No one loves feeling trapped. And there’s not much to love about it. But it has much to teach us. We can exhaust ourselves in the efforts to pretend we’re not trapped or escape the trap we’re in, only to find we carry the mechanisms of the trap inside.

Being humbled in defeat is a great gift. All the thrashing starts to settle when you finally experience what you most feared would happen. It turns out the trap was your unwillingness to experience pain, and that unwillingness made the pain into suffering.

This is a season when the ego’s efforts to hold onto its fantasy of self are thwarted. You thought you were beloved when you were despised. You thought you were impervious but you had weakness. It could all be okay, not in the sense that things will work out the way you think it should, but that you can be okay even when hardship comes. And that okayness is the true warrior’s heart, to set aside how you think life should go and instead meet life as it is with courage.

Today the moon passes through a corridor of fantasy and compulsive action. She wants to act according to the brilliance of instinctive will toward destiny but her eyes are clouded with fantasy.

Fantasies are not bad or wrong but they are unrealistic by nature, living in our minds unencumbered by the burden to respond to real limitations. Fantasy shows a great longing and drive within, something’ deeply wanted, yet the fantasy shows that want satisfied or thwarted in unlikely ways.

Today is a day to take action but with a clear mind and open heart. Let action bring the light that burns the fog of illusion. The lover in your fantasies may look like a real person in your life, and you may decide to ask them out, but do so knowing you are going to get to know someone real now. The person in fantasy is not the person you’d date. This is a good thing to grasp. Sometimes action breaks the spell of an illusion that won’t relent.

There is a state of moral development in which a person is inclined to condemn not so much what is done but to whom it is done. We are horrified by this when we see it directed against the peoples that we value—how can you celebrate the harm done to them? And we find ways to soften or overlook this when we direct it against enemies or people for whom we do not care.

Am I endorsing that? No. Is it shocking? Yes, sometimes. Are you the one person who has never felt joy when someone you hate suffers? I doubt it, but if that is so, life may give you an opportunity yet.

There is also a stage of moral development in which we condemn what is done no matter to whom it is done. It is righteous and fraught with opportunities to make exceptions. Indeed it goes hand in hand with the other stage. Murder is wrong, but in some cases we carve out an exception and do not call it murder because we socially empowered a group of people to be able to do it, ideally under constraint.

For more than a year now I’ve been baffled by the exception-making, people who condemn one group for war crimes and minimize or even celebrate another for the same actions but the opposing cause. We could tell a story that this is social decline but I think it is only a revelation of the truth in our souls. We are not intrinsically evil, but the problem of evil may be studied within one’s own heart for the courageous.

The next few days inaugurates a cycle of Venus’s transformation of the gifts of Pluto in its new vibe in Aquarius. The two very different energies come together to challenge each other and seed growth that will come to fruition around early 2026 when they conjoin again.

Pluto wants us to accept our humanity. Whatever we think is disgusting, revolting, beneath us, or—alternately—whatever we think we are beneath and incapable of because of its goodness—Pluto will bring to our attention. We can become inflamed by denial or we could allow the knowledge of even our most disturbing qualities to humble us. Venus wants to create beauty, harmony, connection, and value wherever she goes. Both are meeting in the land of radical change, disruptive innovation, and community over self-interest.

Together they invite questions to unpack this coming year. When is community mindedness lacking in love? When is love naive to the workings of necessary power to compel needed change? What am I performing to give the appearance of belonging? Does that inauthenticity serve my community? Overall, can I breathe in more space and perspective, and dedicate my deep conflicting animal drives toward the higher ideals I admire?

If you walk the path of love, beauty, and art, the next few days offer important seeds of your work to come.

Of course you don’t have to do anything and you’re free to disregard this. And this is a time when everything feels off, and thinking you’ll be ten minutes late ends up being thirty.

Wisdom continues to say to listen to the multiplicity and sift for truth. If you want to judge and dismiss others’ perspectives, you are free to do so, but those perspectives may still affect your life in important ways. Other people exist and their feelings and actions matter. We can only boundary ourselves but there is a portion of life that happens regardless of your consent. Whether you allow yourself to be informed about such things or shut them out is up to you. But it feels like patience is what leads to wisdom.

Today’s contemplation had me confronting that life rarely affords moments of quiet contemplation for deep thinking, especially if you want a life with family, friends, career. Some call this a world of distractions and there’s truth to that, but some of these things aren’t “distractions.” They’re life. Your partner wants to connect with you or update you on important information. Your kids need something. Your coworkers are messaging to ask for help.

And a mind constantly being pulled in so many directions loses its center, depth, and calm to meet life with presence. Sometimes we do need to protect our time, if only a few moments, to check inside on what we think or believe so we’re not just reacting.

As I started this I remembered this wisdom from the Hagakure: “When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.”

Seven deep and slow breaths seems too little for immense decisions but it’s actually quite a lot of time. It’s enough breath to still the body and soothe the mind so our deeper wisdom can emerge. It’s also not so much time that everyone around us loses patience. It’s easier to ask for. “I need a moment to think and I’m going to take seven breaths.”

This recent new moon inaugurates a cycle of farsighted vision and broadening to hold the bigger picture. Why cling to what is collapsing when you could free your hands to build something grander? As I write that, I think of the beautiful churches and temples built and maintained over centuries while disease, poverty, and war persist.

In some ways it’s a horror to invest in buildings instead of people. In other ways these structures have lasted beyond so many lifespans and hold together the collective experience of the people who go into them for prayer, meditation, and community.

That invitation extends to what we prioritize in life now. There will always be human need and it is so necessary to be in community, to connect with those who love or meaningfully challenge us. And we might have aspirations to a calling that means investing time and resources in other ways. Feeding the soul does matter, just as caring for the body.

What is your northern star in life when you feel caught in a choice? What values or beliefs do you return to that help you connect to something larger than yourself? How does that something larger want to be expressed through your words and actions?

As sugar cuts the bitterness of coffee, Venus is bringing sweetness to a terrain that has endured years of turmoil and exposing what was rotten. What a relief and a joy, almost like a feeling of victory. But is it just adding sugar to cover over the flavors of what is rancid? Or is it bringing liberatory softness to sweep away those final toxic ingredients to restore a hardy and fertile land? One cannot quite tell, but the shift in tone is palpable.

What Venus says today is that change is coming, and we can grow with the change or not. Change is neither progress nor decline, it is just change. Some things get better and some things get worse. Look to any deep ambitions you have and see what the moment offers them.

Today I have an image of an open and closed eye. The open eye is filled with light and stimulus from all the media, conversation, and information available to us constantly. The closed eye offers rest and an opportunity to track what is happening within.

One way we manage information overload is dissociative information consumption, aka the doomscroll. It becomes compulsory. But if all we do is consume with no chance to digest, we become hollow and overfull simultaneously. We lose touch with the wisdom of the body and our own creative powers.

Take time for rest, for silence, for inward reflection. Go for a walk if you feel overstimulated. Take a nap. Do what it takes to get a moment to recenter and check in with yourself and how you’re experiencing the moment. Then re-engage with this knowledge.