A: I am not surprised that you struggle with getting clear about your own life path as well as the difficulties with really establishing a state of happiness and wellbeing within yourself.  You are not essentially cursed, but it is because you have brought some very strong karmas, both good and difficult into this life.  At no point is this a rationale for not believing that you have a right to both. 

As for general life direction, what I feel to say to you is that in the traditional house of career, you have the planet Uranus, the healing goddess asteroid Hygeia and you have Juno conjunct your Libran Midheaven.  This combination says a number of things about what, on a superficial level, represents career directions, but on a deeper level about the way your uniqueness wants to be expressed in the world.

What Hygeia adds to this picture are gifts as a natural born healer.  Thus you have multiple natural, pre-existing skills brought in with you as a soul into this lifetime.  Additionally, Juno conjunct the Midheaven (particularly in the sign of Libra) really highlights various forms of counselling and facilitating modalities, with a strong possibility of working with relationships, masculine / feminine balances, working within one-on-one and intimate human interactions and exploring the emotional interactions affecting individual’s relationship lives. 

So it is going to be up to you to find your own unique path.  With Uranus it is usually a mixture of trial and error, trying things out, experimenting and exploring to encourage you to explore deeply your own self (spiritually and therapeutically) to discover your own unique skills.  This includes stepping out into so-called alternative modalities such as astrology and tarot. 

Now as for feeling free to be happy.  A lot of joy in each of us has to do with the house of the child and how alive the little one feels inside us.  You have some beautiful and powerful energy in this particular part of your chart.  Initially this will have been profoundly suppressed and controlled.  For instance you have the lovely Venus (goddess of love and creativity) conjunct both Medusa and Saturn in this house.  Particularly with the latter two, a lot of your initial creative spark and self-expressiveness and your feelings about being okay to be here as a child are initially suppressed and contaminated by various agents. 

There are some very dark energies around a distorted deep feminine.  So it is likely that as a child you would have not felt safe enough to express yourself freely.  Partly this arises from ancient family traumas, patriarchal conditioning and deep ancestral forms of anger and rage.  Initially (and I emphasise this) the journey is a difficult one.  Now, before I get into the nuts and bolts of how to work with this territory, I want to say something about the deep feminine in a very broad sense.  As a Cancerian male, you are a man born with a naturally deep connection to the feminine, both in the light and dark expressions of the goddess.  Cancerian men are often very emotionally sensitive, innately caring, soft and very big-hearted.  Their energy has a strong maternal quality that is able to support and nourish others.  Their masculinity is deeply informed and fertilised by a connection with the feminine side of self. 

Specifically Medusa has been mentioned and indeed you have a lot of other very, very strong dark goddess energy.  This means that your feminine is incredibly deep, not simply superficial emotionality, but at a deep, primal, psycho-spiritual level of self you have a great deal of power.  Some of that power has initially been distorted, but at the core of your being is a tremendous amount of Shakti that is sacred and spiritual power.  This will eventually want to come through in your life, so that you can express this psycho-spiritual and psycho-sexual potency as a man in the world. 

Now it has obviously been a very difficult time for you in these last few years and there are significant astrological reasons for this.  Progressed Medusa (the progressed position represents how this fierce goddess is evolving at this point in your life) is conjunct your Sun almost exactly.  Your progressed Midheaven (describing the whole journey of taking your essence out in to the world) has been conjunct the kali-like Black Moon these last three years.  Furthermore, transiting Pluto (representing the deepest transformative powers of self) is conjunct your Capricorn Moon in the twelfth house. 

This suggests that the very deepest feminine energy inside you is rising to be re-claimed and ideally to be integrated into your sense of self.  You are undergoing some of the biggest emotional transformations that you will experience in this lifetime.  So it is fair to say that you are under intense emotional and psychological pressure.  This can be a nightmare if you are not getting the right spiritual and therapeutic support, but handled well with support it is also an extraordinary opportunity. 

As a Cancerian, your Moon is critical to your whole wellbeing.  Your Moon is under intense pressure to radically transform a lot of older emotional patterns, some to do with emotional loss in the early stages of your life particularly to do with your mother’s emotional unavailability.  This is where the twelfth house Moon often describes a mother who has a great deal of inner turmoil that makes it hard for her to be really well-equipped for the maternal role and being a parent.  Sometimes the Moon here describes the emotionally absent parent for instance and for a Cancerian this is emotionally crippling.  It also represents your mum as being full of heart and deeply connected to powerful spiritual forces within herself, but her turmoil meant she had great difficulty in really fulfilling all your emotional needs.  Consequently the child is left feeling unloved, unworthy, very emotionally, which can lead to depression and despair. 

Be aware that these highly active transformative processes are going to flush up a lot of emotionality and you need support to be able to go with that.  Turning this around, a twelfth house Moon indicates that despite what I have said about your relationship with your personal mother, your journey towards becoming emotionally fulfilled has to do with deep, spiritual practices.  These practices include meditation and other techniques which can take you very, very deeply underneath the surface – beneath the mind – into the spiritual dimension to connect with, draw from and tap into, deeper layers of nurturing power.  Going deeper on this inner journey will fill you up from within, so much so that spiritual energies are actually food for you.  In doing this, you will also become more and more joyful. 

Your Moon position is incredibly powerful spiritually in the twelfth house as it is conjunct the great god Shiva and the benevolent energies of Jupiter.  This describes a vast and deep wellspring of spiritual and emotional power hidden within you, including some profound spiritual capacities and a tremendous amount of grace.  For all these reasons I absolutely encourage you, if you are not already doing so, to find powerful forms of meditation that will take you into these processes and in particular, if possible, to get yourself initiated into a Shiva, Tantric or Goddess tradition.  Hopefully you can find the spiritual master in this period of your life, as these archetypal line-ups suggest this possibility. 

Now, as for the darker goddess energies such as the Black Moon and Medusa, you can apply these practices to both the healing of their distorted faces and the slow process of claiming the sacred feminine residing within yourself as a man.  There parallels with your twelfth house Moon processes and these dark goddesses rising within you to be claimed.  The main difference is that the Black Moon and Medusa are archetypes within our own psyche that carry a great deal of trauma, grief, loss and almost indescribable levels of rage.  This comes from ancestral lines in your family system, particularly to do with the betrayal of the feminine in the female lineage going back generations.  Now, when this complex material is unhealed, it can turn very dark and toxic.  This is the stuff that poisoned the psychic environment around you as a little one and that made you so frightened to fully open up and express yourself.

It is scary, lethal material to work with and can be helped by deep spiritual practices, but you also need to unload a lot of very toxic energies using deep therapeutic processes.  These processes include practices that support you to express your emotions and this energy and learn how to release it safely.  Emotionally based therapies such as primal therapy, breathwork, re-birthing, experiential astrology, psychodrama and gestalt are all different therapies that can support you to feel the deeper energies inside you and support you to express and release.  As the toxins slowly get mobilised, the incredible spiritual power, the transformative energies and tremendous freedom of these so-called dark goddesses will become available to you. 

This will inform and empower everything that you do in your world, whether in your relationships, sexuality or professional life.  One of the exceptional opportunities of owning the dark goddesses is that they will help take you closer, not just to your path in the world, but closer to your ultimate soul purposes in this lifetime.  There is a tremendous amount to be gained by taking this journey.  It is not an easy one, it will be very scary at times, but with high quality, professional support, the fruits for you are enormous.

As you do this work, you will become more fully powerfully and freely yourself.  Also, you will find that these deep sacred energies (the deep feminine in the form of the dark goddesses and Shiva Moon energy from your twelfth house) will empower you to make a real contribution in the world.

Now if you want to check out a very good role model of a man embodying the sacred feminine and doing great work in the world, check out the writings of Andrew Harvey.  He is pioneering what is called ‘sacred activism’.  Being a man in tune with the deeper feminine, he is a tremendously inspiring role model for where you are heading.  With each aspect of this journey, the deeper you go, you will not just experience more joy, but a level of fulfilment that many people never get to.  So go well with lots of blessings, lots of encouragement and lots of love.