Insights for July 2026

Awakening

As the truth is revealed, the inner guidance becomes stronger. M

“Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through you, to bring into the physical world through you its unending and unfathomable reverence for and love of life. WHY? When the soul is in sync with its purpose, your life is enriched with meaning. It gives you strength to overcome obstacles and challenges To help yourself and others move forward and beyond the overwhelm of your difficulties to a healthy and productive life." Garu Zukav

I have always wanted to live outside of the roles that have been assigned to me. M

Allow yourself to be in the in between. Margaret

I want to be the calm in my own river. Margaret

This is a time to magically align with your own work. Be careful to stay aligned - and not with others’ work but with yours. Margaret

“Sometimes plants die.” Margaret

There is unlearning in becoming. Margaret

The age of curated spiritual personas is closing. The cosmos is impatient with our beautiful theories and exquisitely articulated longings. Neptune and Saturn together in the sign of the warrior demand that we incarnate what we have only imagined. They insist that our visions take on weight and make demands of us. Aries insists on first-person presence, on showing up in the flesh with whatever we've got, even if that feels insufficient.

The hero's journey can't be about conquest or mastery but has to bear the wound of the world in a new way: transmuting private disillusionment into public, embodied compassion.

The old myth is being retired. No more of the lone seeker venturing out, claiming the treasure, and returning triumphant. In its place, a stranger and more demanding initiation emerges: warriors who fight not to win but to learn how to be in love with life. They clear a path that others can actually walk on, not just admire from a distance.

Our ideals must get robustly practical. Dreams that can't survive contact with the brawl-and-jostle world are being dissolved. Only those visions willing to scuffle and rumble are allowed to go on.

This is a brutal but loving sorting. The cosmos is composting our spiritual escapism to clear the ground for visions that can survive difficult conversations, financial setbacks, and sleepless nights with a sick child. Can our prophecies negotiate, organize, build, and repair?

Our faith has to become less about what we believe and more about what we dare to enact in the face of fear, failure, and futility.

Belief is no longer a noun we possess but a verb we perform. The question shifts from "What's your spiritual path?" to "What does your spiritual path lead you to do on a Tuesday morning when nothing feels meaningful?"

Aries is the sign of beginnings, and what begins now is the long, awkward, exhilarating practice of becoming the people our prophecies have been describing. Not someday. Not when conditions improve. Now, with this body, in this hour, with whatever fear is currently moving through us.” Bob Brezsny

Astrology July 2026

The chart above shows a basket shape [highlighted in yellow] of the outer planets aligned on July 19, 2026. It is the chart for Zohran Mamdani.

This basket shape is a very significant event affecting all humans and events on the planet. The powerful outer planets of transformation (Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) are exactly aligned, creating this basket shape.

It is an activation. If you look up your chart on astro.com, choose natal and transit chart on July 19, 2026, you can see on the outer wheel, in green, where the planets were, Follow my example above and circle Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (on the outer wheel in green on your chart.) These are the planets creating the basket. They fall into a different part of the chart for each of us [based on your birth chart.]

See my key words above for the activation of each planet’s transformative power. I have super shorthanded the potential key words for each activation to make it simple and hopefully understandable. But if you copy the key words for each planet onto your chart, you will see the places that activation is taking place in your chart.

It is important to understand the simple key words for the houses - to understand where the planetary energies are activated in your chart. Here is a very simple shorthand for the meaning of the houses:

1 self

2 values and money

3 mind, thinking, and communicating

4 home, mother, and family roots

5 creativity, love, children, and joy

6 work, health, and service

7 primary relationships

8 others’ values and resources

9 ideals, higher education, travel, global

10 career and authority

11 long-term vison and network

12 evolution of consciousness

You are in luck if you have my deck of astrology cards to do this reading. There is a card for each planet and each house, and you just lay them out beside the planet!

Read the key word you wrote on the outer wheel for each planet, then read the corresponding key words for the house where this planet is located. This gives you the shorthand meaning for each of the placements and tells you what the basket configuration is activating for you – all of these four placements – together.

Or - reach out to me for an appointment to read this for you. With a check-in, one hour reading we can read in detail the activation of this energy in your chart and for you.

The energy of this basket has set in motion big changes for each of us - the changes will continue to manifest. It is important to know what they are and keep that in mind going forward. It is a pivotal time, and this is pivotal information.

Grief

“Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather than a natural function of being alive, of feeling life deeply and living it fully. All our sorrows have been wasted if we have not learned to suffer and to be surprised by the door at the end of our suffering, on the other side of which is simply the world, which keeps on worlding. It is not healing that allows us to go on but integration, allowing our losses to live right alongside our joys for either to mean something, to jolt us from the stupor of indifference that is worse than death.

No one has articulated this more plainly and profoundly than Nick Cave in reflecting on the anniversary of his young son’s death:

It is early morning in Nîmes. I am waiting for coffee while looking out of the window of the small hotel where Susie and I are staying. The square below is waking up. There are a few cars, a woman walking a dog, a kid on a scooter, an old man smoking on a bench. Today, Susie and I plan to walk around the town for a bit, maybe visit a church, and maybe find the river that people say runs clean and cold. Later, I’ll play a show at the amphitheatre.

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won’t be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

This may be the most discomposing aspect of loss — how impartially the world goes on when your world has been shattered. And yet the great paradox is that it is precisely by surrendering to this ongoingness, both dispassionate and rife with wonder, that we are returned to life.

Susie wakes now, and I sit beside her. She says she dreamt about Arthur. Arthur often comes to her in that way. The dreams are simple, poetic. She tells me she dreamt she was in a dark place, perhaps a wood, calling for him. But it was too dim, and she couldn’t find him.

These feelings of loss drift through our bodies like ghosts. They settle in our cells, in our blood, gathering around days like this like weather patterns, shaping us in ways we cannot understand. It is a sad day. I can see it in my wife’s eyes. But it is an ordinary day too, a beautiful day. The best day. Susie is already at the window, pulling back the curtain, looking out over the town, the sun shining on her face.” Nick Cave, The Marginalian.

Vipassanā Meditation and Buddhism

“It is important to emphasize, in discussing the art of meditation (and the practice as you continue it becomes an art, with many subtle nuances), that you shouldn’t start out with some idea of gaining. This is the deepest paradox in all of meditation: we want to get somewhere—we wouldn’t have taken up the practice if we didn’t—but the way to get there is just to be fully here. The way to get from point A to point B is really to be at A. When we follow the breathing in the hope of becoming something better, we are compromising our connection to the present, which is all we ever have. If your breathing is shallow, your mind and body restless, let them be that way, for as long as they need to. Just watch them.

The first law of Buddhism is that everything is constantly changing. No one is saying that the breathing should be some particular way all the time. If you find yourself disappointed with your meditation, there’s a good chance that some idea of gaining is present. See that and let it go. However your practice seems to you, cherish it just the way it is. You may think that you want it to change, but that act of acceptance is in itself a major change.

One place where ideas of gaining typically come in, where people get obsessive about the practice, is in the task of staying with the breathing. We take a simple instruction and create a drama of success and failure around it: we’re succeeding when we’re with the breath, failing when we’re not. Actually, the whole process is meditation: being with the breathing, drifting away, seeing that we’ve drifted away, gently coming back. It is extremely important to come back without blame, without judgment, without a feeling of failure. If you have to come back a thousand times in a five-minute period of sitting, just do it. It’s not a problem unless you make it into one.”  Larry rosenberg, tricycle buddhist review.