Do You Live Your Life By Your Birth Chart?

Musings by Sarah Brynteson

Hi, I'm Sarah Brynteson — mom, astrologer, and intuitive psychic guide, and the voice behind Written in the Stars. I help individuals understand their own energy through their birth chart, and I have a special love for helping parents understand their children's energy, too. I'm a graduate of the Debra Silverman School of Astrology, a former middle school teacher, and someone who believes, deeply, that dreams become reality when we choose to make it so. Today I’m answering a special question that was posed to me that is worth exploring.

I was out and about on Wednesday June 3rd and I was asked a very interesting question: Do you live your life by your chart?

Before answering I paused to really think about it. The best answer I could come up with was…kinda.

I know that is not much of an answer so hopefully this article will help to shed some light on it.

Before I go any further, let me say something I believe deeply: planets don’t do things to people. We do things. We have free will — every single one of us — and that doesn’t disappear just because Mercury is retrograde or Saturn is making a hard angle to your Sun. Using your chart to guide your goals for the year doesn’t mean you live it literally, or that you hand the wheel over to the cosmos.

What it does mean is that some stretches of the year may feel more challenging than others — and your chart can help you understand why. The goals you set with your Personal Year in mind may hit resistance. That doesn’t mean you give up and hide until the transit passes. It may simply mean you need a little more support, a little more patience, or a slightly different approach. The chart is a map, not a sentence.

Not All Beginnings Look the Same

Many people start their year as the clock strikes midnight on January 1. The problem with that is it does not always feel like the start of something.

We know that on January 1st we’re deep in Capricorn Season — the earth is cold and structural, and because of that, nothing is quite ready to grow.

Instead, it’s the type of earth that holds things together. If everything is held neatly in place, though, it’s hard to grow past those borders.

And for some of you, this is exactly when your Personal Year begins — and that is just as valid. Capricorn energy is not a barrier, it is a foundation.

In my membership, when the Capricorn New Moon arrived around that time, we talked about how that season serves as the framework.

While researching that New Moon, I came across an article referencing Rudolf Steiner's cosmology. It spoke about each element having its "workers" — beings that govern how the element behaves. For the Capricorn Moon, those workers are Gnomes.

According to the article, Gnomes are earth elementals. They work underground, in total darkness, surrounded by stone and mineral. Gravity-bound. Dense. They sit in one place and refuse to move.

In Steiner’s telling, Gnomes are hard. They are uninterested in anything vague. They don’t care about how you feel about the situation. They care about what is structurally true. What holds. What doesn’t. They know where the bedrock is, where the fault lines run, what’s solid enough to build on — and what will collapse under weight.

They work with iron. Lead. Cold stone. The heaviest, least negotiable materials. And they work in silence.

Gnomes don’t like being observed. Watching them makes them stop. They work underground because the work requires darkness. Mineral consolidation doesn’t happen under observation. It happens in places no one is watching.

The key is that staying quiet lets the work happen. Announcing your plans now — broadcasting what you’re building — is like turning floodlights on a mineshaft. Everything stops. The Gnomes leave.

So what does any of this have to do with the original question of do I live by my Birth Chart?

About four years ago, I discovered a book called The Book of Houses: an Astrological Guide to the Harvest Cycle in Human Life Robert Cole and Paul Williams.

In this book, Cole and Williams share how you can use your birth chart to find the timing of your Personal Year, based on where the Sun is located in the sky in relation to your chart.

It starts with you casting your birth chart. For that, you’ll need to know your time of birth, location, and birthday. Yes, the exact time does matter because it helps you set up the houses you’ll see below.

If you don't know where to find your birth time, you can check out the suggestions on the“I don’t know my birth time”page on my website. I share ideas for where to look.

Once you have your birth time, you can click [HERE] to sign up and get directions on how to create your chart sent straight to your email.

After you cast your chart, you'll notice it has 12 slices — like a pie. Cole and Williams explain how each slice of the pie (we call them houses in astrology) represents a different part of your Personal Year.

When Does Your Personal Year Start?

According to this book, your Personal Year begins when the Sun in the sky crosses into your 11th house. This is the time to reflect on and choose what you’d like to work on for the year ahead. Spoiler alert: it likely isn’t January 1st though for some it may be.

For me, it’s around the end of January. From then until midway through Pisces season, I have time to figure out what really matters — to me and my loved ones. What do I want to do in my business, for leisure, or for personal growth?

One of the things I love most about this approach is that it’s not just one day to figure it all out.

You have time.

Time to thoughtfully consider what would work best. Time to plan, talk with the people you want to collaborate with, and set goals in a way that feels natural. Cole and Williams even include simple, grounded practices you can do as the Sun moves through the sky and your Personal Year unfolds.

Once you’ve figured out your dreams or the seeds you want to plant in the 11th house, you’ll start to plant them in the 12th. Just like planting a seed in the soil, we don’t always know if a goal will take root — we just trust that something is beginning to grow, even if it’s unseen at first.

I’ve found that unlike casting New Year’s resolutions, these dreams seem to come true more easily — because of the attention paid to timing, and because there are check-ins throughout the year, too.

The Four Checkpoints of Your Personal Year

Then comes the first of four key checkpoints in your Personal Year:

🔸 Rebirthing Day — When the Sun crosses your Ascendant (AC line) and enters your 1st house, things begin to move. It’s like the official “launch” of the cycle. What I love about The Book of Houses is how it invites you to pause and honor this moment. That pause feels really important. For me, it’s a time to celebrate where I’ve been and where I’m heading.

🔸 Heritage Day — When the Sun crosses your IC (the lowest point in your chart) and enters your 4th house, you’re invited to connect with home, roots, and your family of origin.

🔸 Sharing Day — When the Sun crosses your Descendant and enters your 7th house, the focus shifts to relationships — partnerships, collaborations, and the people you’re building alongside.

🔸 Harvest Day — When the Sun crosses your Midheaven and enters your 10th house, it’s time to take stock. What has grown? What is ready to be seen? This is the culmination of everything you set in motion at the start of your Personal Year.

As each checkpoint arrives, I ask myself:

• Do my goals still make sense? Or do they need to shift?

Results

By working with my personal timing instead of the world’s calendar, I’ve experienced more successes than setbacks.

Do all of my goals unfold exactly the way I imagine?

Nope.

Do some unfold in ways I never could have imagined?

Absolutely.

That’s the beauty of this system — it works with you, instead of following what the world says is the “right” time to begin.

Dreams to Reality

That's what inspired me to build something others could use, too. It's because of this system that I created my Dreams to Reality program. It's a way to support you in discovering your own timing and aligning your goals with it. I've seen how powerful this approach can be — for myself and for my clients.

That's why I offer a free, no-obligation 30-minute session to explore whether it's a good fit for you. We'll talk about your goals, what you're working toward, and how your Personal Year can help you bring those dreams into reality — step by step.

That question — do you live your life by your chart — stopped me in my tracks for a reason. It deserved a real answer, not a quick one. So thank you for sitting with me while I worked through it.

I hope something here resonated with you. Maybe it was the idea of your own timing, or simply the permission to do things differently than the world expects. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts — drop a comment below or share this with someone in your life who might be ready to hear it too.

With love and stardust,

Sarah