2026 Numerology: Year 1 Energy Is The Most Powerful New Beginning in a Decade. So Why are you Still Stuck?

2026 is numerologically coded as a Universal Year 1, the opening of a brand new nine-year cycle and one of the most potent energetic launchpads for new beginnings, bold identity, and stepping into leadership that we will collectively experience for a decade. If you have been feeling a pull toward something bigger, that is not your imagination. That is the energy of this year calling you forward.

So why are so many spiritually attuned, deeply capable women still completely frozen?

In this episode, Michelle breaks down what Year 1 energy actually means and where it sits within the larger nine-year numerology cycle. She explores the piece that most spiritual content skips entirely: why cosmic permission and psychological readiness are two completely different things, and why no amount of universal energy can move a nervous system that does not yet feel safe to be seen. If you are ready to stop waiting and genuinely answer the call, this episode was made for you.

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Soul Curriculum: What Your Life Patterns Are Trying to Teach You

Transcript

0:47

let me ask you something. We are almost, well, almost halfway through 2026, a year that energetically, numerologically, cosmically is one of the most powerful launch pads in a nine-year cycle. This is a year that is literally coded for new beginnings, a bold new identity, stepping into whoever you're supposed to become this year, right? Whoever you're supposed to become in the next nine years, I suppose. And I wanna know, have you started? And what have you started? What I keep hearing is this sometimes quiet frustration that is a version of, "I know something is calling me forward. I feel it, like, I feel it in my cells. Something is churning. I can feel it, but I can't seem to move." And my answer as a psychotherapist who has sat with this for 20 years, with the women that I help, as well as, a very felt experience in my own body and what I have been through, my answer is very similar. The energy is available to you, to us, but the wound that you've got going on inside, the core wound, the pattern, the limited belief, that is what's blocking the door. And that's what we're talking about here today. We're gonna go deep on year one energy, which is super freaking cool, by the way. Um, I really can't wait to talk about this. And I wanna talk about what it actually means so that you understand it, because I didn't understand it. Honestly, I'm not a, an expert in numerology, and I think when you're a energy medicine practitioner or healer of any sort, people think you're like, you know everything about astrology and numerology and, and I find it all so fascinating, but numerology is not my expertise. So, I do wanna talk about it, and I'm gonna share it to you like you're five because that's what I need, right? So, here we are. We're gonna go deep into year one energy and what it actually means, why it matters, And most importantly, what's really happening when a woman who is ready, who is capable, who can feel that calling, you can feel the energy shift, but still can't seem to move? This is Into the Work. I'm Michelle Pofferman. So excited to jump into this. For those of you who are new here, welcome. I am a psychotherapist for over 20 years. An energy healer. And I use this platform, Into the Work, to jump into the intersection in your life of healing the woman you are and building the business based on that. I believe deeply, clinically, and spiritually that the ceiling on whatever you're building, whatever you're creating out in the world will always be the ceiling on your sense of self. So that's where we need to start. That's what we need to heal and how we can move forward. And today's episode is a perfect example of exactly that. So I wanna start by giving you the foundation, in numerology, every year carries a universal energy, a collective vibration that all of us are navigating simultaneously, which is so very cool. Like, we're all going through the same stuff in our own very unique ways. And the way you calculate the universal year is simple. So you just add the digits of the year together. So 2026 is two plus zero plus two plus six, and that equals 10. And then one plus zero equals one. The numerology works its way down to f- the single digit. And so here we are. We're at year one. 2026 is a universal year one. And now here's why this matters, because this particular year one is especially significant. Numerology moves in nine-year cycles. So each number, one through nine, carries its own theme, its own invitation, its own curriculum, if you will. And you know I've talked about soul curriculum on this show. I actually have an entire episode that I will put in the show notes because I actually, now that I'm mentioning it, think it could go really well with this episode. And it talks about the patterns that we keep circling around, the patterns we keep doing, and what our curriculum is here. So 2025, the year we just came out of, was universal year nine. It was the final year of a cycle that began back in 2017. So here's what's super interesting. 2017, for me, and I'm just gonna share it, and this is not all about me today, I realize, but I wanna share with you, 2017 was the year I started my business. It was life-changing, okay? So 2017 was me catapulted into a, a totally new life, and it was the beginning of what now is catapulting me into my next level. And so 2017 was super inspirational. It was super big charge for me. It was a massive change. Now, I was really curious, and I was like, huh, you know, as you're thinking about what you were doing in 2017, and if that, for you, was a massive change into a nine-year cycle. So let's subtract nine again. That brings us to 2008. And now 2008 was the beginning of another- nine-year cycle, and that is the year I had my first child, which completely rocked my world, changed it upside down, and changed my whole life, right? So this nine-year energy. Is the energy of completion. So when we look at 2017, we're talking about 2016. When we look at 2026, we're talking about 2025. And I want you to look at your life and what's been going on in it, and what was happening in 2025 for you. If, if the nine-year energy is a year of endings, it is asking you to potentially grieve what needs to be grieved,, to release relationships, patterns, beliefs, identities that have run their course. It's often the hardest year in the cycle. It can be messy, it can be disorienting, and it can be emotionally intense. So for me, 2025, I'm gonna tell you, I had this really surreal kind of experience where I was telling my husband even, like, back in the day, you know, last year. I was saying, I'm like, "I'm having these really weird experiences when I close up my office." I'm, like, leaving and I'm closing it up and I'm turning the key, and all these things were happening. My building was bought out by another landlord, and so all this shifting was happening in my life business-wise. And my business it is a part of my identity. It's part of who I am and how I serve here in this life, and so it's a massive part. I was having these moments where I was locking up and I was like, "I feel like I'm almost, having out-of-body experiences here," where I feel like I'm, I'm hearing the whispers of, "This is temporary. This is changing. This is going to eventually be over." Now, if you're a client of mine and you see me in my practice, do not fear, I'm still there. But it was really a sort of like I can feel it intuitively in my bones that there's this massive shift, and that's when I started my online business, and that's when all of a sudden I started, you know, creating different kinds of programming and the years and years of helping women build their business and really helping women mostly really look at their identity-level changes and the wounding and the difficult things that are happening, keeping them from those big jumps, those big leaps. And that was just happening more and more and more year after year. And so I only share all this because, for me, there has been a little grieving, a little shifting and changing around who I've been, almost like I'm meant to really be contemplating. I really should be doing more journaling and really, allowing myself to the process, the spaciousness, the capacity to really be able to be with myself in the process of change, and I welcome you to do the same. And so when you think back to what 2025 was, I want you to just take a moment to allow some space to, to really sit with what was going on for you and what was it like for that year to wrap up and to shift and change. And so here we arrive at 2026, and it's not just starting fresh, but starting fresh after a big clearing or a shift internally that tells you you're on board with the clearing, right? Like, maybe everything hasn't completely cleared out yet, but your cells, your nervous system has been adapting to this change. And after a stripping away of things, after some version of letting go, here we are. And year one is the cosmic dawn. It's the first page of a brand-new chapter, one that will unfold over the next nine years through 2034. So what you plant this year, what you initiate this year, what you claim You know, that you're going to do and how you step into it, it sets the energetic architecture for the next decade of your life. How cool is that? I really geek out on stuff like this. The idea of growth and change and beginnings and endings, this is all so rich. So the themes of year one are new beginnings, identity, independence, leadership, initiation, courage, and what's called the I am consciousness. And as I was reading about this, this concept kept coming up. And so I really would be remiss to skip this, and so I wanna make sure I say this to you. And that is the I am consciousness is the return to the self as the center of your own story. I want you to figure out how we can adapt this, this I am consciousness of, yes, this is asking me to do that. Because even if I am birthing a new child, that very, that very thing of having a new baby is exactly what needs to happen for you to say, "Wait a minute. Where am I?" And I think that all changes ask us to do that, to say, "Wait a minute. Where am I?" Right? Where do I matter? How do I matter? How do my gifts matter? How do my voice matter? And year one is the year the universe stops asking you to prepare and starts asking you to begin. And there's one more layer I wanna add to that, because I think that's really powerful. Because 2026 is also the year of the fire horse in the Chinese zodiac, and I know we did an episode on this earlier, what we were leaving and where we were going. And the horse represents, as you probably have seen a million times on social media the horse represents strength and freedom and swiftness and perseverance. And fire, amplifies everything, so it brings passion, momentum. But the thing about fire that's so symbolic is it refuses to stay contained. I mean, every... Look at the fires that happen, they are just contagious. They just spread. They are meant to spread, right? We have to work hard to contain them. We have to h- work hard to put them out. And so the fire horse doesn't do well in a small pen. It will push against anything that limits its authentic expression. So we have numerological year one energy and fire horse energy- converging in the same year. Not just horse energy, fire horse energy, which means 2026 is essentially the cosmos handing you a torch and saying, "It's time. Stop waiting. Stop shrinking. Stop asking for permission you were never required to ask for. Just go." Now, that may feel really activating and cool to hear, and this is where my therapist brain comes in, because everything I just described is so real, um, it's almost tangible. Like, the energy of 2026 is genuinely different. I've felt it in my own life. I've watched it show up in my clients. There's a genuine collective momentum available to you right now. A kind of readiness that is in the field that doesn't come around every year. We've definitely had activating years, but this just feels big. But this is what sitting with people, as I said, for the last 20 years that I've done, has taught me about energy like this, and that is cosmic permission and psychological readiness, they are two completely freaking different things, and no amount of universal energy can necessarily override a nervous system that believes it's not safe to be seen, let's say. And so this is the piece that almost no one's talking about because everybody's so ramped up on year one energy and how amazing it is, and this is gonna be the year, and that is amazing to hold that vibration, and I hold that vibration too. And, they're talking about what's possible and what's available, and they hand you vision boards and goal-setting rituals and tell you, you know, "The universe is ready for you. Go." But what about the woman who knows all of this and who can feel the calling, who intellectually understands the opportunity, but can't seem to move? What's happening there? And let me tell you what I see authentically is I see self-abandonment patterns that have been running quietly in the background for decades, and I see nervous system that learned very early that being too much, too visible, too ambitious was somehow really disruptive and maybe dangerous for some, not always for everybody. But I see what I call the core wounds, the deep identity level beliefs about worthiness, lovability, being enough, safety, belonging, that don't care what year it is, and they don't update with the cosmic calendar. Now, the cruelest part is those wounds don't necessarily feel like wounds. They kinda feel like wisdom, people. I'm telling you, they, they feel like intuition sometimes. They feel like protection. They just feel deeply embedded, and you can't necessarily tell the difference between me and my higher self, my internal self, my core self, right? And all these parts that are just, freaking out, freezing up, and feeling crazy. They truly sound like, "I'm just not ready. It's not the right time for me. Who am I to do that? I can't do that," right? we can really refer to these as the shadow parts. And, to be fair for numerology, there's-- I did read that there's a shadow side to year one, and it's actually named in the tradition. And the challenges of year-one energy include impatience, self-doubt, isolation, impulsiveness, and a kind of paralysis that comes from suddenly being placed at the center of your own life with no, no, no previous experience doing that So you're really on your own in a sense You know, energetically it feels. And so think about that for a moment because year one energy removes that scaffolding. It's an-- the old story is complete. You're standing on a blank page. And for some women, this is like totally exhilarating. And it is for me right now. But I'll tell you, had it not been a lot of the work I've done on myself and the work that... i'm doing work on myself when I'm teaching others, right? So when I'm talking to you, I'm, I'm actually-- my cells are vibrating this information as well. And actually in my life, and I think some of you out there will resonate with this, that in my life, some of the best things, some of the most important stuff I've learned has come through teaching and come through standing and holding space for others. And I believe on some part that's also because we're almost channeling, right? And, and for many of us, when we are holding space for others or we're open to teaching, I'm letting stuff come through me and out, and in that I'm getting recoded, right? That information, that energy is coming through me, is lighting up certain codes that are there and hadn't been activated and now are. And so that's how I see it when I say that I am learning so much when I'm teaching because I literally am getting activated in ways that were just asleep. And I think that in some ways, whatever you're doing in your world, you're probably been asleep in some ways, and when you dive in and you start rolling your sleeves up and doing something and you start channeling your own genius zone, your own energy, your own codes, you start to feel it too. And there's something really special about the action-oriented, maybe a little higher stakes things that we do that actually change our energy system and open us up. So... if you're somebody who's not going into action mode and you're staying stuck, that blank page doesn't feel like freedom. It feels like exposure. It feels like exposure. It feels like there's nowhere to hide, and you're being pushed into a direction that you don't, you don't believe in yet, you don't-- you're not open to yet. You haven't taken the action steps to prove anything to yourself yet. And so playing small was never actually about the size of your dreams. It was about how much of yourself you believed it was safe to take up, to experience, to put out into the world. And this is the year one paradox. The energy is pushing you toward visibility. It is pushing you towards leadership in some way, or perhaps just, as we said, being the center of your own life. And claiming your I am. And the wound, or your wounds, might be pulling you back toward the familiar safety of trying to stay small, because that's where you were, and it's trying to burn it down. So that tension, that push and pull you've been feeling is not necessarily resistance to growth., I know that you could even be a relatively, or wanna be a growth-minded person, and, you know, that here as a human you are trying to grow, and you've done lots of things, and you have grown in so many ways. It's just that a nervous system that hasn't been given evidence that it's safe to expand is freaking out, right? So the energy of 2026 is not a magic wand. It is an amplifier to what's available, and I wanna point out, I think it's an amplifier to what's in the way. And therefore, we're being asked to do some work here. So what does it actually take to receive what year one is offering? You have to name what's actually in the way, you cannot move through what you haven't named. There is something important about language to our brain, to our cells, to our body. It's important that we name it. The wound doesn't lose power when you just acknowledge it. It loses power when you stop letting it pretend to be protection, intuition all that we just talked about, you have to get clear, "Oh, that's not what this is," right? Now, I don't mean to disqualify, intuition as a real true thing, divine timing as a real true thing. There is a difference between being with yourself, being embodied, and knowing deep within that you are supposed to wait for a minute, that there is something coming. Um, there's something very different from that and you being flooded with fear and anxiety trying to move forward. Okay? So you also have to give your nervous system some evidence of safety. This is just, like, basic stuff, but it is so true. This is where people can kinda get confused. They think the answer is just mindset. They think better thoughts, higher vibration, stronger belief. And listen, I'm a huge fan. I I could talk all day about the power of showing up for your thinking and the power of shifting your emotional content and how much, we really get in the way of that, being able to be happy for longer. I'm a huge component of higher vibration, better beliefs. All of those things matter. But, or and, a nervous system that is wired for playing small doesn't update through just affirmations. We have to use those things to feel a higher quality within to help us with this next step, which is embodied experience. Small acts of visible courage that teach your system, "I move towards what called me, and I survived. I was seen, and nothing terrible happened." That's how the nervous system gets reprogrammed. Action first, beliefs follow. So it's really important that you figure out what are some small, lower-stake things I can do that cause me slight anxiety, cause me a little bit, like, it's a little scary. And if you can't even tolerate that, then fine. Choose something safe. But action steps are really important here. You need to prove to your body, that you can take action, embody something, and survive. So you also have to reclaim the identity that that wound took from you. So this is the deepest level work. This usually requires us to have some support because the question year one is really asking isn't what do you wanna create, it's who are you willing to become? It's an identity question, and the version of you who answers the call in 2026 is not the version of you who's been playing it safe. Becoming her is actually, is actually work, that we're all need to be doing, In fact, you know, I know a lot of very successful people have really had to learn how to jump in a fire and not be ready for it at all. Like, they get the, they get the, the inkling that there's a shift happening in the universe in which they work, and they are like, "Oh, I'm gonna go jump myself into that, know nothing about it, but I'm gonna just do it anyway." And those are... Sometimes those people are very rewarded because a lot of times it really does take the courage to just kinda put yourself out there and to trust yourself enough that whatever happens, you know you're gonna land. And that's just really important work. So here's what I wanna say to you directly, the woman who is listening to this episode. Hello. You felt something when you saw the title of this episode. Something in you recognized it. You were curious about it. The recognition, that curiosity is not an accident. That's the, that's the one energy calling you specifically. That is why you clicked on this. And I want to acknowledge something, the fact that you're still here. You're listening to the end, still doing the work of your inner life While also building something in the world, because that's what you're doing here in this episode. You're s- doing the work. You're listening, you're learning, you're absorbing, you're taking time out for this conversation. That's not small. That is enormous. I mean, most people never do this. There's a whole world of people who run from exactly what you're walking toward and what you're opening yourself up to. And it is like when you start surrounding yourself with people who are doing the same thing, and this is where you really get your tribe, it's almost like you live in this world where everybody's doing the work and everybody's opening themselves up to authenticity and truth and, and really digging in and, and trying to be expansive. But then you recognize that like millions and millions and millions of other people are not functioning this way, and it's a bit of a jolt to the system. So I also wanna tell you the truth. The calling that you've been feeling, i'm hesitant to say there's an expiration date on it. I think that those things that we want, want us, and we just have to put ourselves back in alignment with it for it to come back around. And it's not that the universe will give up on you. It will not. But I do wanna say, because every year you wait, you're not just delaying the big expansive thing. You know, in this case, we'll say business. You're not delaying this big expansive thing you wanna do. You're actually still practicing playing small, and that practice makes permanent, right? So the more you practice this, the, the stronger it gets, but 2026 is not necessarily waiting for you to be ready. Readiness is sort of a myth that our wounds invented, and the fire horse is not interested in your perfect conditions. It's interested in momentum. It's interested in, you know, you, you know, being like the fire, being contagious, spreading. And the question isn't whether you're ready, it's whether you're willing to begin before you feel ready. And that is sort of an important key factor here for this particular year. And I'm not... I mean, listen,, in my human design My numbers have me being something called, like, the investigator. And so I have to understand everything, know everything before I walk into something. And so it becomes problematic for me when I'm in business and I'm, like, getting all, uh I'm getting all bogged down by needing to know more. And so I'm with you, sister. We're on this ride together. Even this podcast was me putting myself out there way before I really felt ready, and it's like these acts of courage, Of course, there were failures, of course, there's things that didn't work out. Um, and that happens, and that's part of our resiliency. In fact, I was scrolling yesterday, and I saw this study. That was talking about how one of the factors that isn't talked about very often is that the brain changes that occur when we do hard things actually have a direct impact on Alzheimer's and the decay, of our, our brain functioning. And that the more we do hard things, the more this a- this area of the brain develops, and this area of the brain developing is very important to brain health. And so that really got me thinking, too. I'm like, "You know, what are we losing out on by not doing hard things physically, emotionally, and spiritually?" So I really believe when we look at are you willing to begin before you feel ready, I feel like the woman on the other side of that choice, the one who said yes to the year one energy, who named the wound, who took the first step anyway, she is who you've been building towards. She's not somebody else. She already lives within you. She's the most honest version of you, and she is absolutely worth the discomfort of becoming. And so really, in these next coming weeks on into the work here, we're going to be going deeper on this, on these patterns, on these self-abandonment things and learning to matter and all that, the specific wounds that are running. Because I really do believe, that the universe isn't really asking you to prepare anymore. I think she's asking you to begin. And I th- like any untapped potential, which I've talked about a number of times on this podcast, like untapped potential is at the core of our dis-ease, our unwellness in the world, right? When we have physical issues as well, I look at what is your untapped potential. And I really think we're getting called on that, and I think that you're being asked to tap back in. So that's why I'm bringing this work forward, because I think it can be some of the most important work, I've brought to this show. So please stay tuned, come back, and let's do this journey together. It really excites me to be doing this. It really, really fills my heart that you are listening, that you keep coming back. And if you're new, I'm so genuinely, grateful that you're spending some time and energy with me. And I really feel your energy. I feel my listeners. Like, that sounds weird, but I do. And I'm sending you all so much love. I hope this week is amazing and just brings you some of the goods that we're talking about here, some good energy to push you forward. So I'm Michelle Pofferman again. Thank you for coming and for joining me for this episode. I will look forward to talking with you next week. Bye for now.