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Welcome to the Delicious Dignity Podcast. Let's settle in securely and ever so nicely into the brilliance of our own dignity. Hello, lovelies. In this episode of the Love Liberation series, I'm inviting you, nudging you, maybe even slightly pleading with you to love on your own birthday, to liberate the love that's in there somewhere for your own birthday. And you know what's ironic is that I used to be someone who thought her birthday was cursed. I was terrified of my own birthday. And so in this episode, I really want to inspire you to honor your own birthday. And at the end of this episode, I'll show you some unique ways to honor it. Not celebrate it, honor it. And I guarantee you've never heard it said this way before. There's something about the birthday portal that's specifically especially potent from a spiritual perspective, from an emotional, mental, and physical perspective. There's something really potent about that portal. For example, I want to introduce you to this concept of incarnation. We've heard about reincarnation, right? Which is this idea of people reincarnate in different bodies over time and have newer lives each time that they're reincarnated. But I want to talk to you about incarnation. Your birthday is in fact a very special time. It is marking the passage of time in your life. Much like the earth has seasons every year, you two get a restart in some ways. You get to be reborn, you get to rebirth, you get to reinvent, you get to grow more, you get to incarnate more of yourself into the world in one lifetime. People talk about becoming more authentic. This is another way of looking at that. It's allowing, and that word is super important. It's allowing more of yourself to come through to greet the world, to be in the world, to live in the world. By the way, I was inspired to do this particular episode because my birthday is coming up November 23rd. And I'm going to be doing all the things that I'm going to be sharing with you today. And I also want to introduce you to this quote. And it goes like this joy is the justice we give ourselves. Joy is the justice we give ourselves. And this is a quote by J. Drew Lanham. And I feel like it fits so perfectly with this topic we're covering today because the joy of honoring your own birthday can be a form of making right with your own life. Honoring your birthday becomes your special blend of activism. Especially if in your life you weren't honored enough. So I want to tell you the story of how I got here. As I said, I used to hate, fear, and be terrified of my birthday. I thought it was cursed. And it was for very good reasons that I thought this way. I wasn't making it up, and none of the events that happened on my birthday were in any way in my control, so to speak. So there were reasons, very good reasons. I felt like every birthday there was some drama, some calamity that would occur either on the day of my birthday or leading up to it. So usually the day before. And for example, one of the most painful ones was when I was traveling in Spain, I gave myself the birthday gift of traveling in Spain. And all I was doing was walking down the street. That was it. That's all I was doing. I was walking down the street. And it's not like I was paying attention to anything else. I was just walking. And for some reason, I don't know if I tripped or what happened, I just fell down and I fractured my foot. And I spent most of my birthday in the hospital waiting to get seen by a doctor. And then all the plans that I had on my birthday were canceled because I couldn't go anywhere with a fractured foot, especially in a foreign country. Another time, a guy I was dating just disappeared on my birthday. And it's not that he even knew it was my birthday, it just so happened that he chose my birthday to disappear on. And of course, a week or so later, he got back in touch with me. But it was a very strange thing to happen. And then another time, my best friend at the time, rather, my only friend at the time, she gave me a dead rat on my birthday as a joke. And I can tell you so many other events, but these are just a few to just describe to you. I had no control over any of these events happening. None. And they would just happen on my birthday for some reason. And the times when there weren't any kind of drama or calamity, there were a handful of times when that wasn't the case. It was just the case that the November 23rd and around that time is a holiday in the US. And my friends would just leave. They would not be there for the holidays, they would be with their family. So it would just be the lonely time. And that was just a handful of times. The rest of the time, it was high drama, high calamity happening on my birthday. And of course, no hate to the people who contributed to these feelings of me having a cursed birthday. Honestly, if it was just one event in isolation, it would have been fine. It was because this happened every single year over and over again that I started to fear my birthday. And there were maybe one or two times when, you know, something good did happen on my birthday. And I had just so much anxiety from all these years of things going wrong that I would just be on high alert, thinking something bad was going to happen, either to me or the people around me, because it was my birthday. So at some point I was so traumatized by my own birthday that I began to forget when my birthday was and even how old I was. I would isolate myself because I didn't want bad things to happen to me or to other people. And of course, because I had so many years of anxiety around my birthday, I think it at some point became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You could even say I law of attraction it into my life in a way. It's one of those things where things go wrong, you form a belief, you hold tight to that belief, and then more things go wrong. And it's that vicious cycle, and I was part of that vicious cycle. In some ways, you could say that I accidentally cursed myself. And at one point, I just got so sick of my own shit. I realized I was being very silly, or rather, that I could not continue to keep hiding from my own birthday. Like I was this victim of my own birthday. I became sick of my shit because around this time that I became sick of my shit, I started developing self-esteem as opposed to self-hatred. I had, I was starting to do a lot of inner work where I was getting right with God, universe, spirit, whatever you want to call it. And I stopped believing that somehow I was cursed for being born. I had massive spiritual depression for most of my life. And spiritual depression is a huge topic, and I'm, and I will cover it in another episode. But all of these things contributed to me just not feeling right with myself. And what better way to have that happen and show me that there's something wrong with me than all these calamities happening on the day I was born? And so when I started developing self-esteem, when I started doing a lot of inner work, I realized that I was done with this story of self-hatred because that's what was underneath all of this. Sure, I had proof. Sure, there were events that happened that made me feel that way, but I kept continuing to feel it as opposed to try to change it. And so when I tried to change it, I started developing more esteem for myself. I started holding myself in higher regard. And I decided, I came up with this idea that let's say that November 23rd is cursed. I'll celebrate my birthday another day so I can have the birthday without the calamity. And so I think I chose a day like November 1st. And in one case, I even celebrated in April because I was like, let me just give myself a huge runway so that no matter what happens in November, at least I celebrated my birthday in April. Then I think at one point I said, Oh, a day is not enough. Let me celebrate a week because I want a week to celebrate and work with my birthday energy. And then I said, A week isn't enough. Let me do a birthday month. And a lot of times when we're sad or collapsed, our instinct is to shut down and collapse even more or turn in, which is what I had done most of my life. And it's a self-protection thing. We all do it. We're trying not to get hit, so we cover or we protect our vulnerable areas, so we become into a ball. And through this story and episode, I want to show you that perhaps opening up instead is a good idea, especially when it comes to emotional or spiritual wounds. More space, not less, more love, not less, more beauty, more care, not less. That whole decision to go from a day to a week to a month actually gave me more space to work with the energy of my birthday. And it also had this positive effect of now giving me more esteem and more regard for myself as opposed to less. So now we're part of a virtuous cycle as opposed to a vicious cycle. So the virtuous cycle being developing more self-esteem, finding ways to develop it more, having more esteem, experiencing positive experiences, and round we go. So the virtuous cycle, right? And younger me would have looked at this older version of me and wonder how she could dare to do this. Isn't it selfish? Isn't it extravagant to have a whole month of a birthday? Isn't it just for people who are better than you? That's what I would have thought. And I've found in general, and I think you will find this in your own life if you dared to do it, is that treating yourself nicely will get you way more rewards than anything else you could do. People have overused the stick as opposed to the carrot when it comes to themselves. They punish themselves, I think, way too easily than they should. And I think we all indulge in this. So I'm going to invite you to do the opposite. Open up and treat yourself like your precious goods. And a fine time to do that, if you needed a time, a timing thing, is on your birthday. And you know what? I'm happy to report now. It's been about five years since my birthday has produced any calamities. So I've had five years of peace, five years of no anxiety. It's been wonderful. And the truth is, even if even if it does happen again on my birthday, I wouldn't make that mean that there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with the day I was born. That belief has been eradicated from my system. And that's another good point to bring up to you, which is anytime something happens and you can feel a belief forming, or you can feel a belief getting more stuck inside of you, ask yourself, what am I making this mean? So anytime something happens, let's say your grocery bag tears and all your groceries fall out. Why did that analogy come into my mind? I have no idea. But let's say that's what happens. Your grocery bag tears and all your apples fall on the street, or I don't know, something like that happens. And you ask yourself in that moment, what am I making this mean about me? About the world, about the grocery store, about my groceries. Ask yourself that question. What am I making it mean? And that will help you identify what the belief is that's getting more and more stuck, or perhaps a new belief that is forming. It's very in the moment, so you do have to catch yourself, but I just wanted to highlight that for you before we go forward. Now I want to get to the part where I want to show you all the different ways in which you can honor, honor, not celebrate, your birthday. So first I'd like you to start with time. I'd like you to choose what day you will celebrate your birthday. And maybe it is the day you were born, maybe it's another day. It doesn't matter, whatever it is. Maybe you do a birthday week, a birthday month, or even a birthday season if you want to go wild. Because this birthday portal is just a way for you to give yourself space to honor yourself, really. So if you feel like you can do that in one day, fine. If you, like me, in the beginning, need a month, lots of space to figure out how you're going to treat yourself preciously, then do that. There's nothing extravagant about it. I want you to think of it as giving yourself space. We talk a lot about in our culture of having safe space, making safe space. This is about you being a safe space for yourself and teaching yourself to do that. Yeah. Oh wow. I want you to go back and re-listen to what I just said if you can. That that just blew me away. Okay. Now the way in which you will honor it. So now you've come up with a timeline, right? Whatever the time is you want to celebrate your, sorry, honor your birthday. I want you to think of honoring your birthday the way you would approach a season on earth, like earth seasons, so nature's seasons. So for example, oh, and by the way, before I go forward with that, I want to also tell you that the new year doesn't have to be celebrated on December 31st or January 1st. It can be celebrated on your birthday. You can make your birthday the end and the start of a new year. So you can have new year rituals on your birthday. That is a way that you can also honor it. But going back to what I was saying before, a seasonal approach to your birthday means things like what would you do if you were in springtime? What would you do if you were in summer? What would you do if you were in fall? What would you do if you were in winter? So, for example, spring-related activities could be anything from spring cleaning. It could be you donating or letting go of either emotional wounds or mental beliefs or energy cleansing work. You could do all those things if you choose to go the spring road with honoring your birthday. You could also do spring is also the time of growth where new growth is happening. So this is also the time when you take on a new challenge, or you take on a new hobby, or you try to learn a new skill. Basically, this is the seed that you're planting now, or the seed that's germinating now that you're going to tend to all year round. So it's not like a goal that you just check off. It's more like something that you're building and building. So maybe you learn something like carpentry. Maybe you learn how to paint. Maybe you take on the challenge of understanding investments and stock investments because this is something that skill will help you for the rest of your life if you start building it now. So think of it that way: a challenge, one new challenge to take on, one new thing to learn, one new skill that you can develop on that will be good for you and that you're excited to do. Try not to force yourself to do it, but that you can see the benefit of you doing it. So that's spring-inspired activities. Think growth and think making space for growth. Kind of those themes of those activities on your birthday to honor your birthday. If we're thinking about summer or late summer inspired activities, this is usually when the harvest season is happening. It's either fall or late summer. So this is where you're harvesting or you're giving. We're harvesting from nature. So this is where you give of yourself in some way that feels good. Now that could be volunteer work. That could be if you have a candle-making business, you make candles for your friends and you give small candles to them. That could be you doing some kind of public service. It's basically about harnessing the energy of generosity. And I will be doing the same at the end of this episode. So I'll give you, you will see a real life example of me doing late summer or fall activities, especially because my birthday falls in that fall time. My birthday falls in fall. And so I'll be doing that at the end of this episode. So that will give you a good idea of or inspire you as to what you want to do. And that is also a really interesting concept of where wherever your birthday falls. So let's say your birthday falls in January or February in the northern hemisphere, that's winter. And so you might choose to do winter-related activities to honor your birthday, things like that. Just giving you some ideas of how you can honor your birthday. Now we go into actually let's do another summer-related activity. Summary is just being summary, it's a shiny, bright time. So this is where you can buy yourself a new piece of clothing, or you can complement yourself, or you can choose to change your hair. Anything that makes you shine in a different way, or in a way in which you want to shine. Things that really help your radiance. That's what we're going for in summer. So fall-inspired activities or autumn-related activities, like I said, it could be harvest season, generosity, and service. Oh, and I one of the ways that I celebrated my birthday, you guys are gonna get a kick out of this. Because my birthday falls in fall, and because I chose to give generously or perform some service, I went around my block picking up all the dog poop that I had on my block. And I ended up picking up all the dog poop and I threw it away, and I was like, ah, okay, this is my service. So that's another example in which you can be of service. So the other aspect of fall or autumn is all my things that make me feel cozy. So all the things that make you feel cozy, warmed up, cuddly. So that is massages, taking myself out for a really nice dinner, buying more flowers to put on my table, things like that are some examples in which you can cozy up to fall and you can cozy up to this energy of your birthday. The other thing that I find really, really potent to do, and this falls more in the spring, winter, and even fall category, which is doing a lot of personal inner work, so intuitive work with mentors, with teachers, getting either intuitive readings from them or getting some intuitive energy work with them. These help fatten me up for winter, give me immunity, give me thick skin, give me some blubber that ends up feeding me for winter and spring. That's the idea. It's like you're hibernating, but it's an active hibernation. And that really helps with the stamina that I will need to confront the challenges, the obstacles, and the desires that I have for the next year. And then the other thing you can do that's very wintery is you can study yourself, right? You so you're getting sessions with mentors and professionals, but what you can also do is study yourself. And one of the finest ways to do this, in my opinion, is to go to the Gene Keys website. So gene keys are like imagine a personality test, but for your soul. So this is like the Myers Briggs, but on a soul or a spirit level. That's what the gene keys are. So it's gene keys.com. And you go in there, you generate your free profile. You don't even have to sign up to generate your profile. You can just generate it. It's shown right there. And you can download this profile. And one of the four areas it shows you is your life purpose, your radiance, your evolution, and your purpose. And those four areas are just beautiful to read about yourself. You're reading about yourself, you're reading about your own soul. And that's, I think, a beautiful thing to do in winter. That's you getting the blubber you need to last the winter. Yeah, so those are some of the ideas that I can think about this seasonal approach to a birthday. And of course, you can do all of them in one day. You can do all of them in a week, in a month, in a season, whatever you want to do. One of the things that I did on my birthday, and I feel like this falls in in the winter category too, is I tattooed myself on my birthday. In fact, both the tattoos I have on my birthday, I so both of the tattoos I have on my skin, I have done on my birthday. So it's a way of it's a sacred tattoo. So it's a tattoo that means a lot to me and it's an essence of my soul. And that's come out onto my skin to show myself, to remind myself who I am and what I want out of life. And in a way, it also displays it to other people and it has this energetic resonance. So that is something also you can do during winter if you want to celebrate it in a wintery way. And by the way, not so shameless plug, actually. Today that I'm recording the episode is also the day that I actually released the sacred tattoo experience. It's a new offering that I have that I think you'll be really interested to see. It's a whole ceremony and a whole experience around creating a sacred image for yourself that you can choose to get tattooed on your skin. So that might be a nice experience for you to consider on your birthday. But anyway, I hope you really love this seasonal way of thinking about your own birthday because you too are nature, right? We tend to think as nature that nature is the mountains, the rivers, the animals, the plants. Basically, we see ourselves as somehow separate from nature. Everything else is nature, but we are not nature. And the truth is, we too are nature. And so this is your way of working with Earth's natural cycles and applying it to your own incarnation. You could even do an advent calendar for your birthday. If you don't know what an advent calendar is, you can Google it. But basically, you're opening up little presents for every day of your every day for about 15 days, no, 21 days leading up to your birthday. That's another example. But this idea of the calendar, I really want to highlight for you. Because having your calendar, okay, that lasts from the start of your birthday on to the next birthday, especially if you have a large calendar that almost looks like a planner and you can stick it up on your wall. That calendar records all the good stuff, all the achievements, all the sort of not so great experiences for the entire year of your birthday, starting from the first birthday to the next birthday. We all have something that's called achievers amnesia, where we forget the things that we did. We forget the things that we accomplished, we forget the things that we should be proud of for doing during the year. So, one of the things I will always highlight is please get yourself a calendar. I believe they're called wall calendars. You just put them up on the wall, they're huge, and you can write into each day what happened, what you want to remember on your next birthday. And then on your next birthday, you can flip through the entire calendar and read through all the things that have happened during that year of your birthday. And it's a beautiful way to remember yourself. Remember yourself on your own birthday, another wintery activity to get you some blubber. The truth is, I think I say that word just because I like saying it blubber, blubber blubber. I'm so sorry. So, yeah, please, just to finish that thought, please get yourself a big calendar. Okay. Now, before I end this episode, I thought I'd tell you about this too. Usually I only reserve special offers and discounts for my newsletter subscribers. But I thought since you are listening to this episode, I should probably offer it to you too. You see, every day on every year on my birthday, I offer the biggest sale of my one-on-one session, my flagship session. And for every year, the number that I turn that year is the discount that I offer. So since this year I'm turning 36, I'm offering 36% off the clear and potent intuitive session. So usually it's $222, and now it will be $142 for 90 minutes. Yes, you heard that right. 90 minutes for $142. It's crazy, I know, but I love doing it for all the reasons I described above. And this maybe also might give you an example of how you might do things if you are looking to do the fall harvesty season inspired birthday honoring. But this is the way I choose to do it for myself. So this sale, by the way, will happen between November 23rd and December 1st. Only during that period you will have the sale, and the code you will need is 36OFF. So 36 off. And I'll put that in the description. So you have it. Yay! I hope you really enjoyed this episode of honoring, of incarnating, of yeah, just sinking in to more of who you are and who you will be and can be and all your potential. Talk about delicious dignity. Am I right? So until next time, my beautiful lovelies. First of all, happy birthday. And secondly, may the day you were born serve as an invitation for you to incarnate even more of your dignity. Much love to you. Happy birthday. Bye.