Why You Shouldn't Read Your Horoscope

If you are actively trying to employ manifestation techniques or creative visualization to create what you want in your life, reading your daily Horoscope can wreck the whole house of cards.

Reading Your Daily Horoscope Is Too Easy I have a widget on my Google Homepage that displays the daily Sun Sign Horoscope for Leo. I added it in a fit of madness -- a day when I went Google Homepage Widget Crazy, excited by all the possible goodies there were to choose from.

My biggest mistake was leaving the horoscope near the top of the page, near my email preview screen, my feed reader, and links to my blog control panels. So, the [cough*LAME] daily message to Leo from tarot.com, with its eye-catching Fischer-Price-style orange-and-yellow Lion icon, is one of the first things I see everyday when I fire up my web browser.

Bad, Bad Idea First of all, the screen real estate the Horoscope Widget occupies is totally inappropriate in terms of priority -- above-the-fold and sitting front-row alongside my Reading and Writing Toolbelt -- I don't think so, honey, I'm gonna have to ask you to move...

Reading your daily, tabloid-worthy, sun sign horoscope is like letting some random, sweet-hearted but tacky street-hooker sit at the anchor desk with Ann Curry and Diane Sawyer during a national news broadcast about genocide and global pandemics, and comment on what highlights might do for them...

What's wrong with reading your horoscope? It's harmless enough...right?

Horoscopes can be very harmful -- they should be given a proper Time and Place, and that should rarely be sitting on the Throne of Your Attention. Your horoscope, if and when you read it, should be way, way down on your list of priorities.

No offense to Ann and Diane -- I love both of them -- but I think all these newsie ladies need to get out of my face first thing in the morning, take a backseat to the precious morning screen time of my own thoughts and intentions for the day, and come when they're called.

Your Daily Sun Sign Tabloid Horoscope is a cheap, over-generalized form of Astrology. It's like off-the-rack underwear from Walmart that you can't even try on before buying because it's wrapped in plastic -- they'll do in a pinch, but probably not the panties you want to be sporting for your honeymoon.

Compare the value of a message on a fortune cookie to a personal reading with a reputable psychic medium. Whether or not you should believe in astrology or divination is not the argument I'm making here, but belief increases the potential danger.

Your Daily Sun Sign Horoscope is not personalized enough. Your Astrological Natal Chart is as unique as your fingerprints. No two Charts are the same; even identical twins have distinctly individual Charts, differing at least in the time of birth.

There are many astrological factors affecting your day. Transits are the changing influences charted along linear Time in astrology -- I don't know of any transits that only occur on one day with a great degree of significance.

Most transits and aspects [the perceived positions of one planetary body in relation to another] span years, months, weeks, and days.

Even Lunar astrology, which focuses on the effects of the Moon -- clearly one of the most measurable phenomena, and one of the most rapidly changing -- describes transits that wax - grow toward a peak of influence -- and then wane - descrease in intensity -- over a period of a few days.

Sun position is not the only factor in Astrology, nor is it the most important. Your Chart is a recipe with a lot of ingredients, none of them qualifiable in terms of importance, unless you're looking at the Chart with a specific Question in mind.

Which is the most important ingredient in a cake: the flour, the egg, the sugar, or the temperature of the oven you bake it in? Any baker can tell you that all these elements are equally important. If I hand you a bowl of flour with a teaspoon of vanilla extract, would you call that a cake?

Neither can I tell you what your Sun Sign is and call that an Astrology Reading.

The danger of reading your Horoscope every day is a simple matter of impressions. If you are actively trying to employ manifestation techniques or creative visualization to create what you want in your life, your Horoscope can wreck the whole house of cards.

Any prophecy that you are exposed to can be self-fulfilling -- good or bad. And let's face it, horoscopes are often bad news: "Problems in your domestic environment today will arise due to..."

Any message we take in and believe about ourselves -- even unsolicited advice and observations by people whose opinions we value -- can be insidious and potentially damaging.

External information is crucial to survival, but we all know that our true power is found within.

Consider A Horoscope Diet Several years ago, I implemented a total astrology blackout in my conscious daily existence. I grew up "speaking astrology" -- in my family, this is a vocabulary used to describe human behavior and relationships. I think it's very valuable as a language.

But years of studying Astrology and casting Charts professionally had put me in a place where it was just too much of a given. I discussed with my mother the same issue I'm talking to you about here -- that I felt that keeping up with my Chart -- even my actual, unique, specific transits - the bigger, deeper, better version that blows the tabloid Sun Sign column out of the water -- could adversely affect my expectations and intentions.

You attract more of whatever you think about. There are a lot of external sources for thoughts, hopes, worries, concerns. Many of them you can't choose or control; so any that you can positively influence, you should.

At least cut out the negative stuff. You have enough bad news sniping and biting and chipping away at your positive attitude. Your consciousness is both powerful and incredibly fragile, at the same time.

As an experiment, for two and a half years I simply ignored astrology. Incidentally, I ignore News from time to time, as well. What's interesting is how much still creeps in to your consciousness, even when you are willfully blocking it out.

Don't worry, you won't miss much. You can't make it through a day without someone at least coming at you with "Have you heard...?"

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You. If you really want to be in denial about something, your daily horror-scope might be one of the healthiest things to choose.