2025 Wood Snake Year:
Initiation into sudden revelation through direct encounters with death,
with loss or with emptiness.
Written by Tamara Ja for Da Yuan Circle
Greetings all!
Happy Lunar New Year and welcome to the Year of the Yin Wood Snake! Happy almost-Losar, as we are also fast approaching the Tibetan New Year on February 28th. I wish all of you many blessings of happiness, health, wisdom, and prosperity as we enter into the Qi of a new annual cycle.
These last months have been monumentally tectonic in shifts as we transition out of Yang Wood Dragon into Yin Wood Snake year. In the true style of Dragon, 2024 brought us overwhelming, limitless, externally manifesting, yang outward expansion with hurricane-force winds demanding transformation. The lashing tail of the Wood Dragon has been making sure no one misses its unforgettable exit and setting up the stage for Wood Snake’s subtly sliding entrance while seemingly no one notices . . . until we find ourselves already surrounded by its all-encompassing coils.
The dragon and the snake are the most fundamental representatives of Great Yang and Great Yin in the cycle of the 12 branches of Chinese astrology and cosmology. As yang as Wood Dragon year was, so shall Wood Snake year demonstrate yin. The available qi of the year will not be found in outward manifestation into the world and cosmos, but rather, it will be found through internally withdrawing into the hidden depths and underworld. The most auspicious energy will not be found in worldly action and engagement but in renunciation and stillness.
The profoundly limitless possibilities of dragon year will be just as profoundly dismantled, deconstructed, and dissolved into emptiness in Wood Snake year. We may find ourselves going from doing, to not doing. From having, to not having. From being, to not being. From limitless possibilities, to no possibilities whatsoever.
And, there's no need to get particularly morbid about the sound of that. It is only through integrating the lived Qi experience of both, as we dance through the yin (snake) & yang (dragon), through time & space, limitations & limitlessness, that we open our awareness to all the unceasing transformations of dual world and gain the wisdom of understanding that they are ultimately demonstrating the exact same thing.
How that happens on a Qi level, however, will very likely feel quite a bit different.
The energy of Snake is to lie in wait (both “horizontally” and “deceptively”), patiently observing its prey, discretely waiting for just the precise moment to strike with a blow so rapid it’s almost unseen, delivering poison and suffocating death before swallowing it whole.
The Snake represents death, the ultimate negative, unfathomable mystery, and the vast profundity of all that we don’t know. It’s associated with hidden esoteric wisdom, the spiritual path, the nonconceptual, the secret ways of the mystic, the shaman, the ascetic, and the hermit in retreat from the outside world. Yin Fire, as the native element of Snake, encourages sudden awakening through a process of internal confrontation and release.
2025 may be a rare and remarkable year for initiations into sudden revelation through direct encounters with death, with loss or with emptiness.
Like a snake shedding its skin, who are we on the other side of loss and letting go? When we suddenly confront that which renders meaningless all of which we once found meaningful? In what stage of transformation do now we find ourselves in, if there is any sense of “self” there remaining at all? What is loss if we realize there was nothing actually there to lose in the first place?
With one foot barely in through the door of the new year, we have already seen the uncompromising Qi of Wood Snake Year is wasting no time burning away the old to make way for its own very particular brand of new. By new, we don’t necessarily mean better and we don’t necessarily mean worse, new is simply different than what came before.
Snake years bring exceptional possibilities for health and healing. In indigenous healing traditions across the world, intimate knowledge of the complex, dynamic, interchangeable relationship between poison and medicine is another dimension of Snake Qi. There are countless natural substances which are known to be both poison and/or medicine depending on dosage, settings, and contexts of use. The poisonous strike of the snake also brings us into a direct encounter with death, letting go of absolutely everything in that moment, and offers the potential initiation into liberation and awakening.
To go to the place (to paraphrase the Heart Sutra) where there is no more self, no body, no mind, no shape, no sound, no smell, no taste, no feeling, no thought, also means there is no more dis-ease, no more illness. To go to the deepest roots and transmute your poisons, to shed, exorcise, release, and let go of all that made possible and brought into being the illness in the first place. The potent wisdom and clear observational discernment of the Snake invites the possibility to go beyond the limiting judgments, prejudices, and indoctrinated definitions of what constitutes “health” and “illness”. To rest in emptiness, the unknowable embrace of Yin, as the great, unceasing mother which brings resolution to all.
Especially auspicious this year, are healing practices which direct the qi inwards to the internal terrain of embodiment-speech-mind and that incorporate self-reflection, internal cultivation or deep introspection as part of the process (without forgetting the relative world is all still a dream-like illusion). From psychotherapy to Qi Gong, from dream practice, ancestral healing, and shamanism to prayer, chanting, and mantra will have great possibilities. Doorways to the unseen sentient beings we share our spaces with, like the countless myriad winds that traverse our environment, may be accessed with little effort and unique benefit this year.
Wind as representative of wood element is a key aspect for Wood Snake year. Wood is the mother of fire in the 5-element generating cycle. Wind that fans the flames for the Snake’s native fire can potentially manifest as inspired adaptation, flexibility, and joyful envisioning all the way to toxic heat and acute pathological inflammation. Be mindful of liver-gall bladder organ and meridian pathologies, especially in the Spring. Anger and aggression will be simmering just beneath the surface, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Digestive disorders involving liver qi stagnation overacting the spleen and hot inflammatory conditions rooted in the digestive system, both exacerbated by stress and other psycho-emotional issues, will be greatly helped by cultivating a wisely discerning appetite (this includes your appetite for substances and any other addictive behaviors). Heart conditions, with either excess or deficient heat pathologies, from insomnia and irritability all the way to cardiovascular issues (with sudden acute symptoms), mania and shen disturbance will be up this year. Pay attention to the symptomatic traces of wind as it manifests and moves throughout the various dimensions of our collective internal microcosmic terrains and external macrocosmic terrains this year. Rapid-moving contagious illness and sudden epidemics are very possible.
Be cautious of overtreatment during Wood Snake year. Herbal therapy will generally be much more effective than acupuncture. Working with plant medicines, shamanic healing, internal alchemy, ceremonial and ritual spiritual practices which help to resolve and unwind the ancestral, karmic, and genetic predispositions to die like our forebearers will have great possibilities this year.
The wood element combined with this Snake year, offers great opportunity towards rites of initiation, new beginnings and renewals. Its fresh, open, and uncarved quality makes this an excellent year for all learning and study, creative artistic endeavors, as well as stepping into a new spiritual practice, renewing an already established one in a deeper way or being newly initiated into esoteric wisdom paths exemplified by Snake Qi. Apprenticeships, mentorships, discipleships will sow immeasurably deep, long-lasting seeds this year. Ascetic and renunciative meditative traditions, lineages, and practices which embrace the unknowable root of all phenomena as part of their cosmological view will be highly auspicious.
If you can tame the pathologically compulsive hyperactivity of our times, the best medicine will be to slow down and making some time for deep rest, retreat, and solitude this year. The potential to spiral down into a dark abyss of depression and exhaustion is very present this year, as is the temptation towards disassociation. Patient observation, quiet stillness, gentleness, and flexibility will be the most effective antidotes to anger, hatred, and nihilistic bitterness which represent the shadowy qi qualities of the Snake. Overdoing will make these symptoms proliferate with more complications and chronic potential.
Approach the Spring with modesty and caution. The Spring and Summer holds the most possibilities for the new, and simultaneously, the highest danger, of the whole year. Careless impulsivity and hyperaggressive moves in the beginning of 2025 will fall prey to the Snake’s strike. The yin fire of this Snake year brings the potential for blood, loss, sudden violence, and overwhelm by the summer. Beware fire and deception, things could get increasingly hotter and more difficult to discern as the year progresses, in both our internal environment (meaning our personal and collective human embodiments) and external environments (climate, socio-cultural, government and world politics).
The autumn may feel a little awkward and uneven, but the unrelenting dismantling qi quality of the beginning of Snake year should be tempered by then (somewhat). Winter will bring an absolutely necessary call to rest, recover, and regenerate. The less you push, strive, and squander your qi in external games of outward manifestation, the better and more graceful this year will be. This will also give you the qi necessary to survive through the incessant, unceasing, onslaught of energy that 2026, year of the Yang Fire Horse, will bring.
The more one cultivates stillness, wise discretion, and graceful introspection, the closer one can get to the possibilities of delightful fruition Wood Snake year has to offer: playfully deconstructing our ideologies and dogmas, joyfully going beyond our expectations and disappointments, letting go of the burdens of our self-deceptions, piercing through our prejudices and projections, and gently sidling away from that all-too-slippery precipice of spiritual materialism.
Then perhaps we can begin to appreciate the dynamic mutual interplay of loss and gain, deception and revelation, ignorance and wisdom. To allow negativity to become a place of respite and tranquility, rather than fear and anxiety. Then allowing wisdom to arise effortlessly of its own accord (wú wéi 無為), Wood Snake year may open our hearts to a vaster than vast luminous emptiness, wherein we may discover the ceaseless transformational play of the phenomenal world and the always and already present undifferentiated experience of our human condition. 2025, Wood Snake year offers the possibility of truly inspired awakenings that begin like a gentle wind, growing and fanning flames of clarity, awareness, and compassionate wisdom to burn through our collective delusions and obscurations all across the world.