Today’s post is a book review: How to Have A Happy Birthday by Tamar Hutwitz-Fleming.
Author Hurwitz-Fleming wants us to take a new approach to celebrating birthdays. Have you ever considered your birthday a significant holiday?
The earliest birthday celebrations occurred in ancient Egypt when pharaohs celebrated their coronation day. These festivities symbolized the pharaoh’s rebirth as a god. Fast-forward to modern times, when the average person worthy of rituals and trappings of birthdays went mainstream during the 19th century.
As Tamar reminds us in her book, birthdays come around once a year, offering the uplifting treasures of the day: the cards, the cake, the Happy Birthday song, and the coming together to celebrate you. Who doesn’t want a day officially celebrating you, your major holiday?
Birthdays help us be grateful for the love and attention, especially when we say thank you. They enable us to receive the positive energies directed at us, which keeps us enthusiastically engaged.
Everyone is excited when their birthday arrives! As a pharmaceutical sales specialist, I discovered a unique way to connect with hard-to-reach medical professionals by celebrating their birthdays. “Everyone lights up when it’s somebody’s birthday.” This approach opened many closed doors, helping me build relationships and advance in my pharmaceutical career.
But what about when you aren’t celebrated or recognized on your birthday? As mentioned in the book, birthdays have a profound way of magnifying our insecurities. Here’s where you can change the narrative. No one will celebrate you like you. We should never struggle to celebrate ourselves.
Don’t let your birthday be the most challenging day of the year! Transform the birthday blues. How? By embracing your birthday celebration, you choose an opportunity that can provide mindful centering and self-love.
Birthdays are supposed to be happy, yet they can often be disappointing. Melancholy may arise just before our birthday, concealing a yearning for something unarticulated or unresolved. I love that Tamar says that birthdays symbolize our most spiritually aligned day. Our yearning tends to be for deeper personal meaning, whether we know it or not.
Nine Ways We Sabotage Our Birthdays:
1. Ignoring our birthdays
2. Getting depressed
3. Keeping our birthday a secret
4. Not planning or giving proper notice
5. Having childlike expectations
6. Other’s Don’t Want to Celebrate Us
7. Getting Sick
8. Generating Distress
9. Letting the Past Dominate the Present
You have the power to change your narrative. Say, “No more.”I deserve to be happy, receive love, and celebrate my major holiday.”
How to Plan that Birthday:
🎈 Ignite That Birthday Spirit
⭐️ Plan for Your Big Day
💫 Envision What You Want
✨ Ask for a thoughtful, heart-centered gift.
⚡️ Take the Day Off or Go to Work to Celebrate
🎈 Celebrate by Yourself or Plan to With Others
💐 Send Yourself Flowers
🎂 Eat cake
😘 Make a personal attainable Birthday Wish.
Welcome the birthday spirit by adopting meaningful rituals to celebrate you. Rituals are potent ways to acknowledge big moments and raise spiritual energy. Tamar does an excellent job interjecting the importance of higher consciousness needed in our energy levels.
Why I like How to Have A Happy Birthday book:
👩🏽🏫 Easy read
📕 Only 89 pages
💃🏾 We are all worthy of celebrating ourselves
🎈 Tips to dodge the birthday blues
⭐️ A reminder of how thoughtful gestures make a difference to ourselves and others
🎈 Birthdays don’t have to be expensive (the best things in Life are free)
📘 A personal workbook with thoughtful questions to help you identify and ease birthday fears
Congratulations to Tamar for winning the Nonfiction Book Award for “How to Have a Happy Birthday.”
And finally, put yourself first on your birthday. It’s the one day of the year you’ve given 100 percent permission to do that. In Tamar’s words, “Life is precious. Life is fleeting. Life is ours to create to the best of our ability.”
As always, thank you for visiting the Age of Grace. I appreciate you.
