What Your Birthday Is Really For

Ready to see your birthday in a whole new light? Think of it as your own personal New Year's Eve – a cosmic reset button built just for you. Let's talk about what's really going down a layer deeper when you blow out those candles.

In this episode...

🌟 The truth about what's happening in the cosmos on your birthday (hint: it's like a spiritual power-up!)

🪐 Why birthdays are actually cosmic checkpoints in your life story (and how to use them)

⚡️ The real reason your birthday feels extra charged with energy (it's not just the sugar rush)

🔮 How to turn your birthday into your own personal ritual (way cooler than just opening presents)

🌠 A fresh take on why you're actually the one giving gifts on your special day (mind = blown)

Whether astrology is your jam or you're curious about making your birthday mean more than just cake and ice cream, this episode is your ticket to transforming how you celebrate another trip around the sun. Get ready to see your birthday as the powerful cosmic moment it really is!

🎙️ Brought to you by Lauren Poppins Raye

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Connect with Lauren on Instagram: @laurenpoppinsraye

Transcript

0:58

Welcome to the birthday episode. Today, I want to look at the phenomenon known as birthdays from the astrological lens of solar return and what that phenomenon actually is. Bring in some context to better understand what's actually going on energetically on your birthday and suggest the more aligned version of a ritual that I encourage you to do amidst the otherwise culturally created tradition of receiving gifts, essentially. Okay, so solar return. Before we get into the specific significance of the solar part of your solar return, aka your birthday, which by the way, part of what is motivating me to speak on this topic currently is I am right around the corner. I am an Aquarius Sun, my birthday is February 8th, the day this episode is airing, my birthday is less than a week away, and so I wanted to speak to this in part because I am perfectly positioned at this time to be a reflection of this phenomenon because it is basically my birthday. Okay, so getting back to the return part of the solar return. A return is when a planet returns back to the position of the 360 degree circle that is our map of the sky of your birth moment. It's not always necessarily exactly on the same calendar day when it comes to your birthday, but it's close and it's close enough. One way that I like to think about the significance of having an astral body return to your birth position, there's this, uh, realm of mastery that you may have heard of before. Probably haven't, which is the memory Olympics. There are people that can remember inhuman strings of numbers, for example, and the way that they train themselves, what the strategy is behind that is that they're basically placing objects or numbers or whatever it is that they're going to be remembering, they're placing them in their mind spacially. So they're visualizing a room or an environment in their psyche, in their mind's eye, and they're in that visualization actually placing things there so that they know that they will be there for them to return to and recall and remember. I love this example, this reflection of the phenomenon that happens for us in the way that we, as above, so below, as without, so within, look to the planets as a reflection of what's going on for us internally and what we are experiencing energetically in the unseen realms. And because we have this environment of this 360 degree circle that we then overlay the zodiac on and then are able to position the planets to see where they are in that pie with 12 slices of the zodiac, it becomes this way for us to do something similar. We are placing spatially these planets, which represent different aspects of ourselves. And as we make our way around the wheel of the year, one of the things that I love about Western Astrology, the kind of astrology, the map that I use, what I study, is that we're using the Earth as the anchor point, part of the challenge when it comes to mapping these astral bodies and their movements in the heavens is that everything is constantly moving. So the way that we're able to map it is that we just decide something is constant. And so in the case of Western astrology and the tropical zodiac, we use the earth as that stable point, that then we are looking at everything else's relative movement. This makes the most sense to me, in part logically, when I look at the symbolism behind doing it this way is that we are the center of our own experience. For us, Earth and the ground that we stand on is the stable part relative to everything else moving around us. So that feels really fitting. And then the effect that that has is that we are looking at, for example, zero degrees Aries, where that transition is between Pisces and Aries is the point in the sky that's rising in the east on the first day of spring. And what's powerful about this is when it comes to our ability to recognize and remember what it feels like to be at certain points around that wheel of the year, we actually have a really strong sensory input to do that through. So the first day of spring feels really different than the first day of winter or the first day of summer or the first day of fall. The seasons feel very different to us. And so that spectrum of the seasons around the wheel that we experience, we actually have like a really embodied experience of what makes those different. And it creates this opportunity for us to experience deja vu of like, oh, I've been here before. Here I am again. So to tie it together, the way that the, that the memory masters do this is that they create an environment that they place things in so that they can go recall them. Similarly, we have this wheel of the zodiac that surrounds us that we are able to understand the position, the relative position of these astral bodies. And it's the way that we're able to know the sun was at 19 degrees Aquarius on that round map that we're using, the moment that I took my first breath. So every year when the sun comes back around to that part of the sky, 19 degrees Aquarius, I experienced my solar return. And part of that is that it happens in winter every single year, there's a certain vibe, a certain feeling, a certain set of sensory inputs that are part of how I associate what it feels like to be in that part of the year. And it could be feelings, it could be smells, there's different components, there's different features to how I've experienced this moment year after year to where it creates that feeling of, Oh, I've arrived, I've landed. This is actually a space and a place, even though it's actually similar to with the memory Olympics, they're doing it in the psyche. In this case, we're doing it in time. We're positioning ourselves in time, but I'm able to experience that as a place that I return to year after year. And I pay attention to because it's my birthday. Now that said, we have returns for the sun. That's your birthday and your solar return. But you have returns for all of the planets in the sky. The one that you've probably heard the most of is the Saturn return. So that's about every 29 and a half years. And each of these are going to create a phenomenon of ending one cycle and beginning the next. And so in this experience of seemingly endless time until our time actually comes to an end, it's a way to break up that time into smaller containers that we can then reflect on and look back on and actually perceive a story that's unfolded. So it's not just this endless ongoing thing. It's that in the case of your solar return, you have these years, you can look back on what was it like for me from one year to the next, to the next with Saturn return, most people only experience three Saturn cycles and there's a big difference. It's like a generational transition that happens through your maturation process from your youth chapter to your adult chapter to your elder chapter. So that's one of the best examples to understand the power and the potency of those returns. Because in the case of Saturn, Saturn is about your relationship to responsibility and maturity and your karma and your dharma and the bigger cycles of time that are unfolding in your life through your development in maturing and getting more responsible and stepping more into your sense of purpose and your work in the world. And so with Saturn, and I'll talk more about this in another episode, I could talk forever about Saturn's return. It's a huge rite of passage. And all of these are. But with Saturn, there's this sense of a progression from the youth to the adult to the more mature elder that are chapters in this unfolding story of a lifetime around your work in the world. So that first chapter being the exploration, the failing forward, the trying things on for size and categorizing what's yours and what's not, deciding what's going to stay in Saturn's ring that is the boundary of what you choose to commit to or what you're going to let go on the outside of that. And then there's a big shift that happens when you move into your thirties and you start developing yourself and your work in the world, your body of work, and you're helping people and you're mastering your craft and learning more about your capacity and what you're developing to offer to people, the legacy that ultimately you'll leave behind, all of that during your adult chapter. And then eventually there's a big transition that happens into your 60s when you step into your elder years. And it's more about how can you leave your work, your body of work behind for others to benefit from? How can you package and teach and transmit everything that you've mastered and developed to leave behind to the next generations so that they can stand atop your shoulders and continue on in whatever direction they end up taking it. So it is one big long story, but through those returns, it breaks it up into these very clear chapters that can really stand on their own in terms of the story that they tell, and then like a trilogy, it can be pieced together into a bigger story. So that's Saturn's returns. There's lunar returns. Those happen much more quickly and often. That's every 28 days you go through an emotional body cycle of playing out a full story around that wheel of archetypes. When it comes to your emotional body, there's your Mars returns that happen every two years, the most, familiar one being what the world calls"terrible twos" when we have our first Mars return and Mars returns to that place, that moment of our first breath to reset our relationship with and our awareness to our will and our motivation. And we start the two year olds, I have one right now that starts experimenting a lot with the game that is saying no and deciding what they are and are not into or okay with. All of the planets have them. So that's the return. And I want to also bridge this to the broader concept of ritual and having an opening and a closing to create potency in the space, both the time and the space space that we create when we decide the beginning and the end of something, and we commemorate that through intention and awareness and witness in a ritual way. And I want to point to that now because I'm going to circle back to it when I talk about the specific ritual that's so powerful to do on your birthday or on any anniversary really. And I'm going to diffuse what I'm talking about eventually at the end to apply to really anything that we commemorate from year to year in that way. The start of a business, the start of a relationship, the start of a lifetime. Okay, so that's the power of the returns. Now let's look specifically at the power of the solar return, the sun returning to its position. One of the things that's worth noting that makes the solar return special in a way that no other return is, is that it takes exactly one rotation around that 360 degree circle to get back to the place that it was the moment that you took your first breath, the moment of your birth. Right? Every other one, it's more or less time relative to a year. But it is actually the sun moving around relative to us, that wheel, and getting back to its position that creates the wheel itself. That is the wheel. So that's really interesting to note, is that the sun is the only one that takes us around the circle of its own creation and its own design and its own timeline. Okay. With that, let's look at some of the symbolism around what is it on a solar return that we are ritually noticing end and begin again? What are we breaking up into chapters when it comes to our solar story? There's a few things that come to mind for me when I think about the symbolism of the sun for us. And even though I'm an astrologer, It's so valuable. It's so helpful when it comes to understanding these things, to get back to the basics and literally look to the sun in the sky and what its purpose is in our life and reality to understand what its symbolism is for us in our inner experience. And so the Sun is 1, the source energy of all of life, right? It's the warmth and the light and the energy that keeps this whole show going. That's 1. 2, it's the gravitational center that keeps the solar system in rhythmic rotation and the earth dancing around in an ordered way so that we can have this human experience. So that's And the third I'm going to look at as some combination of the two, some kind of the sum is greater than the parts feature of the sun that is made possible by it being the life source and the gravitational center and the power of that, that I'm going to speak to in the reflection in our experience. So the first, the energy source. Over the course of a lifetime, from year to year, you can think back to that there were different things when you were much younger, I think a decade ago, there were different things that fed you and lit you up. There were different things that drained you and made you feel low energy. There's an evolving story throughout our lives and our biographies of what we turn to, to have more energy and what we turn away from to retain more of our energy. So that's one that's worth looking at on your birthday. So much of the power and the value of astrology is in our awareness and our willingness and ability to take a moment and acknowledge what's already taking place. Similar to when I do a session, I'm not telling people anything they don't already know. It's already there. These cycles are happening. These endings and beginnings are taking place. But it's through that ritual observance that we're able to see more into the meaning of what's unfolding, become aware of the story and the saga that's better than any movie that you could watch playing out in your own life and to be able to step more fully into the role of co creator and your ability to wield your agency around the trajectory of your life. So it's not that these things aren't happening if you're not paying attention. It's that so much more becomes possible and available when you are. So, the second thing, feature of the sun, reflection that it is in our experience, is around that it is the gravitational center of our solar system and, When it comes to your own life story, you have all of these different storylines playing out. I mentioned the moon is playing out story after story every 28 days, Mars every two years, Saturn every about 30 years, and all of these different storylines playing out at different speeds and different ways, and then you have the sun. The sun is like that central narrative, that gravitational center storyline that everything else is dancing around that ties everything together into one cohesive narrative or storyline that creates a sense of order and sanity and a way for us to be able to wrap our mind around what's going on and to experience the trajectory and the experiences that we have in our life. as part of one me, right? One life that I'm living. It's what helps us not to feel so scattered. And so the second thing that's really valuable to reflect on as part of a ritual observance of the last year long chapter that's closing and the next year long chapter that's opening is to consider What has felt like the central storyline? This is a big one that's common when it comes to the flip of the calendar year. People will think about what is my word of the year? So this is a really good time to do that for your solar return year, for the years that exist between your birthdays. And to think back on What was the theme? What was the main theme? What was the main, like, what was the word that encapsulates the main storyline of my last year? And through my intention, what do I want to focus on or give energy to or prioritize as the main theme or storyline of my next year till my next birthday? And then the third piece is what I mentioned is kind of this combination of the two that shows up in our lives as our sense of identity. And this is where I want to speak to the difference between the kind of backwards way that the prominent cultural narrative places birthdays, and what might make a little bit more sense, is that we have birthday parties and we invite everybody to come celebrate us with us and they bring us gifts and while on some level, it's a beautiful thing to give offering to essentially the embodiment of the sun in that moment at that time on our birthday at our solar return that we are, but on the other hand, it's worth acknowledging that we are the ones being beaming outward. We are like the sun at that time shining on everybody. My husband has had this idea that he would love to implement if he ruled the world, right? Where on your birthday, you actually get gifts for all of your loved ones instead of them giving gifts for you. So something worth thinking about, not actually suggesting that we change that because I love birthdays and I love getting gifts for the people I love on their birthdays. I love seeing my son get to be the center of attention and open up gifts on his birthday. So not actually suggesting that we switch things up, but worth looking at the symbolism around these things. And so when it comes to this sense of identity, looking at and reflecting on as part of this ritual observance that is your solar return. Taking a quiet moment alongside whatever celebration and birthday party and gathering of people might be taking place for you, probably more so in our younger years than when we get older. Maybe as time goes on and we mature, we actually, whether we're aware of it or not, start to feel more aligned with the opportunity that your birthday and your solar return is to have this introspection, this ritual observance. So this third piece is around the shifting and the changing of the guard that is your identity. How are you shining into the world? Another one where if you think back a decade ago, the way that you showed up, the role that you played was very different. This one I like to think of as that we each are this little piece of the sun shining in our respective corner of our reality. That is the center of our, of our universe, each of us, right? And that there's this grid of all of us like candles or lights at the center of each of us, and we're each playing a role in this greater story, this greater play of the unfolding of the human experience, and we have our torch, our light, our flame that is playing out its own individual story and role in the bigger picture. What role was that for you at the last year? What role would you like to play the next year? What is that identity that is shifting on your solar return to where you are acknowledging and giving thanks for the person that you were the last year and creating space for and setting intention around the person that you would like to be and the ways that you would like to show up in the year to come? These are the things that I encourage you to tune into on your birthday because your solar return is an opportunity for you to mindfully acknowledge what those features were of your last year and which ones you would like to call in for the year ahead. And it's such a powerful moment because getting back to that energetically there was this space, there was this point, there was this area of the sky, there was this direction relative to you in the 360 degree circle that surrounds you. That is where you first met the sun. Whether or not you actually first felt the sun as warmth on your skin, but energetically you experienced the energy of the sun from a certain direction. And then on your birthday, every year, the sun goes back to that point in the sky and becomes like a portal to that bigger source energy that you are a candle or a flame or a part of. And the way that I like to imagine it is it's literally like an energetic power up. You are aligning and so plugging back into the source energy and the direction That first animated you the moment that you were born. So you're given this huge surge of energy to support that transition. It's like in monopoly, you know, passing go and collecting$200. Like you're given this power up and part of the way that you can leverage that is to become aware of, okay, what am I letting behind? And what am I using? What am I projecting into my next year intentionally that I'm going to charge up with that extra energy boost that I'm being given on my birthday. Now, up until this point, I've been mostly love, light, sparkles, and shininess, right? Because in big part, the sun is about that. That is the sun. But let's look at an aspect of it that maybe isn't so positive. I want to take a moment here, and especially in the context of both your life and your birthday, but again, like I mentioned before, that checkpoint that your solar return is that is the anniversary of the moment of your birth. So that could also be the anniversary of a relationship or the anniversary of a business, whatever it might be taking this ritual moment, not just to give thanks and celebrate what felt good and what worked for you and what you appreciate about the last year, but also to get really real with yourself about aspects of your last year again, with the example of the first with the energy source, what drained you look at that too. In the example of the cohesive storyline, that main primary theme was part of your last year. Maybe you look at the light and the shadow version. What was the thing that played out for you that you're really proud of? But what's the word for the thing that really you struggled with and plagued you over the last year? Look at that too. And on the third one, the same thing with your identity. What's the role that you played that felt really good, that you're really proud of, but then what's the role that you played that you wish you could step more out of and away from, that didn't feel so aligned for you, that doesn't anymore feel so aligned? It's worth looking at the light and dark side of this, because just like the sun in the sky, sometimes the sun is actually up in the observable sky and we can see the light and we can feel the warmth, but sometimes the sun is hiding behind the earth and we can't. And so with that same symbolism of that reflection of the phenomenon of the sun, there are times that we are our not self. And so in terms of our recapping, honestly, what our relationship to our energy was that we were playing out and the role that we played in the sense of identity that we embodied, what was the light and dark side of that? And take a moment to have an honest review of what that was for you so that you can have as much information as possible to feed the intention that you set for your next year in those three areas with realism as much as optimism. And this is especially true, again, to create a contrast between the way that we culturally do things and the way that maybe cosmically makes a little bit more sense when it comes to the anniversary of a relationship. Yeah, of course. It's awesome to do something to celebrate the last year, go out to dinner, do something fun, but it's also a great opportunity to look at what didn't work over the last year and to be really honest about what you would like to shift together moving forward into the next year. And with that, I'd like to end this episode by being an example of what this reflection looks like on your birthday, because it is my birthday starting with the first one, what gave me energy over the last year and what was draining for me? What gave me energy was taking messy action toward building my new business as part of the pivot that I've been in since letting go of my tax practice. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist. And think more about things than actually doing them. And what really fueled and inspired and lit me up over this last year was just doing the damn thing. Whatever that was. And learning as I went. What really drained my energy has been scrolling when I could be creating or being more productive or mindfully resting and getting distracted by the reality of the season I'm in right now with my business of having lower engagement and sales than I know I will eventually. What I'm intending into my next year when it comes to what gives me energy. Is creating more structure around the time that is available for me for my business or for anything for that matter, having more mindfulness, realism, and strategy around how I budget my time so that I can make sure that I'm creating enough of it in the rhythm that is most supportive to me around all of the things that give me energy. And when it comes to what drains my energy, it's a similar thing. My intention really is to create more mindful structure and strategy around my time so that I'm not as susceptible to spending it doom scrolling and then seeing how much time went by and was wasted. And in terms of the distraction of the feels that have come up as part of this pivot and transition and season of letting a really successful business go and starting over to rebuild a new one, I will circle back to that with my word of the year, That is number two. And for my last year, I would say that my word has been courage. I found that what has been required of me over the last year around being willing to let something successful go and really dive headfirst into this next new thing that is much less developed, and all of the things that I've had to learn and try on for size and almost move through like the Aries fool of just not being as good at things. I went from being so seasoned in the previous business that I had into having to really be a noob in a lot of areas to start out where I was to embrace this new direction And the word that I'm intending for the theme into my next year is traction. I have courageously put a lot of things in motion and made a lot of commitments and a lot of progress that I feel so confident is going to create traction into this next year. I'm going to start to see more and more exponential growth and results for the efforts that I've put in. And I'm calling that in through my continued effort, through the mentorship that I receive and through the networking that has been taking place that has really been setting the stage for more exposure and more traction with the people that need it. And lastly, my sense of identity, the way I've been shining and showing up in the world. My last year, being the second year of my son's life, really felt like the bringing my work back into the fold and the balance that was made possible by equal parts showing up as mom and business owner and getting to experience those in symbiosis together that has felt very balanced where one doesn't take up more of my time or bandwidth than the other. They've been placed alongside each other in this really beautiful new world of that I get to have And the identity that I see taking shape and that I'm calling in for my next year is one of really getting to make an impact on more people. So much of this last year was really an inside job of what needed to shift in me to be able to show up more for my work in the world and how I'm supporting people. And this next year, I see myself really offering more support, taking more time actually serving clients and helping people that need to experience the transformations that my work provides. I hope that this has been inspiring to you and for you and that this will come to mind when your next birthday comes around and every birthday after, every anniversary, every ritual commemoration of the turn of the wheel that happens between powerful, initiating events like the start of you, the start of a business, the start of a relationship. I hope you really take a moment amidst the celebration to honestly take stock of what the last year was for you so that you can thank it and let it go and what you're calling in for the next year so that you can set in motion the intentions that are going to support its unfolding as the best year yet.