Honoring Our Boundaries: July Horoscopes
Image: The Muse Tarot by Chris-Anne
Welcome to July! Cancer season is well underway and I don’t know about you but I am feeling those ocean tides. Cancer rules The Chariot card in the tarot — one of my personal favorite cards and a hugely powerful archetype. As the final card in Line 1 of the Major Arcana, The Chariot signals that we have outgrown something; that we are ready to leave something behind in order to expand. Like a hermit crab seeking a new home, we are all testing out new approaches of living life. Based on the collective reading for this month, we are going to be learning how to set healthy boundaries by following our intuition and being open to receiving assistance.
The theme of the month is Queen of Swords, aka The Bitch With The Boundaries. The Queen of Swords’s mantra is: "Saying no to someone else is saying yes to yourself." As someone with people pleasing tendencies (#libramoonproblems), I am intimately familiar with how difficult it can be to actually prioritize your own needs and wants over all the other demands on your time and energy. And if any of the people making said demands lack self awareness and their own healthy boundaries, it’s even harder. I spent years in relationships with people who told me that they didn’t feel like I loved them unless I demonstrated that I was willing to negate my own needs and prioritize theirs. I could have used some Queen of Swords magic back then.
The Queen of Swords knows that self-preservation is our most basic birthright, and as such it must be protected at all costs. Unfortunately, from the moment we’re born, many of us are playing defense against ongoing attacks on our autonomy. As a result, we grow up without a solid sense of our own needs and desires. Or, if we manage to articulate some of them, we’re often rebuffed, shamed, or made to feel as if we are unworthy.
Here’s a secret: you are worthy. Just by virtue of being here, you deserve to take up space in this world.
You deserve to do whatever is required to protect your ability to continue existing. But it’s not just about the right to self-preservation. Because you aren’t just here to exist: you’re here to evolve. What every living species does over hundreds of thousands of years, those of us with consciousness can do within a single lifetime. There is something within us that wants to evolve, to grow, to expand. As far as we know, we may be the only living species that has the opportunity to evolve at the level of consciousness. And as I’m sure you’ve noticed, when it comes to consciousness, not all of us are evolving at the same pace.
Image: Mermaid Tarot by Leeza Robertson
The Swords suit is about our relationship to our mind. The minor arcana in the Swords is a journey of learning how find our way out of the tortuous maze of self criticism, shame, and other destructive thought patterns created by our own brains (generated, ironically, with a well-intentioned will to self-preservation... but not with a will to evolution of consciousness). The court cards are about how we expand once we have freed ourself from the shackles of our brain’s efforts to protect us by keeping us in what’s safe and familiar (even if it’s also unhealthy, abusive, or simply out of alignment). The Page of Swords is learning how to trust their mind again — developing a new relationship to the mind altogether. Knight of Swords is about learning how to take decisive action toward what we feel is in alignment for us. And Queen of Swords is about trusting our intuitive sense of our needs, wants, and boundaries.
The Queen of Swords wants us to live our truth, even if that truth is unpopular or disappointing to other people.
Are you regretting telling your friend you’d meet them for drinks tonight? Do you wish you didn’t have to go to your coworker’s baby shower that you already RSVP’d to? Do you actually want to go to that spin class you signed up for? The Queen of Swords is here to help. She teaches us that we each have a very clear intuitive sense of what we need and what we want. It’s just that most of us learned not to listen to that part of us, because we were told too often that our desires were wrong.
The good news is that the Queen of Swords has been here all along. She was just waiting for you to notice her. She is crystal clear on how she feels about the baby shower and spin class and drinks with your friends. And of course, at some level you also know the answers to these questions. But it takes courage and vulnerability to say no, and many of us (myself included, bigtime) don’t always have it in us to take her lead. Instead we suffer through all of the obligations we said yes to and by the end of the week we’re totally drained, exhausted, probably frustrated with ourselves and possibly even resentful toward some baby who hasn’t been born yet. Sound familiar to anyone else?
What would it be like to live in a world where all of us were allowed to truly trust and follow our intuition about what is best for us at any given moment?
Queen of Swords wants us to evolve. She wants us to say yes to ourselves. And she knows that involves saying no to anything — that’s right, anything — that is not in alignment for our highest evolutionary expansion.
And it’s true, saying no may very well disappoint people. But if you are more concerned about someone else being disappointed than about following your intuition toward your own highest evolutionary expansion, you might want to take a look at your relationship with that person. I spent many, many years living in fear of disappointing other people. And ultimately not only was it super shitty for me, I don’t think it was necessarily great for them either. Wouldn’t you want the person you care about to feel 100% great about everything they agreed to do, not to be doing it out of fear of disappointing you?
Let’s normalize canceling plans anytime, no excuse necessary. [Cue mass Virgo panic.]
Look, I get it. I’m a Virgo rising. I fucking love plans. But as I’ve learned the hard way, becoming too attached to one particular plan is a surefire recipe for disappointment. Thank goddess for my Venus/North Node in Gemini, which is teaching me how to appreciate adaptability. In this world, wouldn't the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances be a great skill to cultivate? And meanwhile, being less tied to our calendars might also mean that we will end up living more spontaneously and being present in the moment. Which seems like it could be good for the whole evolutionary consciousness thing. Just saying.
The card that showed up as our teacher for the month of July is Knight of Pentacles. The Knight of Pentacles is all about being wholly present, grounded, and intentional about how we move through the world. This card reminds us that whenever we have a choice to make, we benefit immensely from pausing, and taking a moment to sense into whether this choice is truly in alignment for us. Because the truth is, we’re all making choices, constantly. You’re making the choice to keep reading this — at any moment you could choose to close the window and do something else. I’m making the choice to write these words. Later I’ll make a choice about whether or not to publish them on the internet. And so forth.
Image: Wild Unknown Tarot by Kim Krans
Many of us make a lot of choices automatically, without pausing to consider. For instance: setting our alarm in the morning, getting dressed, drinking coffee, going to work. And while it might not feel like a choice about whether to go to work (although if the global labor shortage is any indication, a lot of people do appear to be making that choice), there are a million other tiny decisions we make during the day that we do on autopilot. Not to mention that most of us are addicted to the tiny supercomputers in our pockets whose main purpose is to try to control all of our behavior.
The Knight of Pentacles is the gentle, soft-spoken guardian angel whispering in your ear: “Is it in alignment for you to answer that text right now? What if you put down the phone and go outside for a few minutes, just to clear your head and get back into your body?” And, it so happens that quite often, once we actually go outside and take a breath of fresh air and feel the ground under our feet and the sun on our face, we may all of a sudden be struck by a conviction that wasn’t at all clear before. Even if that conviction is: It’s too hot, I want to go back inside.
Beginning to tune into our intuition requires a patient approach. We’re used to the linear way that our brains work, and intuition, as tarot goddess Lindsay Mack teaches, is spiralic rather than linear. That means that we might not always receive the answers we want when we want them. But sometimes no answer means: not yet. And if we begin to practice tuning into that inner voice more regularly, we will start to understand how it wants to communicate with us.
Taking it slow is going to be extra helpful because our challenge this month is Ten of Wands. We are taking on too much. We are trying to do it all ourselves. That myth of boot-strapping independence is really a doozy. Possibly one of capitalism’s most evil ideological tools.
So let’s normalize not doing it all. Let’s normalize doing less.
Why are we all competing to be the most prolific writer/the most innovative artist/the most competent organizer/the most overachieving super mom? We’re all messy ass humans, we’ve all inherited a ton of messy ass shit from our families and ancestors, we have no control over where we were born or what we look like or really anything other than the choices we make within the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So all we can really do is try to make the best choices we can at any given moment.
And we don’t have to do that alone. Whatever situation you are currently agonizing over, I promise that there is someone out there who can help you — if you ask them to. (In fact, the field of coaching is designed to help folks with exactly this kind of thing!)
I used to believe that asking for help was a huge inconvenience to the person I was asking; that I was burdening them with my own pathetic inability to do thing x by myself. It’s been a relatively recent discovery that in fact, most people (myself included) love helping other people — it makes us feel good. Cooperation is an evolutionary adaptation among many species, humans included, because it allows us to accomplish more than we could by ourselves.
Image: Ethereal Visions Tarot by Matt Hughes
Now, I don’t want to imply that all your friends have endless supplies of emotional labor and you can go to them any time for anything. Obviously, we all have to respect one another’s boundaries. And that means that you need to be able to trust your friends to say no if you are asking them for something that is not in alignment for them to do. Given that so many of us are running around attending baby showers we have no desire to attend, that trust is hard to come by. And speaking as someone who loves helping others but who also goes from zero to resentful pretty damn quickly, there have been plenty of times that I agreed to help with something and then realized I didn’t actually want to do it. What I’m working on now is being self aware and communicating honestly. Again, we all just have to do our best to communicate our own boundaries and respect one another’s. With full knowledge that we won’t always get it right and we will make mistakes and continue learning and growing.
And as you as you continue to evolve, you may discover that not everyone in your life is meant to come with you. If you find that there is someone who is not able to respect your boundaries and doesn’t respond to your efforts to communicate with them, you might want to ask yourself whether it’s in alignment for you to continue to put energy into that relationship. (And don’t forget to check in with the Queen of Swords, because she already knows.)
So whether you’re facing a big choice or the multitude of micro-decisions we make every day, this month is the time to get clear on exactly what (and who) you want to spend your energy on. Insofar as our energy flows to where we direct our attention, we have the chance redirect that energy by placing less attention on the content provided by our mind-numbing scroll machines and more on our own embodied experience from moment to moment. With the Knight of Pentacles as our patient guide and the Queen of Swords as the uncompromising defender of our sacred boundaries, we are well-equipped to begin waking up from the trance and tuning our senses into this wild, precious experience of living.
JULY HOROSCOPES
ARIES (March 21 – April 19)
This month you are invited to pause — no matter where you are — and celebrate. You could celebrate how far you’ve come. Or, just celebrate for the hell of it because we’re alive and parties are fun and life is fucking short.
Tarot card of the month: Four of Wands
TAURUS (April 20 – May 20)
It’s time to become your own caretaker. Can you open to the possibility of spiritual reparenting? What does your inner child need from you right now? What do you need in order to be able to caretake them?
Tarot card of the month: Six of Swords
GEMINI (May 21 – June 20)
This month is an important one in committing to your healing journey. Healing is available to you, if you decide to accept it. First, you must be willing to take responsibility for your healing work — and admit that you are deserving of healing.
Tarot card of the month: Ace of Cups
CANCER (June 21 - July 22)
You have been preoccupied with a loss, disappointment, or feeling of defeat, but you are learning to engage with feelings of sadness and anxiety differently. What happens if you offer yourself the tender compassion that you need?
Tarot card of the month: Five of Swords rx
LEO (July 23 - August 22)
It’s a marathon not a sprint, my friend. You may be feeling frustrated that you’re not where you wanted to be. Feel that frustration and then let it go so you can be with where you actually are at. You are exactly where you’re meant to be.
Tarot card of the month: Nine of Wands rx
VIRGO (August 23 - September 22)
This month is a time for deep inner work. You are in a position to access incredible innate wisdom. How can you slow down and get quiet enough to pick up the signals that are coming through?
Tarot card of the month: The Hermit
LIBRA (September 23 - October 22)
This month, you begin to envision something that until now has remained rather opaque. Don’t be afraid to dream big: your imagination is your greatest ally right now.
Tarot card of the month: Three of Wands
SCORPIO (October 23 - November 21)
What if the barriers you face exist only in your own mind? In order to get out of a difficult situation, rely on all of your senses. Even if you can’t see a way out, can you feel your way toward more ease and freedom?
Tarot card of the month: Eight of Swords
SAGITTARIUS (November 22 - December 21)
It’s time to walk away from something that no longer serves you. It’s called a break up because it’s broken. Whether you’re breaking up with a lover, a friend, a job, or a belief, know that not everything is meant to come with you. With gentleness (especially toward yourself), let it go.
Tarot card of the month: Eight of Cups
CAPRICORN (December 22 - January 19)
This month you have an invitation to shift your relationship to the worst case scenario monster in your mind. Try picturing it as a dachshund puppy (or another adorable small creature of your choice). After all it’s just trying to protect you, and its bark is much worse than its bite.
Tarot card of the month: Nine of Swords
AQUARIUS (January 20 - February 18)
You have walked away from something — but what are you walking toward? What is it that truly fills your cup? You are the only one with the answer, and it might require some internal inquiry. Don’t worry: you’ll know when you know.
Tarot card of the month: Nine of Cups
PISCES (February 19 - March 20)
The time has come. To boss the fuck up. You don’t have to worry about stepping on other people’s toes when you are fully inhabiting your own unique way of being in the world. Be you, unapologetically.
Tarot card of the month: The Emperor