Lessons from the Year of the Snake
What the end of a nine-year cycle brought to the surface
1. Stagnation or stillness
Today is December 31st, 2025. After a long year that, from the outside, looked like stillness and grief, I want to share some of the main lessons it left me.
From the outside, this year looked like nothing was happening. I returned to my childhood home, went on medical leave, watched plans collapse, relationships end, and futures dissolve. There were no visible milestones, no linear progress, no external markers that could justify the amount of inner work taking place. It could have easily been mistaken for stagnation.
From the inside, however, everything was being reshaped.
As part of what later became The Spiral Way, this year taught me to see life cycles as mirrors rather than predictions. Through that lens, the symbolism of the snake, rooted in ancient Chinese astrology, fits this year with unsettling precision. And before dismissing it, it’s worth remembering that nature does not act randomly. What comes from nature is raw, intentional, and exact.
The snake does not rush. It sheds in private. It contracts, disappears underground, and allows parts of itself to die so something more integrated can remain. That was the rhythm of this year in my body. Slow, internal, unavoidable.
2. When moving forward stopped working
At the beginning of the year, I tried to move forward the way I had been taught. Externally. I attempted to relocate my life, to build a future that made sense from the outside, to anchor myself again in plans and in other people’s ideas of what a “happy life” should look like.
It ended abruptly in March.
What followed was not only a breakup, but a rupture that dismantled my sense of safety. Fear entered my body, followed by shock. I returned suddenly, without preparation, to a place I had spent years trying to leave behind. Not just because of the physical space, but because of what it represented. In my mind, coming back meant failure. It meant returning to the root of the wound where everything had started.
Shortly after, my system collapsed. There was a hospital visit, medication, labels meant to reassure the system that everything was under control. And yet, the real shedding began immediately after. I started to see more clearly how deeply the system relies on numbing rather than listening. I knew, with a clarity that surprised even me, that what I needed was not to be medicated into functioning, but to let everything surface. To grieve. To finally allow myself to feel the grief I had been carrying since childhood.
Everything that had been holding me together artificially fell away. From that moment on, the year stopped being about expansion and became about survival, truth, and reorientation. There was no capacity left for pretending. Only for listening.
3. Sometimes you walk by standing still
The house I am writing from is loaded with memory, tension, and identities I had long outgrown. Even the bedroom I returned to belonged to a version of myself that no longer existed. So I changed it. Not for aesthetics, but out of necessity. I reshaped this space until my nervous system could soften enough to breathe. This room became a container, a place where, for the first time within walls that had once erased me, I could simply be.
In this house, I learned how to perform in order to be loved. How to protect siblings and reparent parental figures. How to regulate not only my emotions, but everyone else’s. How to read every subtle shift in the air so I could anticipate danger, hide, or step in to protect others while overriding my own fear.
Here, I learned that being myself was never safe, so I learned how to be everything except who I really was.
This year, my soul could no longer hold that.
The grief that began surfacing in spring felt like a tide breaking through doors I had kept shut since childhood. At first it was overwhelming. Then I realized I was still here. So I took the hand of that inner little Marisa and learned to witness her. We all need someone to witness our pain so it can be expressed and transformed into meaning.
Sometimes you don’t move forward by leaving. Sometimes you move forward by making what you have inhabitable.
4. Grief, endurance, and the selves I released
As the months unfolded, patterns I could no longer ignore surfaced. I saw how many times I had stayed hoping to be loved better, how often I had endured pain disguised as devotion, and how easily I explained other people’s behavior while dismissing the intelligence of my own body. I grieved those selves deeply. Not because they were wrong, but because they were exhausted.
Self-betrayal is one of the heaviest burdens we carry. Each time you choose others over yourself without acknowledging your own needs, each time you people-please in exchange for acceptance, you take another step away from your inner truth. You betray yourself in the hope of being chosen.
This grief lived in my body. In my chest, in my stomach, in my inability to rush anymore. My body refused to keep performing resilience and asked me to slow down until honesty could catch up.
5. Anger, shame, and reclaiming authority
This year also brought a real spiritual awakening, and with it, a necessary disillusionment. I encountered forms of spirituality that bypass trauma and shame pain, confusing control with consciousness. I briefly fell into the trap of the love-and-light narrative. That disillusionment taught me something essential: real spirituality does not disconnect you from your body, and it does not rush healing.
Through deep emotional and somatic work, I discovered something else. Anger, despite its terrible reputation, is not destructive by nature. It moves, it protects, it sets boundaries. But anger has a companion that often silences it: shame.
Shame believes it is protecting us. In reality, it turns anger inward and convinces us that we are “too much” for feeling it. Together, anger and shame revealed how deeply conditioned we are to suppress truth in order to remain acceptable. This understanding became a compass.
In 2026, my commitment is not to be agreeable, but to let anger exist without shame. To show up even when I don’t fit. We are not Disney characters, nor flat archetypes of good or bad. Living “love and light” at all costs is not truth. It is another form of erasure. Awareness, not perfection, is the way out.
6. From the snake to movement
This year closed a nine-year cycle in my life. Not because I decided to end it, but because my body no longer had the capacity to sustain it. Ending a cycle doesn’t feel like fireworks. It feels like exhaustion followed by relief. Like finally putting something down after holding it for too long. Only after that exhaustion settled did I notice something else. My system was no longer contracting in the same way. Space began to appear, not as a push forward, but as a quiet opening. Movement became possible again. Not from urgency, but from alignment.
I am beginning the year traveling through Southeast Asia with one backpack and no fixed plans, letting go of false comforts and control. Not to escape, but to practice presence. To trust myself to respond to what comes. To rediscover community in simple, everyday moments.
This path, spiritual or otherwise, was never about becoming someone new.It has always been about returning to what stayed when everything else fell away. Because things will fall away. Life keeps changing. And so do you.
Whatever season you are in, stillness or motion, contraction or expansion, remember this: you are not breaking down. You are breaking open.
I wish you a 2026 filled with real happiness, real sadness, real anger, and the full, meaningful spectrum of human emotion. A year of alignment, courage, and steps taken in your own direction. A year where you learn to see the world again with children’s eyes, because that is where wonder lives.
With love always,
Maria Luisa
PS: In the coming months, I’ll be sharing this new path back to myself more openly. Traveling through Southeast Asia with only what I truly need. Exploring what it means to live with less, to return to basics, and to move through the world with presence rather than performance.
I’ll write about traveling alone, befriending shame, reclaiming authority and self-trust, and about learning how to stay in relationship, with myself and with others, without disappearing.
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