I can hear the response already:  “What?  Virgos?  Sexy?  You’ve got to be kidding.”  But I’m not.  Prepare to be shocked as you discover why.

If you’re a Virgo type, you probably already know that some Virgo habits are viewed by potential partners as un-sexy.  Have you ever been called “picky,” “fastidious,” “perfectionist” or even the dreaded “nag?”  Even these traits, when viewed in the right way, can be completely sexy.  Here’s how:

1.    Virgo, you’re clean.  And what’s not to like about that?  Sure, you demand that your partner be clean too, but that’s not a bad thing.  Just don’t get all OCD about it.  Be reasonable.  And allow them a space that’s all their own, to have as messy as they want to.  Then take a space for yourself, in which you can play with order and chaos in the rhythm that feels right to you.  And find balance in the areas you and your partner share.

2.    You’re independent.  The definition of a virgin in ancient times was “an independent woman, an unmarried woman, a woman complete unto herself.”  Obviously, not all Virgos are female but the truth is, Virgos of both genders don’t really need anyone else.  This actually gives you a huge advantage in the relationship arena—you don’t appear desperate.

3.    You’re a perfectionist.  Sure, you want the perfect partner.  But you also want to be the perfect you.  To those who relate with you, it appears as if all the judgment is directed outwardly.  But if they could get inside your head, they’d quickly realize that even more judgment is self-directed.  Ten times more.  This means a Virgo is self-maintaining.  Who wouldn’t want to be with a person who is always striving to improve themselves?

4.    Virgo is the virgin, right?  As a Virgo, you have a God-given ability to restore your virginity.  This is a conceptual, not a literal thing.  It’s in your mind (and as you probably know, the brain is the largest sex organ).  You can conceptually restore your virginity anytime you decide to close up your boundary.  You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?  Don’t live with your boundary closed, Virgo, because when you open up to love again, it can be entirely fresh and new for you.  Just like the first time, only better and better as the years pass and you get more comfortable with your body and its appetites.

5.    As I’ve been saying, you have boundaries.  You know where all the lines are.  This means that transgression really means something to you.  When Virgo lets her hair down, she really lets it down.  There’s no one more lapsed than a lapsed Catholic and there’s no one who understands sheer kinkiness than a person who is hyper-aware of impropriety.  You get where I’m going with this?  Absolutely nobody misbehaves better than Virgo.

Now it begins to make sense how some people fantasize about nurses and like to “play doctor.”  Virgo has inherent hotness all her own.

Love yourself, Virgo!  Put those perfectionist tendencies to work on learning to relax, and to relish your body and your life.  Because maybe—just maybe—you are already completely perfect.

Got a favorite Virgo you’d like to celebrate this year?
How about a birthday astrology reading?
Contact Jamie to find out how.

This is a repost of an article I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Journal.  You can find the original here.

Solutions for Earth-Gone-Wrong

In my recent post Personality Flaws of the Four Elements I described ways the 4 Elements can go wrong, each according to its own nature.

How To Know If Earth Is Grounding You
When your life is carefully measured from achievement to achievement (or failure), it’s easy to forget how to have fun.  Earth is the poster child for “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  Your Earth has gone wrong when:

•    You’re such a critical perfectionist that your partner calls you a nag.
•    You’re a cynic, only interested in the bottom line and closed to any ideas that don’t have already proven value.
•    You’ve been called “cold” or “calculating.”
•    You’re prone to overindulging in physical pleasures to compensate for how hard you work or how boring your job is.
•    You’ve learned to defer gratification in favor of long-term goals—learned it so well that you can’t let yourself off the hook during a vacation and you despair of enjoying retirement.

Solution One:  Balance Earth With The Other 3 Elements
If your Earth is distorted, the other elements can help restore balance.  When your routines and systems are so effective that even you are bored, it’s time to break up the Earth with a little Fire.  Be spontaneous, take risks, look dopey.  Fling yourself into something, instead of calculating all its details first.

Earth gets dull and blockish without the lightness of Air.  Air encourages brainstorming sessions and crazy ideas—some may sound just like empty theories, but others will, with the time and testing Earth provides, prove useful in the end.  But you have to open your ears and listen first.

Water fertilizes Earth in a wonderful way, bringing warmth, emotion, compassion and sensitivity Earth does not naturally possess.  Too many late nights at the office?  Balance them with cozy family time.  Gotten too controlled or controlling?  Nothing like a nice emotional outburst to break down the walls.  Oh, and don’t forget to be vulnerable.

Solution Two:  Emphasize Healthy Earth
Healthy Earth practices can eliminate the need for compensatory, negative Earth behaviors.  Here are some examples of “Earth-Fu:”

•    Pay close attention to your bodily needs and engage in rigorous physical self-care.
•    Feed yourself delicious, homemade, organic, healthy food on a regular basis.  It tastes best when you cooked it yourself.
•    Organize your home, your office and your projects in ways that allow you to streamline, be effective and stop worrying.  Work smarter, not harder.
•    Fall in love with this physical world:  get out in nature more, breathe clean air and surround yourself with trees.
•    Set achievable goals and be consistent about rewarding yourself (even if it’s just a mental pat on the back) when you succeed.  When you become preoccupied with your failures, wrench your attention away from them and instead put it on what you’ve done right.

The Four Elements are a fascinating part of human temperament.
Find out about yours in a reading with Jamie:
Contact Jamie to learn how.

Coming up next:  Does Air Have You Lost In A Cloud?

Remember that old TV show “The Odd Couple,” with Oscar and Felix, two bachelors living together in the 70’s?  When we think of Virgo, we may well think of Felix.  It’s easy to imagine that Felix is a Virgo type, because he’s so fastidious.  After all, Felix vacuums during poker games, while Oscar leaves pizza crusts under the bed and his room is always a mess.  The two of them continually snipe about order around the apartment.  But I have a new idea for you:  Oscar is Virgo too.  Do you want to know why?

People think Virgo is naturally orderly, tidy, clean, meticulous and so forth, but that’s just half of the story.  It’s not that being organized and clean is easy for a Virgo type.  What is actually going on is not that Virgo is clean, it’s that Virgo has a sensitivity to order.  When things are messy, Virgo notices.  But not every Virgo has the wherewithal to live up to that sensitivity by creating the degree of order they’d like to have in their life (much the way a Gemini secretly wonders if they’re smart enough or a Leo wonders if that last cool thing they did got noticed at all).  The Virgo who is overwhelmed is a sad creature, never getting the tidiness that their soul loves.  And what does that result in?  Oscar.

Oscar represents the Virgo who has given up.  Underneath the disorder, Oscar still cares very much about where things go and how they are kept.  But he just doesn’t have what it takes to maintain that kind of environment.  Felix does, but Felix overdoes it.  Felix, left to his own devices, would live in a hospital, with hard, cold surfaces wiped down regularly with antiseptic and cheap fluorescent lighting.  No beauty or warmth—only stark efficiency.  It’s like they are 2 extremes of a single personality.  And that personality is Virgo.

Every Virgo type starts off life with a predisposition to enjoying clarity, clean lines, empty spaces, tools staged ready for use.  Virgo loves a clean, empty surface and a to-do list with everything checked off.  Virgos who persist against the entropy this world has to offer also learn to love not only the product of order, but also the process of getting there.  They learn to reward themselves (even with just a mental pat on the back) each time they check an item off that list.

But if you take Virgo too far, it splits into two types:  one who is endlessly industrious in an effort to create an impossibly perfect order and one whose standards are so high that they never do anything at all.  This explains something that was a mystery to me for years:  the fact that Virgo is a Mutable sign.  Mutability suggests a built-in duality and ambivalence which the other 3 Mutable signs all clearly have: Gemini is the Twins, Pisces is the Two Fish, Sagittarius the Archer is a centaur, half man and half beast.  But where is the duality in Virgo?  Finally, all is clear:  the Perfectionist has two faces after all.

More about Virgo here.

Virgos, how about a special birthday present?
Your birthday is your own personal New Year’s Day.
Having an astrology reading at this time can focus you
and give you purpose in the coming year.
Contact Jamie at Pandora@pandoraastrology.com
or 510-816-2504 to schedule a reading.

Why do Virgo types often end up at the top of their profession?  How exactly do they succeed so wildly while operating behind the scenes and fending off showy praises?  And exactly why should you be afraid of that unassuming worker in the corner who actually is going places—and how can you be more like him?  This article explains the reasons why Virgos succeed, and how you can do it too.  By the way, there’s a lie in the title of this article.  By the end of the article it should be clear which part it is.

Virgo Success Secret #1:  Be meticulous. Virgo’s obsession with perfection is an asset at work.  The tendency to groom, sculpt or craft something until it’s perfect may be Virgo’s greatest strength.  God is in the details, as Virgo is well aware and when a Virgo focuses on the very small aspects of a project, she is showing love for it.  When you put that kind of love into your work, others can’t help but notice.

Virgo Success Secret #2:  Don’t care about the credit. Virgo knows that their own egotistic gratification is never as important as performing the task that actually needs to be done.  All that Leo flash and glitz is so last-sign.  Virgos focus on doing the task, and doing it well, rather than showing off their prowess.  Virgo values competency over complacency and avoids looking desperate for praise.

Virgo Success Secret #3:  Serve the actual need. Smart Virgos serve the need at hand and particularly smart Virgos watch the person they are attempting to serve for even the smallest sign of what they need next, so that the Virgo can fulfill it immediately.  A Virgo doesn’t mind being a cog in the machine—in fact, a Virgo takes pride in service well done.  For some useful philosophy on service (both the plusses and the minuses), see the films Gosford Park or Remains of the Day.

Virgo Success Secret #4:  Habit is your friend. Clever Virgos know that habit is like a software program—once you install it, it goes on working for you and you can stop thinking about it.  Figure out which habits will forward your success the best, then put them into place and simply “run program.”  This handles the form of your work, the structure.  Then you can turn your attention back to the content, or details, of it.

Virgo Success Secret #5:  Be whole. When you are whole, you bring all of yourself to your work.  You have good boundaries and can make an accurate assessment of what you can do and what is impossible for you to do.  You make clean contracts.  You don’t complain about what isn’t doable, but go about the business of doing what is.  You are neat, tidy and collected, a self-contained human being.  That’s Virgo.

And there you have them—the reasons why Virgos are going places.  The lie is that these “secrets” are secret.  There’s nothing secret about them.  In fact, they are so obvious as to often go unnoticed.  The old saying “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” was probably coined by a Virgo type.

Virgos, how about a special birthday present?
Your birthday is your own personal New Year’s Day.
Having an astrology reading at this time can focus you
and give you purpose in the coming year.
Contact Jamie at Pandora@pandoraastrology.com
or 510-816-2504 to schedule a reading.

Art by Vinyariel, found on deviantart.com.

In my travels through life as an astrologer I have found that Virgo is the sign most people would rather not be.  “What?  I have Virgo rising?  No!”  “You mean I’m not really a Libra, I’m actually a Virgo?  I didn’t want that.”  “Virgo is so nit-picky. . . Virgos are nags. . . Virgos micromanage.”  I say, why all the Virgo hate?  Virgo is a wonderful sign with so many good qualities—why focus on the bad ones?

The trouble with Virgo is the perfectionism.  Virgo types have a tremendous sensitivity to order and tidiness, whether they can live up to that or not.  A Virgo who lives in a mess and is constantly overwhelmed is a truly miserable human being because they cannot shut off the need for order, even when they are not able to create it for themselves.  A love of order leads to perfectionism, which can lead to criticism and judgment.  Virgos can be very critical and what you don’t realize is that, while the Virgo in your life may be critical towards you, he is likely twice as critical towards himself.  For every nagging comment that comes out his mouth at you, two have already been directed at himself and the one that landed on you is merely the one that escaped his rigorous self-control.  When I tell Virgos this, their shoulders relax visibly in relief.  It is very tiring to always be the only one who seems to care about quality.

The Virgo type is a perfectionist because Virgo approaches life as an artisan.  An artisan is someone who crafts a perfect, beautiful and functional object.  The difference between an artisan and an artist is that an artist creates objects that carry beauty or meaning alone, whereas to be an artisan is to be a craftsman.  An artisan applies technical skill to ends both artistic and practical.  A well-crafted thing is a delight each time you use it and its beauty and meaning spring from its useful and well-executed design.  This is what Virgo is about:  making the very best thing for the use intended, and then shaping, honing and fine-tuning until it simply can’t be made any better.  And a Virgo type can’t help but apply this sensibility to everything in their life.

What’s a Virgo to do with this obsession?  The story I’m about to tell you contains an antidote to Virgo’s perfectionism.  You may have heard this story before; now you’ll hear how it applies to Virgo.  It’s the story of how Michelangelo came to carve the David.

Michelangelo’s David is a study in perfection.  To begin with, the statue is massive, several times the size of a human being at 17 feet tall.  In addition, it is in perfect proportion.  It is the very icon of masculine beauty and glows with archetypal grace.  The story goes that someone once asked Michelangelo how he did it.  “The statue is so amazing, how ever did you create it?”  His answer was revealing.  “The trouble lay not in carving the statue.  The trouble lay in finding the piece of marble that had the statue in it.  Then all I had to do was carve away everything that wasn’t the David.”

When Michelangelo said that, he was displaying a Virgoan sensitivity to perfection, but with an important difference—he stayed focused on what was right and let go of what was wrong.  Virgo’s hypersensitivity to imperfection derives directly from its sensitivity to perfection itself.  Virgo knows when something is imperfect because it hurts, almost physically, to be around it.  If a Virgo type can keep their focus on what is perfect in themselves, others, and every situation, they will be empowered to remove what is not perfect until what is left approximates perfection.  Michelangelo had this one figured out.  Do you think that, as he removed every chip from that block, he paused to criticize that chip for existing?  Did he wander around his studio vilifying all the dross that he’d chipped off the statue?  Of course not.  He stayed focused on the beautiful form within the block and by removing everything that wasn’t that, created a miracle.

The key to living life as Virgo lies in accepting one’s own perfectionism as an asset, as the driver of one’s existence.  It is to practice seeing the perfect form inside the block, to ignore the block and to focus so purely on the perfection inside it that that perfection emerges, almost of its own accord.  There is no criticism, no nagging, no attention at all on what is not perfect.  The carving happens with no effort.  The perfect form within emerges naturally.  That way of shaping is the heart and soul of Virgo.

To show your favorite Virgo how much you appreciate them,
why not buy credit for an astrology reading?
Contact Jamie at info@pandoraastrology.com to find out how.

Photo of the David is by David Gaya.