The Snake Has Shed Its Skin, The Fire Horse Is Here
Has the last year felt like wading through treacle for you?? Like you've been doing all this deep, hard, painful work on yourself and your business. Like you were stuck in hiding, and waiting for something? Something to just change, to just feel better?
I've been feeling like this for a while now, but thankfully, there has been such a huge change in energy lately.
The Snake has finally shed its skin, and the Fire Horse is here. Hallelujah, because I am so ready for this shift and the changes that come with it.
Have you felt it? That strange, coiled energy this past year, or maybe like me, it’s gone on a lot longer? A feeling of being stuck in the mud or hiding in a place where people can’t really see you. They know you are there, but they do not really see you, not all of you.
Have you spent years writing pages no one will see, or building things in the dark, or being caught in the moments of the past, that you know you need to make your peace with and let go once and for all? Or maybe you have spent years trying to be better than you believe you already are? Chasing qualifications like they are trophies? That shiny magpie thing, that makes you believe, "Just one more and that will be me"?
A sense of holding your breath, waiting for a signal that it’s safe to move, while simultaneously feeling a deep, restless urge to break free. Has it been a year of really sitting with and feeling the painful stuff, the old habits, old beliefs, old everything, knowing you had to feel every single bit until you were ready to release it?
If you have, you’re not alone. We’ve been living through the Year of the Snake, a time of deep, internal, often isolating work. But that time has come to an end. The ground is starting to tremble, and it’s the sound of hooves. The Year of the Fire Horse is here, and with it, a choice.
You can choose to stay stuck, or you can choose to ride in the wind, to be finally free of all the shite that has held you back. To be at peace with being your beautiful, powerful and unapologetic self. The person you have held back from the world, the part of you who has been silent or scared. The part of you that dares to be free and to use your voice for good, for truth and for change.
The Fire Horse is a powerful shift that only comes once every 60 years. I have not seen it in my lifetime so far and I probably will never be witness to it again.
The Snake’s Year: A Time of Quiet Reckoning
The snake moves low to the ground. It’s an energy of shedding old skins in private, digesting experiences, and gathering silent wisdom. For many of us, it has felt like a long, drawn-out, often exhausting time of reflection, letting go and moving into changes in our own lives that we might not have seen coming. A time of profound introspection, but also of maddening hesitation. A time of feeling coiled, powerful, but pinned down. There have been some brutal moments during the past year. So profoundly painful and deep that many of us thought we would never come out the other side.
I began last year, early 2025, in a bit of a haze because that shedding had already started. I was letting go of people, of parts of myself I thought I once knew so well.
I also began the year so deeply engrained in my nutrition work and research. Oh, how I loved it and wanted to change the world with it. But around October 2024, my mind had been changing. I had started two business courses simultaneously. Both had an intake form that required deep personal work. If you really do the work and write from a deeper place than just the surface, the answers that come are often not quite what you expect. This is what happened to me. It was the beginning of the change that would shape the full year of 2025 for me.
As I sat and took time to write about my passions, my business, what I was actually good at doing, NOT what I thought I should be good at doing, I sat in tears one day. Because as I spent more time writing and pouring my heart onto paper, I realised I was in the wrong business.
My true passion was, and to be honest, always has been, writing and Art. And the human mind and how it works. But I will get back to that later and how it panned out for me over the last year.
When I realised this, it was too hard to face straight away. I had worked tirelessly for years studying. It had all begun back in January 2006. First Art & Design and English. But I realise back then I wasn’t ready for the deeper side of that. My heart was broken from baby loss and a life I had once dreamed of. It has taken me these next 20 years to fully heal and realise just how much all the parts of these two decades have shaped the very person I dreamt of being when I was just a teenager.
The Myth of "One More Course" and Other Delay Tactics
For the better part of a year, I’ve been writing. Pouring decades of experience onto the digital page. I’ve built my entire process for practitioners, a lifetime of knowledge codified into systems and workflows. And where has most of it been? Sitting in a folder on my computer, gathering digital dust. Unpublished. Unseen.
It’s the classic snake energy, the fear of being seen before the shed is complete. I told myself I was preparing, that I was refining the message. But if I’m being honest, I was hiding.
This hiding often disguises itself as noble self-improvement. We tell ourselves, "I just need one more course, one more certification, and then I'll be ready." Just ONE MORE thing and I can be who I am meant to be!
I see this time and time again and I too have lived it over and over again. I just hit my 20-year anniversary of continuous study. Twenty years! From Art to Complementary Therapies, from college to university and then online course after online course. All the while learning about life and building businesses too. Becoming an adoptive mum and learning so much about trauma that I could probably have done a PHD by now. I have the credentials. I have the lived experience. Yet, the snake whispers, "Is it enough? Are you enough?"
It’s a trap. It’s a delay tactic our fear uses to keep us safe. The truth is, the knowledge you have right now is enough to change someone’s life. The rest is just procrastination dressed up as diligence. I remember one of my own Coaching Tutors saying that perfectionism is just another way of being a procrastinator. It is just dressed up in different words. More often than not, it really is just fear and imposter syndrome that so many of us are too afraid to face.
"Perfectionism is procrastination in a tuxedo" - Unknown
Facing the Fear of Being Seen
One of the biggest fears the snake whispers is the fear of visibility. "What will people think? What if they judge me? What if no one even notices?"
I spent my youth as a global wanderer, from 19 to 32. I was often known as the littlest Hobo, although I was never very little. I was comfortable being an anonymous observer. It’s easy to be brave when no one really knows you. It’s harder when you’re planting a flag and declaring, "This is who I am, and this is what I believe. This is the hill I am proud to stand on."
But here’s the truth I’ve had to learn: the only person ever truly judging you is you. Most people are too wrapped up in their own lives to notice what you’re doing. And the ones who do notice? They only pay attention if you start speaking a language that resonates with their own soul. They’re not looking for perfection. They’re looking for recognition. They’re looking for someone who gets them. And also someone who isn’t afraid to stand in their own truth. I don’t know about you, but those are the people I tend to like the most in life.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us." — Marianne Williamson
What The Fire Horse Actually Means For You
So we are talking about the shift from the Snake to the Fire Horse. This isn’t just some weird woo-woo astrological stuff. It’s a tangible shift in the energetic way we live and be in this world.
In the zodiac, it’s not just a simple 12-year cycle. The deeper system is a 60-year cycle where each of the 12 animals is paired with one of five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Think of it like this: the Horse is the car, but the Element is the fuel.
The Fire Horse is fuelled by pure, raw, unapologetic life force. It’s the most potent and dynamic combination in the entire 60-year cycle. This is why this year feels so different. We are moving into a year that demands we take all that quiet wisdom we gathered in the dark and set it on fire for the world to see.
So, what does this actually mean for you, a practitioner, a business owner, a human being who has felt stuck?
It means the time for quiet contemplation is over. The Fire Horse has no patience for hesitation. It’s the energy of the leap. It’s about taking that course you finished and finally creating an offer from it. It’s about writing that book you’ve been terrified to start. It’s about finally raising your prices to reflect your true worth. It is about believing in yourself completely.
This is not the energy of gentle nudges. It’s the energy of a powerful shove from the universe, telling you to get on with it. A swift and powerful kick up the arse, pushing you in the direction you are meant for.
The Fire Horse is also about leadership. Not the corporate, top-down kind, but the kind where you blaze a trail so brightly that you illuminate the path for others. It’s about speaking your truth, even if your voice shakes. It’s about standing on your hill, planting your flag, and becoming a lighthouse for the people who have been lost in the same fog you just escaped.
It's Time to Run
This is the year we stop preparing and start publishing. Well, for me it is haha.
That mountain of material I wrote? It’s about to look like I wrote it all in a week. I have content coming out my backside and it is not doing anyone any good sitting in bloody labelled files in my Microsoft account or Google Docs, or Canva. I have a shit ton of them too, the Canva stuff.
I have said since I was a wee girl that I would write and publish a book one day. I have probably written it over and over and just kept it hidden. But the time for holding back is over. I am not scared of sharing my mind anymore. Someone once taught me that it was almost a crime to hide your knowledge away. It isn’t life lessons and wisdom to keep quiet about. If we want change in this world, we have to be the change.
This shift from Snake to Horse isn’t just astrological; it’s a choice. It’s the choice to believe that your life has given you something worth saying. It’s the choice to honour the work you’ve done in the dark by allowing it to see the light of day. It’s the choice to stop whispering and hiding and start speaking.
So if you’ve kept yourself hidden for what feels like a lifetime, always having that deeper inner self-worth issue, like you’re preparing for a race you’re scared to start, it is time to let all of it go.
Trust yourself, trust the universe, or Source or God, whatever it looks like to you.
But also trust your own self, your own deep wisdom and knowing that you truly are worth being here and that the world needs you.
And on that note, I am away to start publishing, some of the blogs I wrote throughout last year. Although it now might have to wait until tomorrow, because I have spent so much time writing this one that the day has ran away with itself. Oops! But hey I did it, I have published this one, and I am not afraid to share it, woo hoo!
Finding My Own Fire
I almost forgot to get back to that bit, the bit about the change that happened in my own life this past year.
The writing, the Art, the human minds that I so love understanding and find myself so curious about.
There are a few parts to my passion now. One is teaching, where I still use and research all the health and nutrition science. I couldn’t love that role more. I trained with Active Health Group in health coaching and Nutritional Therapy. Then I began teaching with them last April. A role and a team I have come to love.
Then there is the side that I had forgotten. The deep part of my soul that I left behind in those years of pain and trauma. I had stopped writing, I had stopped painting, I had stopped creating.
Writing had been one of the biggest parts of my heart when I was younger, that and either painting or drawing. More painting, as I love working with abstract colour and making a mess, rather than nice neat drawings. That was never really my thing. But give me an easel and a paint palette and a canvas, and that was me, happy as a pig in shit.
I never noticed that I had stopped writing until I started again. It was like coming home. I found it a bit difficult at first, and I was so nervous and vulnerable because this time I knew if I was going to write, I had to let others actually read it. I had never done that before. Well, not unless it was for an essay to be marked.
It started as journaling and slowly progressed into more. I think that is why it became such a profound and special, albeit painful, journey last year, because in writing again for the first time in more than 20 years, I also had to face why I had stopped in the first place. The pain in my heart was still there. Not as much as it once was, but present all the same. The utter heartbreak from baby loss and a dream I had once had. Life had had its own plans for me. I was meant to be a mum in a different way. to wait, to be there ready for my Lucy. My world, my WHYDOM. She saved me, and I saved her. We were destined to be together in that strange part of trauma and loss. And that one is a story for another day.
We are almost 10 years into our life together. Our adoption story. And as I sit here and type this, I am listening to my beautiful, feisty, spirited girl singing. Singing so loudly and sometimes a bit off-key. But so full of joy and curiosity about this crazy world we live in.
So last year I found my way back to it all, the writing, the colours, the art and design through web design and copywriting. I discovered that part of myself again, but this time with all the knowledge I had gained over those years of reading people in my hairdressing chair, of reading between the lines of human nature, and how people think. I began working with clients on their business visions and web design. I just quietly worked away in the background, refining my process, and I guess just working through my own snake skin shedding.
It has become my greatest passion, like a return home to myself. That was where my Brand DNA process was born. Because it is not just web design. The greatest and most joyful part for me is the people. My clients! Getting to know their story and their world. Their passions and their dreams. It does not come from me; it comes from their story and their vision. I just have this way of hearing it and being able to create their world into words, colours, images and making it their digital home.
That is what I have discovered about myself this past year. It has been quite a daunting and scary thing to step into. Probably because it is more a gift and passion than a course I took to give me a qualification. This one came from my heart and has been the most difficult one to accept.
One thing I decided last year was that I just cannot do bullshit. So my tagline became: Cutting the bullshit in health, in business and in life. That is the hill I stand on. I question everything and always will.
This is the year my passion became my purpose and my strategy. And my fire became my brand.
“If you can't figure out your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose.” ― T.D. Jakes
Linda McClure
