The Fire Horse is here — and it’s been waiting for you.
Audio version:
The light is different this week.
I noticed it this morning on my walk, the way it moved across the water with something I can only describe as intention. A brightness that did not feel like coincidence. And when I came inside, sat with my tea, and read about what the Lunar New Year, which began just days ago, on February 17th, is actually ushering in, I understood why.
We have entered the Year of the Fire Horse.
I want to tell you about this, not because I am an astrologer, not because I have any claim to expertise in Chinese cosmology, but because something in it landed in my body the way truth does, quietly, completely, and with a kind of recognition I could not ignore. And if you have been doing your own inner work, I suspect it will land the same way for you.
The Fire Horse only comes around every sixty years. The last one was 1966, a year that cracked the world open and asked it to be different. Before that, 1906. This is not a subtle energy. The Horse in Chinese tradition represents freedom, forward motion, wild instinct, and the courage to move toward the horizon without waiting for permission. And Fire, the most transformational of all elements, amplifies every single one of those qualities. Fire illuminates what has been hiding. It purifies what is no longer needed. It calls things forward that have been quietly, patiently waiting.
Together, the Fire Horse does not whisper.
It roars.
Here is what stopped me still, right there at my kitchen table with the sea in the window:
Everything I have been building the Brave Rest work, the Yoga Nidra journeys, the circles with women, the retreat we are about to take to Bali, all of it looks, in the light of this year, less like a series of choices I made and more like a preparation I didn’t fully know I was making.
Think about it. The Fire Horse rewards those who have done the deep work, who have learned to move from their center rather than their fear, who know both fierce action and surrender. And if there is one thing the last several years have taught me most memorably from the back of a bicycle, on a road in New Hampshire, on a beautiful morning in October, it is exactly that. How to surrender. How to let go mid-fall and trust that the ground will meet you with more grace than you expected.
Fearless surrender. That is what the bicycle gave me. And it turns out, it is also what the Fire Horse is asking of all of us this year.
I have been thinking about the women who are drawn to this work. Who find their way to rest not because someone told them to, but because something in them finally got tired enough, burned out enough, depleted enough, to stop and listen. I think of my own road here, the summit in 2021, the sixty-five thousand people who showed up because they were hungry for something, and how it hollowed me out completely, and how that hollowing became the very thing that led me to Yoga Nidra, to rest, to all of this.
Burnout, it turns out, can be a kind of initiation.
The Fire Horse understands this. Because here is the secret that most people will miss about this wild and electric year: the Horse, even in all its galloping freedom, knows when to be still. The wild horse in the field pauses. It lifts its head. It reads the wind before it runs. Brave Rest is not the opposite of a Fire Horse year. It is the thing that makes you ready for one.
You cannot run well when you are running on empty.
Rest is not earned at the end of a productive life. It is the ground from which a brave one grows.
And Bali. Oh, Bali.
In April, a small group of us will travel to Floating Leaf, a place surrounded by rice terraces and tropical sky and the kind of sacred quiet that asks you to arrive as yourself, fully, without apology. We will rest. We will reawaken. And we will do it in the middle of a Fire Horse year, on an island that has always been known as a place where the ordinary and the sacred meet without ceremony.
I did not plan it this way. And yet.
This is what I am learning to trust: that the work we do on ourselves, the quiet, unglamorous, revolutionary practice of choosing rest when the world says push, of choosing presence when the world says perform, it compounds. It accumulates. And then one day you look up and the year that arrives looks almost like it was made for you.
Not because you earned it.
Because you became ready for it.
I want to ask you something this week, and I hope you will sit with it gently rather than answer it too quickly:
What have you been quietly becoming?
Not the things you have done. Not the goals you have hit or missed. But underneath all of that in the hours of rest, in the practices you have kept, in the moments you chose to be honest with yourself even when it was uncomfortable, who have you been becoming?
The Fire Horse year is not interested in your résumé. It is interested in your readiness. And readiness, I have learned, does not announce itself. It simply shows up one morning, in a particular quality of light on the water, in a feeling you cannot quite name but somehow recognize.
You are not beginning something new this year.
You are arriving.
With so much love, from my corner by the sea,
Sarah
If this letter found its way to you and you are ready to explore what Brave Rest can open in your own life, I would love for you to look at what is coming up the 40-day Yoga Nidra journey, our April retreat in Bali, and the women’s circles happening this spring. All of the details live at sarahbrassard.com.
