• April Horoscopes

    By Ichrak Dahou

    April is a month of mixed progress. While new beginnings, proper to the Spring season, arrive with enthusiasm and spirit, the retrograde movement of key planets this month will delay robust and firm establishment. Therefore, be sure to give your situations additional thought, care, and consideration. This is more an extended season of seeding than getting brand new ventures off the ground.

    By mid April, the powerful planet of love, Venus, will have gone direct. What else besides the force of love can knock you on your bum or electrify your energy system with pleasure? Expect clarity to unfold around love and relationships present since late January. This particular passage contains a potent dose of both healing and responsibility, so acknowledge reality and apply maturity, transparency, wholeness, and effort to relationships for a stance that works with the symbolism of this astrology.

    This month’s Full Moon in Libra on April 11 is action packed, mental, and vivifying. The New Moon in Taurus is among the best of the year, so honor it by envisioning and tending to the contours of anything you would like to remain steadfast and lasting in your life. April 9 to May 3 hosts fleet-footed Mercury’s retrograde and tells a story about personal identity and orientation to value, asking for tremendous mental flexibility and delivering many a keen and genius insight. The usual Mercury retrograde counsel applies: give yourself additional travel time, exercise patience with yourself and others, renounce rigidity, wait to purchase electronics until post-retrograde, and triple check details before signing on the dotted line. Have a wonderful month!

    Warmly,
    Ichrak

    Illustrations by Abby Litman 

    ARIES

    You have been leading the way for all of us to take a more enlightened view of social and group dynamics since 2010 when Uranus, the great awakener, entered your sign. Not all of us can understand what you perceive and why you take the actions you do, but you can certainly help all of us to understand. This month hands you a megaphone and a direct line to the radical inspiration that has been inciting you to live the most real and expressed version of yourself. It might be the case that you consider how to profit from these unusual, advanced modes of existence that you have been embodying. Or it might be that you re-consider the value of what you are putting on the table and sharing with others, with the aim of understanding the durability, classic nature, and lasting quality of the insights you glean from your lived experience — or imbuing your insights with these qualities. The last 10 days of the month find you writing, communicating, and thinking with more vigor. Track and document what is unfolding in your world and the thoughts that come about as a result. Exercise flexibility in your communication because the muses will descend if they observe you willing to look past a goal you may have in mind in favor of noticing the genius that arises spontaneously in the moment.

    TAURUS

    You realize the precious value of the allies you have cultivated over the months and years. You also realize the ways your spirit grows and whole life benefits from the expansion of the circles in which you establish and develop meaningful relationships. You know that you get out as much as you put in, and in the process of creating experiences and shaping outcomes, it helps to define what you believe, what you hope for, and what you want. This month the skills, knowledge, and resources you have to offer benefit those with whom you share your work and your vision, and they in turn share precious resources with you. While this may sound straightforward, this natural exchange toes some of the most taboo and psychologically buried territory in our society. Your motives and those of others matter, and the more honestly you can appraise what these are, the cleaner your exchanges will be. Because the lessons you learn on the journey, in this regard, will be directly infused into the well water you share with your associates, this is material worth exploring. Firmly rooted in a foundation of love, you all stand only to grow. Give yourself the time and space to change your mind this month, and welcome the creative situations that challenge you to think differently. In the last ten days of the month, you are primed to take a more assertive approach toward earning money. Communicate your stance from a variety of angles for best results.

    GEMINI

    By mid-April you will be in a position to intuit the changes you want to make with regard to your career, or what you would call your vocation, your calling; something you know you need to devote your time and energy to whether or not you get paid — but it’s likely that you do. You may have to let something go — an illusion, an old belief, practice or behavior, or an actual activity you take part in. If this is the case, make the release only after some slow, mature, thorough deliberation. If there is someone in your life who serves as a point of inspiration, as a mentor or guide figure to you, they could now be going through some deep changes of their own, so it would be wise for you to engage with them if they are open to it or give them time to process and come back around when the time feels right. You have a lot more going on anyway, your month could be packed with all kinds of social functions and group activities. The people you associate with could be changing, or you are changing your stance toward them. You do serve as a rallying leader figure among your friends and social network, and this month you could devise means to reach more people, influence them to take action, sprinkle your own ideas into the social mix, and watch some interesting social dynamics unfold. If you do this, you are advised to have an end in mind, although the path toward reaching it could take a different form than what you may be considering, conditions which you are, of course, singularly able to adapt to with excellence.

    CANCER

    If you have been thinking of changing jobs or reinventing your vision, scope, direction, or execution of your work in the world, this month would be a good time to meditate deeply on the alternative tracks you would like to take or changes you would like to make. If you experience external disruptions at work, or through a boss or the workplace itself, take this unusual opportunity to ask yourself questions about the highest purpose you see yourself fulfilling as a part of your work here on earth. A hint found in your sign’s chart is that you lead us all to nurture a bold relationship with the potential found within each of us. The wisdom of that counsel comes from your own experience connecting with the core flow of your soul through your personality. Basically whatever you do, your sign’s signature ability is to nurture, propagate, and bloom. Entertain a bold move and stimulate growth. This month you could potentially align yourself with a powerful entity who can help you to advance your mission in a lasting way among broader groups and social contacts. In the last ten days of the month, excitable Mars enters the most secret part of your sign’s chart, a place you happen to have conscious access to. It would be good, from that time, to take direction from the intuitive whispers you hear in quiet times such as the early morning right as you awake.

    LEO

    This is a great month to set sights on your distant plans, goals, and ambitions. Let the far off and long term considerations be the most prominent as you design your next steps. When it comes to your menu of possibilities, you are being asked to step into new mindsets that will help you to look farther than you have before. At the same time, if you are feeling the call to reconsider how you give of the deepest well of your life force, don’t rush the process. The beginning of the month will provide opportunities for you to begin to consider a re-design or inception of a new vision. It will be ready to come to full form later on in the year around September. Around mid-month, you have the opportunity to understand dynamics that have long been a part of the most intimate parts of your psychology — regarding open trust and sharing love and/or money with close partners — and to create ways to maturely and responsibly enhance and heal something that needs to be restored within you. In these 10 days of the month, you can take a breather from the intense slow burn of productivity at work as that energy becomes more upbeat throughout the groups and networks of people you associate with. The core message of the upcoming Mercury retrograde for you is using your dreams and visions for the future to seed what you create as a part of your vocation during the spring season. Vocation doesn’t have to be your career, but it can be. But there are plenty of people who work a typical job and then do their passion of gardening or permaculture or painting at night or on the weekends. Think about it, and think about who can support you to meet this vision you are nurturing.

    VIRGO

    Someone else’s vulnerability is mirroring to your own capacity for depth of feeling. When you travel to that intimate place with someone else, it’s best to have honesty and trust as foundational dynamics, so that the space between you accommodates the depths you are allowing one another to share. Walking amongst the ruins of a relationship gone by might be painful but making that resurrection is actually part of what your spirit needs to do now. Engaging in this exercise helps you to understand yourself a little deeper, open yourself a little wider, and find peace with an experience that sets up shop deep inside you. This adventure into the more tender parts of your inner space will in turn not only create compassion and sympathy for yourself, but deepen your existing relationships and allow you to see the shades of others’ experiences that may have been camouflaged to you before. From the last week of the month your career becomes an area of focus, asking for a lot more discussion, ideas, and stimulus from you. Let this be the place that you pursue productivity while other areas of your life receive a slow down, re-assessment and re-think.

    LIBRA 

    Your leadership abilities are a phenomenal personal strength — do not underestimate them. Your dynamic ability to get the ball rolling, shape the development of events, and discern the logical next step to take, then actually take it, is a great inspiration to other people. This month will show you how addressing a communication issue at work liberates your energy, freeing you up to throw your personal interests, attitudes, or viewpoints into the community pot and letting your desires play as important a role in what unfolds as everyone else’s desires. The fabulous Danielle LaPorte shares a wonderful idea about incremental commitment that you might find helpful to meditate on this month. It is the idea that though you may want to enthusiastically offer up your own resources to share with others – emotional, financial, energetic, or otherwise, you pace yourself, check that impulse, and offer up your substantial goods in the form of a measured slow drip. Once the other person has demonstrated their commitment, produced a satisfactory result, or otherwise made good progress, that would then be a time to lavish your resources and gratitude upon them. The last week of the month begins a month long phase of you envisioning your dreams and plans for the future. Let the mind roam, the feet wander, and your visions be informed by a variety of possible futures and all the viewpoints you can reasonably digest.

    SCORPIO 

    You are focusing a lot of energy on work this month, and day to day things that need to get done. The way you might like to approach a work project is to hone in on it with your Scorpio powers of relentless focus and will power. However, this is a place where you are doing a lot of reframing and re-thinking. If there is a workplace attraction involved, consider how pouring your energy into focusing on making something happen with another person is affecting your ability to be profitable or to line your coffers. Others that you encounter daily, whether at work or somewhere else, want to give you a lot of their energy and focus right now. You could consider that leading a collaboration in a new direction might mean something more gentle than an external show of force or will power. And, while that strategy could in fact eventually be profitable to you in terms of dollars, the stars are saying that what is actually being exchanged and gained on a soul level is giving you life in a way that is much more lasting and meaningful than paper money — though that will eventually be a nice side effect. You begin a process of re-orienting your approach to earning money this month and while this will include the considerations and input of others it will benefit you to introspect enough to map your own inner landscape when it comes to this particular issue.

     SAGITTARIUS

    This month you realize how offering devotion to your family can be among the most healing things you can do for yourself. In the process, you resurrect what you must of the past and give it the proper emotional attention that it deserves. This year you are wrapping up a potent passage of becoming acquainted with who you are, what you want, and where in the world you fit in. This month, everything you have been becoming turns inward for a final firing, glazing, and sealing process. That’s potter lingo for you will begin firmly establishing all the changes you have made over the past 18 months or so in preparation for stoic Saturn leaving your sign this December. Through August you have an opportunity to more deeply explore and expand the terrain you see yourself trekking. After that, it’s go time. Savor and take advantage of the process. The last week of the month offers you more energy to put into your closest one-on-one partnerships, romantic, close friendships, and business. This is the time to liven things up by rotating the routine, pursuing a different line of communication, brainstorming new ideas, and going to new and exciting places.

    CAPRICORN

    This is the month that you make your home a sanctuary for the important work you need to do. This has been a consistent them over the past couple of months, but the truth is there is a lot happening in this area of your chart. You would do well to adopt a flexible mentality and be open to wild suggestions received via synchronicity and other unlikely places, about how you can work toward peace in your living space. While your home will always serve as a dynamic base of operations, it has been a place of enhanced activity and even upheaval over the past years. Find home within yourself, and make conscious your appreciation for the spaces that surround your home. Get to know your area in a deeper and broader way than the oldest of locals. Make a gesture of care for the land beyond the immediate property on which you reside. Talk about your home, visualize its ideal characteristics, and share these with others — your words are carried on breath that is more potent and creative than you may realize. This month romance and work may compete for your attention at the same time that you are stepping into increased responsibility and an increased need for deep introspection. You of all signs are equipped for finding the right balance for these areas of life, and conjuring help with this if and when need be.

    AQUARIUS

    This month could find you re-thinking your approach to meeting your long term visions and ambitions for your life. It is a great time to check in with yourself and ask how the goals you have align with who you are today and the roles and experiences you would like to step into over the course of the rest of the year. Let this month be the beginning of that re-visioning and the time when any new seeds are planted via your own communicative initiative. Reach out to the people and entities you need to reach out to and you will find that you are able to assert yourself with remarkable pointedness of direction and have refreshingly eye-opening conversations with people who help you brainstorm remarkable ideas. These folks could also offer up connections and resources that would be useful to you. Take a long term approach and let the ideas flow now and the realities generate over the next couple of seasons. You are working with powerful manifestation energy so it is especially important that you consistently direct your thoughts toward the outcomes you wish to experience. Reality then morphs itself to help you and our vision meet each other. Home and family matters could be asking for more attention from you. This could even have to do with the deep ancestral past. Use this energy to make any changes at home you are being called to — whether that is physical or psychological. Plant life, aromatherapy, re-decoration, and spending time outside around your home or neighborhood are all ways to honor this fire and earth energy present around your home space this month.

    PISCES

    It’s time to review, consolidate, and integrate all of the growth you have experienced over the last half year or so. You have changed, and the world around you responds to your own inner unfolding, meeting you as far as you have met yourself. This month is a great time to do something soulful and pleasurable for yourself that really marks and honors the transition you have been through. Any genuinely open, meaningful and heartfelt exchange with someone who is going to support you for all the growth you have already made will help you to reflect on this passage in a way that honors and seals it in. This month you also have energy available to liberate energy around money and finances. You realize now that the health of money as it flows through your world relies a lot on your ability to apply some good old fashioned and reliable goal setting alongside an attitude of pursuit, like courting a distant but totally available and completely desirable lover. This month and next really offer you the ability to make this new realization of unlimited abundance a part of your personality so deep that you carry it with you for the rest of your days, weeks, and years. Just think of the various possibilities you can play with now that this newfound certainty is becoming firmly established in you.