In our solar system, all planets revolve around the Sun. In astrology, the Sun plays the same role. It represents our ego or personality. Your Sun sign says a lot about how you prefer to express yourself to the world.
Your entire horoscope lives within you. And everything in it organizes around your Sun’s approach to life. This approach offers clues to your personal gifts and challenges. Working with both consciously, is important on your personal development journey.
Below are key solar challenges based on Sun signs and book recommendations, helpful in moving through these challenges.
Aries
With your Sun in Aries, you have a very healthy survival instinct. Just pay attention around early Springtime and you will get a sense of this. New plants push through the soil to greet the Sun and baby birds breakthrough their eggs to greet the world. A youthful, self-determining, and raw life force energy organizes the ego.
Your solar challenge is conflict. You seek out adventure and adrenaline pumping activities that test courage. This leaves very little room for peace and understanding. As an Aries Sun, part of your personal development journey will involve learning skills that foster connection and cooperation.
Book recommendation: The Dance of Connection The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You’re Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate by Harriet Lerner, PhD
What you’ll learn:
- The perspective of your natural opposite, someone who is conflict averse
- How to transform conflict into connection
- How to handle disagreements when you’re rejected or cut-off
Taurus
With the Sun in Taurus, you experience life at the level of your senses. You honor your body by paying acute attention to its physical comfort. The personality organizes around being tuned into the material world for obtaining the feeling of safety and security within.
The solar challenge for Taurus is commitment to security above all. There is a level of security that is needed for living on Earth and living a physical existence. But growth requires moving beyond what we know as safe. Challenge yourself to move outside your comfort zone and discover a deeper sense of security that comes from within.
Book recommendation: Jump…and Your Life Will Appear: An Inch-By-Inch Guide to Making a Major Change by Nancy Levin
What you’ll learn:
- How to cultivate courage
- How to navigate change, step-by-step
- How to set boundaries to help you feel safe
Gemini
With your Sun in Gemini, you are an active learner. You are hardwired to take in new experiences, ideas, and information on multiple levels. Among your friends you are likely known as the connector or social butterfly. Observe a group of young students on a class trip to the Exploratorium and you’ve captured your essence.
Your solar challenge is distraction. Sometimes your Gemini Sun can be distracted by all the new ideas in its head that it never really gets a chance to complete what it has started. Your personal development journey will require developing skills around mindfulness and focus.
Book recommendation: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
What you’ll learn:
- You are not your thoughts
- How to cultivate presence
- How to live more embodied
Cancer
With your Sun in Cancer, you feel a lot. You value self-care, emotional safety, and diving deep into your subconscious. Your personality organizes itself around your subjective inner world. As the quintessential nurturer, you are talented at being a safe space for others to own and express their emotional life.
Your solar challenge is your emotional sensitivity. Feelings are real and important but they are not facts. Overidentification with our shifting moods can lead to protectiveness and stagnation. Your personal development journey will require you to balance your sensitivity with remaining open to the world.
Book recommendation: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer
What you’ll learn:
- What happens when you close yourself off
- How to let go of control
- How to free yourself of your inner “thorns”
Leo
With your Sun in Leo, you are always on! Fully aware of the effect you are having at any given moment. Your natural warmth and confidence radiates strongly. Like sunflowers following the path of the Sun, people naturally gravitate towards you.
Your solar challenge is approval. Your heightened sense of self can often lead to self-consciousness and a need for approval from others. Sometimes you being authentically who you are may not get the desired applause. Your personal development journey will require the ability to rise again despite it.
Book recommendation: Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
What you’ll learn:
- A process for getting backup when you don’t get the applause
- How to clarify truth from story
- How to create a new story that allows you to re-engage with the world
Virgo
With your Sun in Virgo, you are pragmatic, reliable, and likely an expert in your chosen profession. Your personality organizes itself around being of service. This pushes you towards active pursuit of inner self-growth.
Your solar challenge is perfectionism. You see with exacting clarity your faults and attempt to correct them. This ability can be taken too far into the realm of self-criticism. Your personal development journey will involve learning how to quiet the inner critic and how to regularly practice of self-acceptance.
Book recommendation: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brené Brown
What you’ll learn:
- The connection between shame and perfectionism
- The difference between perfectionism and healthy-striving
- How to cultivate self-compassion
Libra
With Sun in Libra, you value peace, equity, and justice. You have charm and grace that allows you to be a conduit for these values. You’re naturally oriented towards relationships and will easily understand both sides of an argument.
Your solar challenge is indecisiveness. You easily see the positive and the negative on both sides of a matter. This can lead to challenges in making a decision. Fence sitting, doesn’t lead to an enjoyable life. Your personal development journey will require you to make-decisions aligned with who you are.
Book recommendation: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
What you’ll learn:
- What science has to say about how our brains decide
- Common decision making pitfalls
- A reliable 4-step decision making process
Scorpio
With your Sun in Scorpio, you are penetrating, intense, and complicated. You tend to pick up on things that nobody wants to talk about. But you see those taboo topics as the essential. Your personality organizes itself around uncovering those buried places within yourself and society where others fear to tread.
Your solar challenge is mistrust. Being comfortable with the darker sides of human experience can lead to suspicion of the motives of others. Trusting yourself and trusting others is an important part of your personal development journey.
Book recommendation: Trust: Mastering the Four Essential Trusts: Trust in Self, Trust in God, Trust in Others, Trust in Life by Iyanla Vanzant
What you’ll learn:
- The 4 main types of trust
- How to build your trust muscle consistently
- How to repair broken trust
Sagittarius
With a Sun in Sagittarius, you are an optimist, traveler, and philosopher. You seek out adventures beyond your place of birth because you’re fascinated by what people belief and how they live.
Your solar challenge is delusion. Opting for a cheerful devoted demeanor, you sometimes don’t see how things can go wrong. Your personal development journey will involving cultivating presence to loss and failure.
Book recommendation: Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals by Thomas Moore
What you’ll learn:
- How to be with emotions of a darker nature
- The connection between constriction and expansion
- The sacredness of melancholy
Capricorn
Your Sun in Capricorn brings a lot seriousness, hard work, and maturity to ones life. You don’t shy away from responsibility. Like the stereotypical father figure, you are called upon to be “the rock” in a family unit. This results in a personality organized around integrity and honor.
Your solar challenge is guardedness. You can keep a bold face through some of the worst times. But not all of life will require armor. It needs softness to allow things like love, creativity, and healing. Your personal development journey will require some vulnerability training.
Book recommendation: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
What you’ll learn:
- What vulnerability truly means
- The tactics you’ve used to protect yourself from vulnerability
- How to practice the courage needed, to allow yourself to be seen vulnerably
Aquarius
As a Sun in Aquarius, you have the mark of genius. You have the ability to see things in new unconventional ways. Your mind is freed from convention and holds contempt for groupthink. Together this manifests into an ego committed to fierce individuality.
Your solar challenge is detachment. It allows you the objectivity and freedom you need to pursue things beyond what we currently can conceive. Your personal development journey will involve bringing the heart together with the mind.
Book recommendation: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
What you’ll learn:
- How the creative process works
- How to foster your own creativity
- What gets in the way of living a creative life
Pisces
With Sun in Pisces, you experience life between worlds. You are connected to subtler realms, dreams, God, the ancestors, or the muses. This connection allows for a vast imaginative resource and a depth of compassion.
Your solar challenge is escapism. Your awareness of something beyond what most of us see, makes it hard to be here. In addition to drugs or alcohol, spending excessive amounts of time in meditation or binge watching Netflix, are all ways you may seek to escape. Your personal development journey will support healthy practices that keep you in this reality.
Book recommendation: The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People by Judith Orloff
What you’ll learn:
- How to maintain your gift of compassion, despite an incentive reality
- How to protect yourself from sensory overload
- How to find and connect with nourishing people and activities