Leo — August 2026

August opens with *Jupiter* sitting right on top of you, in your own sign, at nearly 7 degrees. That should feel magnificent. And it does, mostly. But *Jupiter* in *Leo* has a specific side effect that nobody warns you about, which is that it makes you feel so fundamentally correct about everything that the idea of changing course starts to seem like a personal insult rather than a reasonable option. You're not arrogant. You're just very, very confident, and you'd like everyone to notice the difference, please. The conversation you need to have exists. You know which one. It's been sitting in your peripheral vision since at least June, and your strategy so far has been to be so relentlessly warm and generous and *present* in every other area of your life that the person it concerns will presumably forget it needs to happen. They haven't forgotten. Neither have you. You're just hoping that if you are entertaining enough for long enough, reality will eventually lose interest and wander off. *Mercury* begins the month still in *Cancer*, which means your emotional intelligence is technically available to you, it's just buried under approximately eighteen layers of performance. Around the 13th, the *New Moon* in *Leo* arrives, and this is your actual moment. A *New Moon* in your own sign, with *Jupiter* also in *Leo*, is the kind of setup that astrology textbooks write home about. It activates your *first house*, which governs identity, presence, and the story you tell about yourself. You'll want to use this energy to announce something. A relaunch, a reframe, a new project with a name that sounds better than it actually is. What it's actually for is beginning something real, which is different, and requires you to be honest about where you're starting from. *Mercury* moves into *Leo* around mid-month and then keeps going into *Virgo*, passing through your *second house* of money and resources as it goes. This is a useful transit for looking at what you've been spending in ways you haven't examined. Not just money, though money too. Time, goodwill, emotional labour deployed as a way of keeping people close enough that they won't ask difficult questions. *Mars* moves from *Gemini* into *Cancer* this month, shifting from your *eleventh house* of groups and friendships into your *twelfth house*, which is the house astrologers describe as hidden self-undoing and which I tend to describe as the house of things you know but won't admit. *Mars* in your *twelfth house* is frustrated energy with nowhere visible to go. You'll feel it as irritability. You'll attribute it to other people. The *Full Moon* on the 28th is in *Pisces*, lighting up your *eighth house* of shared resources, intimacy, and things that are psychologically tangled. *Pisces* is already quite porous about where one person ends and another begins, and *Leo* and *Pisces* understand each other about as well as a brass band and a fog bank. What this Full Moon will do is bring to the surface something that two people have been circling. If you haven't had the conversation yet, you'll be having it now, except now you'll be having it under pressure, which was entirely optional. Here is the thing about you that only people who love you know, and that you'd hate me for saying. When you finally have the difficult conversation, you're actually good at it. You're warm and clear and you don't flinch. The whole elaborate avoidance operation isn't because you'll be bad at the conversation. It's because once you have it, you'll have to give up the version of the situation that you've been performing so beautifully. *Jupiter* will still be in *Leo* when September arrives. The audience isn't going anywhere. You have enough goodwill to survive being real.