How to make the most of your Solar Return – LightCenter

For years now I have spent some time in meditation on the day of my Solar Return in order to propel my positive thoughts into my year ahead but it wasn’t really until I created a 3-day Solar Return exercise in Cuba in December of 2013 that things got really interesting and it became clear that this was a very powerful tool! I’ve been wanting to share this method every since and now I’m going to!

Your Solar Return is when the Sun comes back to the exact same degree that you were born at. Essentially it is Sun conjunct Sun and…Your Birthday! It’s true that sometimes your Solar Return falls on the day before or the day after your actual birthday (because it’s all about degrees here) but, if you don’t want to look up your Solar Return chart you can just assume your birthday is your Solar Return for the purpose of this exercise. It’s a 3-day commitment, so you’ll be covered! 🙂

If you want to find out exactly when your true Solar Return happens go here:

1. If you don’t already have an Astrodienst account, register here. It’s free!
2. Add your birth information. (and up to 100 people)
3. Click on “Free Horoscopes”
3. Scroll down and click on “Extended Chart Selection”
4. Choose who the Chart will be for
5. CHART TYPE select Solar Return Chart*
6. Web default style is fine
7. KOCH House system
8. Click to show the chart!

…and, voila…there’s your chart!

Check the Solar Return details in red. That is the day, hour and minute that the Sun comes back to the exact degree you were born. That’s the time of your Solar Return! 🙂  If the ‘reference place’ is incorrect scroll to the bottom and ‘choose different reference place’ to reflect exactly where you will be on your Solar Return.

First I’ll outline the exercise and at the end I’ll tell my super-trippy story of instant manifestation.

It’s a very simple intention exercise that you’ll do for three days: the day before your birthday, the day of your birthday and the day after your birthday.

Pick a spot where you won’t be disturbed, ideally in the same spot each day, to help the energy build in that space.

Then…clear your mind of other thoughts and focus on your year ahead. Ask yourself how you want to feel in the coming year. Write these feelings down in point form. Choose 3, 4 or 5 feelings. Once you have them all down and they feel like they are authentically springing from your true desire to feel and be this way, then you start to generate the feelings.

Start with the first feeling on your list, close your eyes, and generate the feeling. Really flesh the feeling out. Embody the feeling. Feel it in your bones, your blood, your heart, your body, your mind, your spirit, your energetic body. Reeeeeally feel it. Become the feeling. Be the feeling.

Once you feel satisfied with the generation of that first feeling and have held it for some time in your whole being, move on to the second, third, fourth and fifth feeling.

The next day, your actual birthday, do exactly the same thing. Then, the day after your birthday, do exactly the same thing again.

That’s it!

All you have left to do is to watch and see how these feelings manifest in your life over the next year!

Because the Sun (energetic life force) is conjoining your own Sun (your life force and who you are and who you are becoming) there is a lot of energy available to you. Energy that vibrates exactly as you vibrate. Energy that can propel the energy that you are creating, living, being in these moments into the future. Energy follows thought and energy really follows feeling and intensity.

I hope you make this a ritual every year around your birthday for it is truly a wonderful tool available to all of us! We have to use the energy of Sun conjunct Sun that happens every year on our birthday. It’s a lost opportunity, if we don’t!

And now for my story 🙂

I was in Cuba for the Permaculture Convention at the end of November, 2013 and so I celebrated my birthday there, too, on December 2nd.

By the time my birthday rolled around we were out of Havana and spending a week in cabanas by the beach with the 400+ permaculture people.

The day before my birthday I went to the beach and wrote down five feelings I’d like to feel in the coming year:

1. Physical strength and vitality

2. Connection to my divine self

3. Connection to Nature and Beauty and All That Is!

4. Giving and Receiving Romantic and Platonic Love

5. I will reveal this last one at the end of my story! 🙂

After I wrote these five feelings down I sat and concentrated on generating each of the feelings so that every part of my body and mind felt each one of them. It was a very interesting exercise because I didn’t realize I’d have such trouble generating the feeling of receiving romantic love!  But I worked it out and I ended up being able to generate the feeling to my satisfaction. What I wasn’t expecting was to have an experience of receiving romantic love just a few hours later! That totally blew me away. Here I was, having not experienced that heart-twingelly-romantic feeling when you really like someone in years, experiencing just that, within hours of having generated the feeling inside myself! Cooooool.

But that is not the big story. Nope! Read on…

That evening I was telling one of my room-mates about what I’d been doing on the beach and she wanted to know the five feelings I’d generated so I told her the first four, but I couldn’t remember the last one for the life of me. I didn’t bother to go get my notebook and just left it at that.

I went to bed that night and had an awful nightmare: I was driving my Wagoneer on the dark, eerie, streetlamp-less streets of Havana. People were milling around in the middle of the dark street ahead of me making it really hard to make out the road itself. All of a sudden the road ended and I saw that I was on some kind of ‘high’ road on a trestle-like industrial structure much like the one I took a snap-shot of days earlier (left). The one in the dream was much higher, like 4 stories high. As my vehicle went over the edge of the unfinished road the thoughts running through my head were: “This is it, this is it, this is it…I’m going to die!!” It was sooooo crazily real.

Then, I hit the ground with a smash and I felt my consciousness get hot and dissolve and expand and dissipate. As this happened I found myself floating above the accident in the dark and repeating in my head was: “Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no.” Then the very last thought in my head was, “Mom!”. It dawned on me as I was looking down at the accident and my dead body, that my mom was going to flip out when she found out I was dead. I felt so bad for the pain she was going to feel. 🙂 Ugh. What a horrible dream. It felt so so real.

Then…I woke up in the pitch-black room in my bunk-bed…and it all started to come back to me…I’m at the Permaculture Convergence in Cuba, I’m not dead…and I was soooooooooo damn happy to be there and to not be dead! 🙂 “I’m ALIVE!!!” were the words in my head. “Thank goodness, I’m alive!!”

So, guess what number 5 on my list of feelings to generate was?

5. The sheer JOY of being alive!!

I kid you not.

Talk about instant manifestation eh!?

Sooooo wild!

Remember that you have the power to influence your year ahead – of course you do! I hope you use this tool every year and expand on it. Find what works for you.

Happy Solar Return-ing! 🙂