The Word of the Year is: Transform

“You do not grow by clinging. You grow by shedding.”

2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake, a rare and powerful astrological transit that weaves together ancient Chinese wisdom, nature-based metaphysics, and the deeper call of soul evolution. This is a year for sacred transmutation — of behaviors, beliefs, energy, and emotion — as we’re invited to shed all that no longer fits, and emerge clearer, lighter, and truer.

Snake years are not about flash or speed. They are about inner mastery — moving with purpose, protecting your energy, creating beauty and power through stillness. Combined with the Wood element, the Snake becomes the gardener of the soul, slowly growing what’s rooted in truth, and pruning what no longer belongs.

The Spiritual Psychology of Snake Years✨

Snake years are deeply internal and reflective, inviting transformation through intuition, analysis, and observation rather than action for its own sake. There is wisdom in pausing before striking — in moving intentionally rather than impulsively.

This is a year that asks:

• What patterns have I outgrown?
• Where am I moving out of habit rather than alignment?
• What if silence held more power than noise?

The Snake archetype teaches that rebirth doesn’t always come in the blaze of glory. Sometimes, it arrives softly, like skin loosening from the body. Slowly, then all at once, we shed.

Kundalini Awakening & Embodied Energy✨

In yogic tradition, the serpent is sacred — the coiled energy known as Kundalini that sits at the base of the spine. When awakened, it rises through the chakras, initiating awakening, transformation, and alignment.

This year holds potent potential for:

• Spiritual activation (especially through body-based healing like yoga, somatic therapy, or EMDR)
• Creative breakthroughs as blocked energy becomes available
• Embodiment work to clear trauma, enhance vitality, and ground intuitive power

This is an ideal time to explore practices like:

• Breathwork or conscious movement
• Chanting or vocal toning
• Grounded meditation focused on the body’s wisdom

When approached gently, the rising serpent within can be a guide, a teacher, and a healer.

Yin Wood: Growth Rooted in Grace✨

Unlike the bold energy of Yang Wood (trees), Yin Wood is represented by the tender vines and delicate blossoms that grow with consistency, care, and devotion. This year is less about force and more about flow.

It’s about tending to your life like a sacred garden.

• What are you growing?
• Are your roots strong?
• What no longer deserves your energy, water, and light?

Let go of outdated stories. Create space for new life to take root.

The Sacred Ritual of Shedding✨

Snakes don’t shed skin once and remain transformed forever. They do so many times in their life — often after periods of rapid growth or environmental change. This year mirrors that rhythm.

Expect waves of:

• Deep emotional clarity
• Intuitive knowing that certain relationships, habits, or identities have expired
• Grief — not as punishment, but as a sacred teacher guiding you into alignment

When you feel stuck or in-between, honor it as sacred molting. You are not lost. You are evolving.

Here is a beautiful ritual to support this:
✨ Write down what you’re releasing — behaviors, stories, attachments.
✨Burn or bury the list with intention — returning it to the earth as compost for new growth.
✨Follow it with a cold plunge, a bath, or a cleansing shower — washing away the old.

Tools for the Snake Year✨

These healing companions can guide and nourish your process of evolution:

✨ Books

• Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés — to meet the wild woman within
• Untethered Soul by Michael Singer — to gently release attachment and find your center
• The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo — for daily soul reflection

✨ Crystals

• Serpentine – Supports Kundalini awakening, transmutation of energies, cellular healing
• Labradorite – Strengthens intuition and protects your energetic field
• Smoky Quartz – Grounds excess energy and helps transmute heaviness

✨ Rituals & Practices

• Candle meditation — focus on the flame to clear mental chatter
• Somatic journaling — ask your body what it’s holding, write what comes up
• Dance alone — intuitively move to music as a prayer to release stagnant energy

The Remainder of 2025✨

The rest of this year invites you to:

• Unclench what no longer serves you
• Root deeper into what feels true
• Trust the parts of you that don’t yet make sense
• Choose healing — not because you’re broken, but because you’re sacred

Let this be the year you take full responsibility for your growth, your joy, your liberation. No one is coming to do it for you — and that is your greatest power.