Giddyup! By Michele Poff, PhD

Before asking you to read further, two questions:

1. Was 2025 a difficult year for you?

2. [Did] you feel low energy the last couple of months of 2025? 

If your answers are yes, this article is for you.

I didn’t give a lot of credence to the Chinese zodiac. Year of the rat, horse, dragon… that’s nice. Then I found myself in December feeling like I’d been kicked into the next decade, just wanting to curl up in the corner and lick my wounds from the brutal year I’d just lived through. Long-term relationships ended suddenly and randomly. Unaware traumas surfaced with a vengeance. A minor car accident threw me into the Costa Rican court system. Long-term family struggles came to a close that wasn’t quiet or easy, and demanded a lot to push to reconciliation. 2025 was a hard year to be sure.

Lying around in December, scrolling through Instagram between naps, I started coming across messages like “Wood snake cleared the way in 2025 to get ready for fire horse in 2026” and “You’re supposed to feel wiped out right now after this purging year.” Wait, what? 

According to this philosophy, 2025 was supposed to suck. It was the ultimate inner house-cleaning. Relationships ended because they did not serve our highest good and we can’t take them with us, even if they were important to us. All of those old wounds from ancient traumas needed to be seen and known to be healed. Family wounds are never easy to heal, but enough is enough. It’s time for us to live our truths, peacefully. By December, we were supposed to be exhausted, supposed to feel like we’d been through the ringer. Because by the end of the year, it was time to rest, to integrate the lessons 2025 imparted. And damn, it was a doozy.

2026 is the Chinese year of the horse. But this isn’t just any horse. I recently learned that in addition to assigning one animal per year, the Chinese zodiac also assigns one of five elements: water, air, earth, fire, or metal. This means that even if the animal comes around every twelve years, the combination of the animal plus its element comes around only once every 60 years. The most auspicious combination is the golden dragon, which has appeared in 1940 and 2000. 2060 it will come around again. 

This year? Hold on tight. 2026 is the year of the fire horse.

What does this mean? Imagine a horse’s characteristics. Its strength, power, independence, fierceness, and sometimes stubbornness. Now imagine that horse has a fire in its belly. Flames flicker in its eyes. It will not stand still and will barely follow direction, unable to slow down enough to hear you. It becomes an unstoppable force. The fire horse does not trot. It races at full speed. It does not care about low-hanging branches that will knock you onto your a$$ and leave you gasping for air. The fire horse is on the move!

In our lives, this means that it’s going to be a banner year, one way or the other. If you’ve done all of the internal purging and integrating the wood snake invited you to do, the prediction is that your year will be unforgettably amazing, filled with expansiveness and opportunity on top of opportunity. It’s the year you’ve been working toward and preparing for. If you’re hiding something from yourself or refusing to let go of something you need to, the prediction is that you’ll be that person knocked off the running horse by a low-hanging branch, on the ground gasping for air before you know it. Because alignment will happen, whether or not you agree. For those who didn’t clean house in 2025, 2026 could be a tough one. If you were born between January 21, 1966 and February 8, 1967, you were born in fire horse energy (and happy 60th birthday!). So you’re going to get everything even more intensely. Make it magical!.

Snake stays with us until February 17, so this purging and redefining of our inner selves is still taking shape. There’s still time to address the uncomfortable and make space for the fire horse. It’s coming. And it is not gentle. It demands your best self and your authenticity. It will insist that you live your truth.

Will you ride that fire horse throughout the year and take full advantage of the powerful, expansive energy it makes available to you? I hope you do! Good luck and hang on! 2026 promises to be a wild ride.

Michele is available at poffmt@gmail.com. She lives on the Central Pacific

 coast.