Did you know that by making a pilgrimage to an astrologically-determined location for your birthday, you can enhance the quality of your entire year? It's called a Solar Return Birthday Trip and it is an incredibly powerful tool for realizing your goals, harmonizing your life with the cosmic plan and safeguarding your health and well being.

Here's how it works. On your birthday the Sun returns to the position it occupied in the heavens at your birth. The moment this occurs is the start of your own personal New Year. The position of all the celestial bodies in the sky at that anniversary moment is the map of the energies that will be affecting you until your next birthday. All astrological maps are dependent upon the location of the event so by changing your location for the 24 hours of your birthday, you alter your life's map for the year.

I have clients from all walks of life taking Solar Return Trips every year and the stories of how these trips impact their lives is dramatic. I was made aware of the potential powers of Solar Return Trips many, many years ago by the astrologer, Signe Quinn Taff, who is the foremost expert and pioneer in researching this area of astrology. But it was not until I experienced the most dangerous year of my life that I became convinced of the value and importance of Solar Return Trips and dedicated myself to learning, promoting and designing these trips for myself and my clients. During that traumatic year I came close to losing my life (more than once!), my health failed, I was hospitalized, and I was emotionally overwhelmed. My Solar Return chart for the city I was in on my birthday that year, clearly showed a year of life and death crisis. A few years later, I had a similar chart pattern but this time I traveled to Turkey to shift the dangerous planetary placements and I sailed through the year without difficulty.

Besides helping to prevent serious problems, Solar Return Trips can be used to support your goals for the year. Solar Return Trips can and have been used to support financial prosperity, health, relationship, a career change, buying a house, having a child, creative projects, education and spiritual renewal, to name the more common themes. There are limitations, however, on what can be achieved with any particular year's chart. Some years the planetary aspects may only offer a few "safe" options. For example, if you desire to support your financial goals but the best location to achieve that would endanger your life or your health, then it's best to wait until a year when you are dealt a planetary hand in which it is safe to pursue financial goals. Also, you can not use Solar Return Trips to avoid the consequences of your actions (your Karma) or to achieve something that is not part of your destiny pattern as revealed in your Natal Chart. So if you want to be a rich and famous actress and it is not in keeping with your destiny, no amount of Solar Return Trips will achieve that goal.

The best use of Solar Return Trips is to support your Soul's Agenda, not your ego's agenda. The Soul's Agenda is revealed in each individual's birth chart. So if your Soul's Agenda is to have a child and you have not fulfilled that calling, setting up a Solar Return Trip to support manifesting a child is ideal. If you are not moving in the direction of your Soul's true desires, then you are not living in accordance with the cosmic plan for your life and the cosmos will not support you no matter how many journeys you take to achieve other things. The more you work toward aligning your life with your true path, the more you will be able to benefit from Solar Return Trips.

We are blessed to be living in times when we have so many incredible tools such as Solar Return Birthday Trips to help us realize our full potential. Just a few decades ago there did not exist convenient means with which the average person could travel vast distances. Now the means are at our disposal to co-create our destiny and quicken our spiritual evolution. The lessons are coming fast and furious and the choice of whether we learn them the easy way or the hard way is up to us.