What if Leo season is illuminating your brilliance with ADHD 🌤️

But you're missing out because you think it's all about 'shining'?

Photo by iam_os on Unsplash

The average house cat sleeps around sixteen hours a day. A lion in the wild clocks in at closer to twenty — it hunts in a burst, eats, and then takes a long cat nap on the open tundra. You’ve probably watched the domestic version of this in your own living room, your cat tears around the house at top speed and then sleeps so hard you have to shake the bag of Temptations to wake her up.

That’s the animal we have collectively agreed represents Leo season.

Which is worth a second look (aka a cognitive reframe), because the familiar battle cry of Leo season is: be seen, get out there, it’s your time to shine! — thirty consecutive days of visibility, showing up. By about day four it’s exhausting, and that’s especially true if you have ADHD or similar tendencies and the pressure to perform on demand keeps colliding with a brain that doesn’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to continuous motivation or consistent output.

(Tip: This one gets technical, so I created a free Leo Season Guide you can use to manage your energy and productivity all season. Subscribe for free and I’ll send it right to your inbox!)

So what if the season is actually built more like the big cat itself? A surge of energy and visibility, then a retreat, then a nice long cat-stretch of working out what it all means before the next burst of activity. That’s a different instruction than just shine, and it’s more livable for a brain that hates pressure.

The heresy: I like combining astrology and human design because, first of all, I have ADHD and cannot do just one thing. Second and more importantly, following an astrological sign’s season through its corresponding transitions in human design adds so much nuance to the energy you can actually tap into week by week. If you’re a seasoned astrologer, you might not have the need for this layering; but for the rest of us, layering the degrees of the sun’s transit through Leo over the human design mandala provides insight without needing to be able to read an astrological transit chart. This works whether you’re a Leo, Leo rising, a Leo moon, or a person with zero placements in Leo who is simply trying to get something out of the next thirty days.

The double-heresy: What if I don’t believe in any of this stuff? Fine. It doesn’t matter. I’m not dying on a hill for any of this (well, maybe Placidus). The system I am proposing works perfectly well as a framework to structure your energy, creativity and productivity over the next 30-ish days. No belief in archetypes or devotion to luminaries required.

Here’s how it works

Every degree of the zodiac maps onto a gate in the human design body graph. It isn’t perfectly exact, but it’s good enough to be useful.

Two things come out of that. Where your Leo placements fall tells you which specific energy is activated for you during this season. And as the sun moves degree by degree, each of those gates becomes available to everyone, in a sequence, every six days, so roughly a week at a time.

The sequence is the part I’m fascinated with, and it looks more like the lion’s typical day than like the fabled-advice about the lion.

Leo season, week-by-week 🦁

Gate 56 — The Wanderer. Stimulation.
0°–2° Leo, roughly July 22–24
Throat center. The core quality is storytelling, curiosity, adventure, and giving your lived experience a voice. This is the one everyone means when they say “Leo season.” You’re at the party or on the stage, you’re telling the story, people are listening and laughing and leaning in. We bust into the season with the shine.

Gate 31 — Influence.
2°–7°37’ Leo, roughly July 24–30 — this is where we are right now
Also the throat center. Recognized leadership and speaking for the collective. The distinction that matters here is that this is leadership conferred by the group rather than claimed by the individual — you’re influential because people turned toward you and asked.

My moon is in the 31, which is interesting, because a body graph gives you sun, moon, earth, and all the planets you’d reference in Western astrology. Everyone says the moon is about emotion, and sure. Go a layer deeper and it’s also where your fuel comes from, your motivation, your reason for doing the thing. Mine sits in the 31, which means I’m genuinely lit up when I’m called upon to present, to lead, to teach and share with the group. That’s what motivates me to show up and deliver, despite my own ADHD brain. It also explains a truly unreasonable amount of my career.

Gate 33 — Retreat.
7°37’–13° Leo, roughly July 31–August 4
Throat center again, and here’s the record scratch (I made a nice record scratching sound on the podcast for this, you should really listen to it.) Privacy, reflection, remembering, and the sharing of the past. Wait–Leos don’t want privacy, right? They want everyone looking at them, all season. Wrong.

This is the twenty-hour nap, arriving right on schedule about a third of the way through. But it’s not just blank downtime — the 33 is specifically about reflection, remembrance, and telling the story of what already happened, so there’s still something social living inside it. You went out, you led, you gathered people together, and now you retreat, grab your journal and make meaning of it.

This part is important for your mental health. Even an epic world tour has a break somewhere in the middle. And when it doesn’t, there’s an MTV documentary a decade later about the breakdown that occurred when that artist refused/wasn’t allowed to rest (Spoiler, the band is not getting back together.)

Side note that might explain someone in your life; If you know a Leo sun or Leo rising born somewhere between about 7.5° and 13°ish who has never once read as a “typical Leo,” this is possibly why.

Gate 7 — The Army. The Role of the Self.
13°15’–18° Leo, roughly August 4–9
This one moves into the G center, which is identity. Direction, leadership, and guiding others. “Army” is the traditional name and it’s a little much, but the meaning is people who take a group somewhere — teachers, principals, public service. But it’s also the role of the Self, which definitely rings true to our collective impression of Leo.

Gate 4 — Youthful Folly. Formalization.
18°–24° Leo, roughly August 9–15
Ajna center. This is where you go looking for mental answers, settle into logic, work to resolve doubt, and try to solve the problem.

I don’t think it’s called youthful folly because the energy is young. I think it’s because when you’re young you’re trying to figure everything out — where to go to school, what to do with your life, who to marry — and the folly is reaching for an answer purely so that you have one. With my clientsI call this box-checking syndrome. That’s the shadow side of the 4, and you’ve watched it happen. Someone announces they’re going to be a doctor, you privately cannot see it, they go anyway because the path was there and it came with answers, and at 41 they’re miserable. It could be a doctor, a lawyer, or the family business that was sitting right there when they needed certainty.

If you want to work the shadow of this one, the move is to allow yourself the trial and error. You are still formalizing, you’re still making real decisions, and nothing you decide is permanent or set in stone. You can always pivot; this is true whether you’re 21 or 70.

Gate 29 — The Abysmal. Perseverance.
24°–29°+ Leo, roughly August 15–22
Sacral center. Commitment, devotion, saying yes to something and then actually following through.

I love this energy for ADHD, because we do have a tendency to start things and not finish them, and the assumption is always that we weren’t committed enough. That’s usually wrong, because the devotion is real. Saying yes and following through are two separate capacities that have to get woven together over time, and that weaving is something you have to stay with rather than something you decide once. You’re weaving the thread back and forth through the fabric, over and over and over again until the stitch is complete. Or however sewing works, I don’t know. Anyway, the 29 closing out Leo season is almost too perfect.

But just to be clear, this is definitely Leo-coded commitment and devotion, not the Virgo commitment that reads more organized and competent. The clearest evidence for this devotion-to-a-craft is the sheer amount of heavyweight Hollywood superstars whose birthdays fall in the 29, namely:

Madonna

Angela Bassett

Steve Carell

James Cameron

Halle Berry

Steve Martin

Jennifer Lawrence

Ben Affleck

Robert De Niro

Sean Penn

And seriously so many more, but I rest my case.

Leo comes in like a lion and out like... an accountant?

Gate 56 actually begins back in Cancer, and gate 29 keeps going briefly into Virgo, which gives the whole season more flow.

Let’s explore this for a sec. Leo season opens with an energy that started in Cancer — tribal, family-oriented, gathering — and arrives as storytelling and giving your experience a voice. You collect your people first, and then you have something to tell them. It closes with an energy that carries into Virgo, all commitment and to-lists and doing what you said you’d do. Virgo’s follow-through shows up before Virgo does. Which is good, because I need extra time to commit myself to anything.

So what do you do with this

The realistic version of Leo season looks like the lion’s everyday/b-roll rather than the lion’s highlight reel. You get about a week on the stage, and you still have to write the material. If you get booed off, you get a retreat week to reflect and refine the material before we enter the 7 and you find your sense of direction.

Find your Leo placements and see which gate they land in — that’s your personal activation this season. If you don’t have any Leo placements or you generally don’t care and just want to follow the framework, skip this. Then track the weeks. When we enter the 33 on July 31 and you shut yourself up in your room, remember you’re not ‘failing Leo season’. When we enter the 4 and you’re suddenly desperate to resolve every open question in your life, notice whether you’re formalizing or just grabbing. Talk through this with your therapist or mull it over in your mastermind group. We’re currently going deep into this inside Coterie; the breakthroughs my members are having are truly liberating.

I put together a free Leo Season Guide with the degrees of Leo mapped against the human design gates, the centers, and guidance on each core quality, so you can see the whole arc at once. Subscribe for free and I’ll send it right to your inbox! If this post was useful to you-please restack and pass it on!

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I’m Buffy Fermino, a licensed therapist and coach certified in CBT, ADHD, and Jungian shadow integration. Heretic is where we look at the patterns underneath the overthinking, the self-sabotage, and the procrastination — through the lens of psychology and the esoteric.

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