This week, the new moon’s introspective nature is enhanced by its passage through four astrological houses that directly affect our sense of security and self, relationships with family, connection to the home, and our pursuit of pleasure. This powerful lunar energy calls us to sit with our most vulnerable emotions to process them fully — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Our reflective endeavors will come to a head at the end of the week as the dark moon conjoins with the Sun, the ruler of our ego. This week is one for inner transformations, redirections, and prioritization.
How will your sign fare in the second week of the new year?
Choose Your Sign
As tempting as it might be to continue into the second full week of the new year with your guns blazing, the stars suggest you take a softer approach. Don’t underestimate the power of pausing in between periods of productivity. Despite how it might feel to your usually assertive, energetic self, you can accomplish just as much by knowing when not to act.
This will be especially relevant in the middle of the week as your ruling planet, Mars, conjoins with a new moon in the 4th House of Home and Family. Take a moment to sit with, rather than act on, your emotions. The decisions we make in haste are often our most sloppiest. You’ll know when you’re actually ready to move forward.
There is a vast difference between acknowledging past hurts so that you can learn from your mistakes and clinging to grudges, regret, and other negative feelings out of fear. These emotions might feel like armor from a limited, ego-driven perspective. But in reality, they’re closer to anchors keeping you on this frustrating plateau of your personal growth.
You must believe in yourself enough to know that you can make the right decisions forward without keeping your past at the forefront of your mind. No matter how hard you try, you can’t change what’s already happened. Luckily, you do have the opportunity to affect what’s next. The stars urge you to focus on what’s ahead, Taurus. Leave the past where it belongs.
Be careful not to focus so heavily on your external surroundings that you neglect your inner environment, Gemini. Your desire to keep others happy is admirable, but it proves unproductive when you repeatedly pursue these efforts to the detriment of your well-being. Eventually, this will cause burnout that will make it to where you can’t offer others or yourself the support that a situation calls for.
Thus, it’s critical that you guard your resources carefully. It’s easy to respect the finite nature of financial and physical resources. It’s far easier to forget that our emotional and mental resources are just as limited — sometimes even more so. Don’t be afraid to push back on the expectations of those who don’t have your best interests in mind.
Sitting with interpersonal conflict is certainly uncomfortable. But you can’t always will a problem to go away — or another person’s mind to reach a resolution — whenever it’s convenient for you. Unfortunately, you’ll have to see this difficult lesson from the universe through to completion. Now is the time to practice patience, grace, and empathy.
Consider a time when you were on the other side of a disagreement. Would the prodding of the other party convince you to resolve yourself more quickly, or would you dig your heels in and take even longer to make a decision? As unsettling as it might feel, those around you deserve the same space you’d expect if you were the one with hurt feelings.
Is being liked worth your dignity? Your ego, ruled by the Sun, has been inching toward a tense squaring off with Eris, a dwarf planet that governs our rebellious sides. As this planet returns to its direct movement, the stars offer clarity in how we’ve been cheating ourselves of our true passions, goals, and identity for the sake of winning others’ approval.
The stars urge you to remember that the most important approval you can obtain is your own. An opportunity will present itself later in the week to reflect on the ways your inner self and your outward actions have deviated along your life’s path. A bit of diversion is to be expected, and in that same breath, so is redirection.
There is a fine line between healthy skepticism and chronic over-analyzation. The universe doesn’t operate in black and white, Virgo. The longer you keep your perspective stuck in this highly delineated format, the more difficult it will become to take life’s ups and downs as they come. Indeed, chasing down perfection is an exhausting and futile effort at best.
The stars urge you to approach the world — and your inner self — with a more forgiving heart this week. How might you react to your current circumstances if you forgo your superbly high standards of conduct? There is great prosperity to be found outside the confines of your comfort zone. A flexible mindset is like anything else in life. Practice makes perfect.
Not every problem, obstacle, or injustice is yours to fix, Libra. Your heart is larger than most, but this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have an immense capacity to support, love, and empower those around you. But on the other hand, you struggle to do the same for yourself after expending all your energy on others.
This week, the stars urge you to extend that same radical compassion you dole out so willingly to yourself. Considering your own needs and helping others don’t always have to be mutually exclusive. There are ways to accomplish both if you take the time to try. Keep an eye out early in the week for a chance to put yourself first. You deserve it.
The reality that you’ve made the best decisions you could with the information you had at the time and the reality that those decisions are no longer the best for you can be true at the same time. Changing our minds is an inevitability of life. It’s not a sign of failure by your previous self, nor is it a sign of finickiness or waywardness in your current state.
Rather, it’s a gentle nudge toward a more enlightened perspective. Eventually, the revelations you make today will soon become the outdated notions you’ll move on from further down the road. It’s all part of the process. Use the emotions you’re currently feeling as a guide. The decisions you made one, two, even ten years ago don’t have the same navigational power.
As much as you might like to drag everyone to your life path with you, that’s not how the world works. Holding others to your standards of ambition, work ethic, and perseverance is a recipe for disappointment. Serve as an example if you must. But don’t let your ego mislead you into thinking that you have any meaningful sway over someone else’s motivations.
At the end of the day, we all act on what we believe is our best interest. As such, you’d be better off focusing your energy on making progress on your own. If your friends, family, or colleagues want to join you, then that’s great! But holding your breath while you wait for them to do so is a waste of everyone’s time.
When we’re deep in the humdrum of daily life, it can be difficult to see the bigger picture. As a result, we feel stuck in quicksand that, in actuality, is more like a rainy puddle — inconvenient when stepped in, sure, but certainly not something that’s difficult to overcome. Consider how different the problems you faced five years ago feel now in the forgiving light of hindsight.
Indeed, your current situation will one day seem all the more manageable after the passing of time. But luckily, you don’t have to wait for years to pass to adopt this perspective. Don’t focus on making grandiose changes or gestures toward improvement. Instead, try adopting small, meaningful changes that will compound over time.
Change is rarely a painless process, Aquarius. Don’t let this temporary discomfort convince you that you’ve made the wrong decision. As difficult as it feels to stare down the unknown, consider this: the sooner you step into this uncharted territory, the quicker you can begin acquainting yourself with it. The only thing standing in your way is, in fact, you.
As your ruling planet, Uranus, continues its retrograde motion, the cosmos urges you to reflect on the ways in which you’ve alienated or discredited yourself from achieving true happiness. A harmonious trine between this planet and an introspective new moon offers much-needed clarity in this regard. Keep an open mind as the information comes in.
Identifying ways in which we’ve been holding ourselves back can be a disheartening process. But avoiding this exercise won’t prevent this sort of self-sabotage from happening. On the contrary, it will likely exacerbate the problem. Rather than focusing on what could have been, the stars urge you to adopt a different perspective: what could be?
The harsh truth of this realization is that you won’t be able to make up for lost time. However, your identification of the problem now has saved your future self from even more backtracking, regardless of whether or not it feels like it. Rejoice in this effort to be better to yourself and others. The mistakes aren’t what’s important — how you learn from them is.