgos, whose inner makeup is quite different than what is so often sanctioned by the world, but who are not necessarily bestowed with the rock-solid confidence to fight it out. This is the first thing that changes as the planetary setup in your solar chart begins to take effect. There is an overwhelming sense that you have personal assets to work with — perhaps elements that were there all along, perhaps things that have been recently acquired or will come your way soon.

Consider the setup: Venus, Jupiter and Pallas Athene are in Libra, your 2nd house of self-worth, personal assets, and the values you live by. The implication is that there is an actual face value — spiritual, social, financial, whatever — to what you believe and who you are. What you value is not merely beautiful; it is meaningful and powerful. The power, though, is much more about the power to influence and persuade than anything else. We're talking about Jupiter, which offers a sense of vision; Athene, which offers the ability to negotiate and work with power rather than fight power; and Venus, which is the driving force behind both.

But more to the point, Venus is what we can call your inner artist; the poet in your heart; the soulful visionary on the level of Cindy Sheehan or truthout's William Rivers Pitt, driven by a sense of truth and justice that transcends themselves personally.

Hmmm, what exactly am I talking about here? In essence, making sure that what's important to you is what you actually do in this world.

The question is going to be getting from here to there. Even assuming you are doing what is important to you, or what at one time was, there is always further you can go, but of course the reasons for sacrifice are legion. In the case of a Virgo, speaking in broad generalizations backed up by many specific experiences, there is likely to be some form of guilt or obligation involved in any experience of not doing what you know you need to do. As a result, the mighty social vision of this sign can be reduced to something akin to a lifetime of customer service. And even the desire to act on one's true creative needs, social calling, professional aspirations (let's pretend they're all the same thing for now) can be hampered by guilt — generations and generations of the stuff.

Consider this: some take this notion of "do your thing" business as being selfish. That's often what we're taught — by people for whom it's convenient that we do their thing, their way, for them. More often, when people do their actual thing, it's something that is useful, inspiring, participatory, and which actually frees them from the bonds of the past. Hmm. Could this be the issue? Don't let it get you down. Just be real, and a little bolder than you were yesterday.

In recent years, you may have noticed that people have showed up in your life who actually seem to work this energy. I'm going to imagine that for a while, you viewed them as dangerous anarchists, then as arrogant bastards, then as self-directed creative individuals. What changed? Um, you did. (You may still be in this process.)

Continuing this little astrological story, I'll add a few more flourishes. In the process of these (let's call them) encounters (they may have felt like confrontations) you recognized that you really can be yourself, or rather that you have to be. You may have felt pushed or cajoled into it; you may have rebelled; you may have thought you would go nuts — but it's the right kind of nuts; the kind where all the artificial control devices, factory-installed behavior governance units, and highly advanced self-criticism utilities that would make Norton Utilities programmers envious, start to fall apart and go away.

I mean, is it really necessary to be good, when you can be creative? Is it necessary to be moral, when you can be real? Those are the two choices that most sensitive people actually have before them. To the extent that you may have utterly revolted against some image you had of past powerlessness, that was based on a lack of sensitivity that by all rights should be reversing itself, coming on as stark and utter awareness fast and strong right about now.

And it's not showing any signs of reversing itself. However, in the process of giving up toxic self-control, one operative idea is that self-value is not an absolute; and when you go to a new level, there are new challenges with new rewards. But to put it in the most comprehensible terms possible, if you are a Virgo and you have a pulse, you will be believing in yourself within one year's time, like you never have before. You may get there the hard way, you may get there the easy way, but one way or another you will have finally cultivated faith in yourself, your personal assets and your role in the world.

Is this so bold of a prediction? Are you not ready? Are you not understanding that there is a missing piece that you hold right in your hand, one that you can finally be put in its place? Will you be so surprised to see that you held it all along?

The miracle of this will be, I feel, the sense that you really can rise up to the challenges of your aspirations, your relationships with people, and with the events of our world — all of them. And this is no accident. You cannot feel you are on equal terms with the world if you do not feel strength inside you. You cannot stand up to the chaos of the world until you have embraced some of the fertile creative void inside yourself, and thus your sense of potential.

From there, you must act. Potential is not enough — but I think you have what it takes to be the prime mover in your own life. And it is true, you have help and inspiration from outside if you need it. There are some talented, self-aware people around you, and they see who you are and they are on your side; that is, on the side of your one and only soul. ++

Friday, Sept. 9, 2005
Happy Birthday, Virgo!

Faith is not about proof. In this respect, it has nothing to do with thought, the intellect, or even with ideas. It's a state of knowledge, and one of the more natural conditions that the mind can assume. That's because it represents knowledge about yourself. But don't let this deter your quest for self-understanding. The journey itself counts for more than anything, and it can begin wherever you are today. All factors point to the same thing — you have an astonishing year ahead, one that will take you far and wide beyond anything familiar. Don't worry about where — just go forward, grow and learn.

For Friday, Sept. 9, 2005
Happy Birthday Virgo!

Building yet another level of psychological independence from your parents rates high on this year's list of priorities, judging strictly from your solar return chart. The story will differ for everyone and, as I often warn, astrology is a form of personally applicable mythical fiction —so this may have nothing to do with you.

But what I see is a degree of emotional over-involvement with mother and a simultaneous desire to please father, which amounts to an inner replaying of their relationship. And that relationship may have been too close for comfort or sanity. How it plays out inside your own psyche is the question to watch, and you're more likely to see it as the influences dissolve and leave you with a kind of power vacuum that you need to fill in with your own desires, intentions and will.

This week's birthdays are really divided in two by a crucial transit that, despite this being "Sun sign astrology," we can plot rather exactly. That transit is Pluto (in Sagittarius) square the Sun (in Virgo). While I normally devote the birthday report to a calendar week, I'd like to devote this edition to those who have already experienced the transit, and the next edition to those who are about to experience it. From the standpoint of applying foresight and hindsight, both will be applicable to everyone.

The division point is approximately Sept. 14/15, leaving a one day window due to leap year. Those born before these dates have most likely experienced Pluto square the Sun in the past year or so, and those born the 16th, 17th and 18th will be experiencing it in the next year. To be sure, cast your charts and transits using a commercial or free service, or ask an astrologer to check an ephemeris.

My own astrologer described this transit as "the ultimate transformation" a couple of years ago when the transit was applying in my chart (it also refers to a lot of Pisces born in the corresponding date range on the other side of the calendar). Pluto square the Sun certainly puts a lot of pressure on the finding and expressing your individuality. It highlights the symbolism of the Sun: for most, the center of consciousness, and the place where we are being called to seek our glory. The Sun also refers to a lot of engrained patterns of being that, with a Square from Pluto, are going to be called upon to be remade.

The turning point of the past year or so, perhaps until quite recently, can be considered in this context. Every form of change, every development, every shift in a relationship, involves you finding and expressing yourself. For Virgo, the difference is moving from the small to the large; from the idea of something to the reality; from the background to the front; and, using astrological terms, from the mutable (Virgo) to the fixed (the Sun rules Leo).

Since this transit is most likely behind you, you are dealing with the immediate aftereffects. These can be considerable. You may feel disoriented in some way, and you may be expecting long overdue change to be having its effects. You may also be struggling on some level with various traumas and enforced changes the chaos of which is still lingering. But one thing is certain: you can trust that this transit has had its effects.

Give yourself a year to sort things out; to clarify your most important goals; and most of all, to look around and notice what world you are living in. It is by all indications a different world than when this transit began approximately one to two years ago — for personal reasons and transpersonal ones as well. You have gone through a rather massive shift, and so too has the planet. Where, now, do you fit in? This is not an easy question and it's not a fast question to address, but it's a significant one.

Allow yourself to have different goals; a different sense of who you are; a different place in the world. Let the past be the past; see what that feels like.

Now, given your solar return chart, I am going to speculate about what this turning point includes, perhaps in a big way. There was something in your relationship to your parents that has been the crux of the issue; what you've been working through; and it has provided both the impetus of your journey, its greatest challenges, and also its most important rewards. In truth, what held us down in the past, and therefore what we become free from today, forms the basis of that freedom.

Let's start with your mom. You can understand the changes in your relationship to her in terms of her sense of loss. You may well have been a focal point of what she felt she lost in herself; what she feared she would lose in you; and what she experienced through her life that could never really be compensated. And it's likely that you took some of this on. Facing the dark side of this equation, you have been able to cast it off or hand it back to her; you might consider doing that as consciously as possible. After all, her troubles are not yours unless one of you makes it so.

As for your father, it is clear that you are close to him, and desire his respect, but it's not necessary and indeed unfair to you that he have too great a role in defining you as a woman or as a man — I mean in defining your sex role and gender identity. You may feel a definite loyalty to him, and that can go as far as feeling like you would be violating that loyalty if you change or express yourself authentically, and this fear may be subtle! Putting it in as simple terms as possible, you are entitled to be different than him, you are entitled to have different ideas, and in summary, you are entitled to be exactly who you are with neither defensiveness nor permission necessary.

Between these two sets of circumstances, it's likely that you had very little room to be yourself, a condition that in many ways has followed you to adulthood and is behind your struggles with confidence and self-approval today.

As you begin to effect these changes, you will likely discover that your relationships improve; that is, that you no longer experience difference as disruption but rather as potential and inspiration. As this happens, you will have confirmation that you have indeed changed, that your psychological and emotional processes are working, and that you are able to meet the world on equal terms, that is, in relationships between adults rather than the many different forms of parent-child relationships that dominate our social and professional interactions.

Martha Lang Wescott once pointed out that while we are in the midst of Pluto transits, they seem like the hardest thing in the world, and when they are over, we miss them. You are still close enough to this process to have it be close in your memory and emotions, and to truly appreciate the benefits of strength and discipline that it has offered you. There have been many, and you can take them with you.

Sept. 16, 2005
Happy Birthday, Virgo!

Sunday's spectacular Full Moon in your opposite sign Pisces suggests that certain individuals you've come to love and trust are about to play an even more vital role in your life. With certain difficult personal transitions behind you, you're emerging in a whole new dimension of yourself and can finally take up a new role in your own life and in the world around you. For a Virgo, confidence is mostly an issue of feeling that you really do exist, and you are likely to have more than enough confirmation of that from the responses of the people you care about the most.

Monday, September 19, 2005
Late Virgo Birthdays

IN THE PREVIOUS installment, I covered birthdays that had already experienced the transit of Pluto square the Sun. This is a 90-degree aspect from Pluto in Sagittarius to the Sun in Virgo. Everyone born until around Sept. 16 or 17 (of any year) has experienced all or part of that transit. This birthday report edition, the last for Virgo this year, will cover those who have the aspect developing in their charts. People born through Sept. 19 or so will experience this over the next year to two years, and those later in Virgo a little after that — but with Pluto, like any outer planet, the ripples and vibes are often on their way long in advance and can last for quite a while after.

You are entering a time of deep and significant change at a time when the world is going through the same thing. So you should feel right at home on a planet that will not be the same for more than two consecutive days.

There are people who need to be told that Pluto is not a force that one can resist safely. Attempting does not count for valor, and does not help anyone; and by the time Pluto shows up, it has been clear for a LONG time that change is necessary. In the best world, we feel the changes both as they are necessitated and as they are approaching, and we work with them. But often, Pluto is what ultimately saves us from being stuck.

There is the possibility that the sense of being stuck itself did not register as the need for progress, but heck, it probably dawned on you once or twice. You may have thought you could not do it. Yet the kind of change that Pluto calls for and indeed makes possible is the type that we usually think we cannot do. When Pluto says it's time to get moving, we do it because that's just what happens; the concrete falls away; steel melts; one is free, or a little more free, anyway. But sometimes, in actual fact, the prison walls fall down and you escape walking, not even running.

The thing with Pluto transits is that they are not structural, or transformational in the way that Saturn transits (for example) are. It is more like they are cellular. It is not the form so much that changes as the substance, but the form comes along for the ride. Pluto to Sun is a transit that involves the core fiery self; the expressive aspect of the self; something more real and essential than the personality (which is represented more often by the Moon).

There are a few ways that Pluto transits typically feel. All the different expressions can show up, but sometimes one dominates.

-- A long, endless push
-- Obsessive tendencies in the self or with partners
-- A series of changes over which one seems to have no control
-- Drive for control and power, and some struggles as a result
-- Isolation
-- Need for solitude
-- A lot of sex energy, intense like you've never felt it before
-- Sense of purging and regeneration
-- A super potent, fairly long spiritual test
-- Some kind of disaster that frees you instantly

Not everyone experiences all of these with a Pluto transit. It depends on you, and on your chart.

The thing is: generally, the feeling is productive rather than futile. Remember that. If the feeling is mostly futility, than something is off or out of balance. Pluto transits are of the "hurt so good" variety. As Martha Wescott says, they are hard, but we miss them when they are gone.

Depending on the particular planet Pluto is aspecting (in this case, your Sun), the flavor of the transit will vary from a little to a lot. Since you are born with the Sun in Virgo, there is a reasonable chance that you have Mercury and/or Venus in Virgo (neither go far from the Sun) and also a chance that you have other placements there as well. The planets like to cluster together. If you were born in the 1960s, you have Uranus and Pluto in Virgo (hence, you may be in the master Pluto transit of all, Pluto square itself).

The point is that you may be in the midst of a long series of Pluto transits. And if you have similar concentrations of planets anywhere on the mutable cross — Gemini, Sagittarius or Pisces — you will be in a similar situation. As Pluto aspects planet after planet as the years go on, it's like each one goes through a super intense therapy process and is graduated and takes on a new, clarified role. Pluto then goes onto the next one.

Many of the writings on Pluto transits are decidedly unenlightened and must be read with extreme caution, and many sources of information sought out to get a balanced picture. There are also a substantial number of practicing astrologers who do not know how to work with Pluto transits — a sure sign is if they predict a particular outcome, a "bad year," or a negative chain of events. If you have received such a prediction from a reading or from a report, you can consider it someone's opinion, not an informed fact. Seek other information! Keep reading or asking around until you get an enlightened view and your mind says, "Aaaah! That's the idea I need."

The purpose of astrology is not to mess with you — it is to help you put the pieces of your own growth process together in a way that makes sense.

While Pluto can play with our sense of power and control, it really is we who are making the decisions. Pluto just says it's time to make them now. About 95% of the time, now is indeed the moment, change and rearrangement occur, and we take our lives in another direction. There are certain individuals under certain circumstances who can evade, elude or indeed resist, and while this is vaguely possible, it is dangerous. Pluto is the opportunity for the clean sweep that we need, and since its transits come so rarely, we need to live with them like they really matter; like they are the gift they are.

There were some serious for-real echoes from the future reaching you regarding this time in history going back to the autumn of 2001, around October through December. This was when Chiron made a sweep through the last degrees of Sagittarius, making essentially the same transit as Pluto is now making — only Chiron was preparing the way, running vanguard.

Using my patented Holographic Bio-Time™ method of astrology, you can study late 2001 as a kind of model that can help you avoid mistakes, clarify your agenda, capitalize on experience and in general treat where you are now as somewhat familiar territory.

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Pluto is not the only planet active in your chart at the moment, but previous Virgo birthday reports this year cover most of the others. It is, however, significant and well worth mentioning that all of the current Libra activity takes place in your 2nd house of self-value and self-esteem; your house of money; your house of what is really, really important to you. While I have not dwelled on Virgo personality traits, I will leave you with this one comment, one that I make after 11 years of watching people and their astrology with as little astrological prejudice as is humanly possible because nobody gave it to me in the first place.

Virgos — whether by Sun, Moon or rising — have a tendency to be V E R Y hard on themselves. So much so that it seems normal and expected; indeed, this tendency of self-criticism is often designed to pre-empt the criticism of others, but in fact, it was born of others and their treatment of you much earlier in life, and in general all it really does is make you weaker, often miserable and often enough, sick. Self-critical stuff that seems to be "in your mind" — ideas, dialogs and so on — are old, unconscious material that is shaping how you feel about yourself in a way that is not necessary.

The activity in Libra is offering you something that portends a genuine turn-around; another way of looking at life; evidence that you are far more than you may have suspected in some very positive respects, and far less in the negative ones. But it is up to you to call the self-blame mechanisms off, if they are affecting you, and to let in the new information! If you do not succeed fairly soon, make sure you have help — real help from someone who absolutely does not judge you.

Pluto says give yourself time, and to be content with small but visible progress every day or every week. Give yourself credit for what you work through, become aware of, and bring to the power of your ability to decide. You are alive; you are doing it; you are learning to do it better. Happy birthday, cousin.

love,
e