Getting to Know Your Numbers: Calculating Personal Months and Years

Numerology places special focus on the self and destiny; more recently, however, attention has been given to numerologically identifying the energies that impact the collective, then filter down to the microcosmic. Thus marked the resurgence of Universal and Personal Months/Years, which can be calculated and followed even without knowing any of your other numbers.

Why Keep Track of Those?

Being able to keep track of your personal month and year allows you to anticipate life changes, direct spiritual challenges, and prime healing events. They also allow you to time major endeavors with quite a bit of success, or avoid pitfalls that may arise while a certain energy is active. Understanding and reading up on the Universal Years also has utility: you'll see exactly why a horse in a hospital might have refused to leave - nay, threaten to sue to stay there, in a month marked by trial! You'll be able to plan your Tinder activity and avoid Endless Swipe Syndrome! Zing your Zoom conference mates with your casual predictions of office buffoonery and technological glitches! Or, perhaps most importantly: you'll be able to explore, understand and appreciate exactly how intertwined we all truly are, no matter how much we sometimes go out of our way not to be.

Calculating Your Personal Month and Year

To calculate your Personal Year, add your day of birth and month to the current calendar year. To calculate your Personal Month, add your Personal Year to the current calendar month. That's it! That's the formula. Everything after that is just learning how to work with each of the energies that I've described earlier in this series, and knowing how they express themselves from month to month. And if you’ve been around folks who talk about how the end of the year is a preview into the coming year, know that this is numerologically correct. Let’s test it out using Cassandra and her fake Date of Birth from this post:

Cassandra Allegra Portia Calogera Filomena Pentaghast 

Date of Birth: August 28, 1980

Sample Month: November 2020

Remember, Personal Year = Day of Birth + Birth Month + Current Calendar Year, so:

(2 + 8) + (8) + (2 + 0 + 2 + 0)

1 + 8 + 4 = 13, or Personal Year 4.

And since Personal Month = Personal Year + Calendar Month:

4 + 11 = 15, or Personal Month 6.

December would be a Personal Month 7 for our Seeker. It’s natural to reflexively assume that since the calendar just rolls on along, January would be a Personal Month 8. Nope! January effectively Groundhog Month, as Cassandra would be right back in 6 energy once again, hopefully much wiser for the wear. I encourage y’all to take note of occurrences that pop up during the last two months of each year, always: if you know what’s coming, you can plan ahead. It is prudent to frequently put time aside for sincere reflection, so that you understand what you might be challenged to master before that energy circles back around.

Calculating Collective Changes

A Universal Year number represents the energy presiding over everyone globally. It represents the challenges, triumphs, and lessons that the world undergoes as a whole. Same deal for Universal Months. When calculating a Universal Month, numerologists will technically use the month and the year. Let's run the numbers for November, which is the month that this post was originally published on Ko-Fi in 2020:

Calendar Month + Universal Year = Universal Month

11 + 4 = 15, or Universal Month 6

As for what those you who keep track of my Spiritual Reports have seen me call a Grid Month: most numerologists will just stop at the above reduction and do their interpretation using the 6 alone. I choose to reiterate the calendar month because of how much everyone on a Western geopolitical grid really relies on the Gregorian calendar, and take into account how that influences the way we interact with the Universal Month energy at large. Not only do we experience the energy of each month in the context of the year that we’re currently in, we’re also experiencing each month’s energy in a very linear time-irreverent way.

With the above in mind, using both the Universal and Grid month, which you'll see me call a "combined [energy] signature," widens the spectrum of possibilities for consideration, reflection, and growth in a way that using a Universal Month alone does not. Also, the combined signature swiftly identifies potential tensions and resistances to collective shifts based on how those two numbers tend to play with each other.

Some Considerations

Universal Years are conventionally measured by the Gregorian calendar in the West, which is convenient when we’re looking to line things up with major events. Not every culture or region uses this as a primary calendar, or even consistently enough to matter. The difference between the Hijri calendar and the Gregorian, for example, is approximately 11 days. This difference means that while we all experience the same 24-hour day, we are not all experiencing the same collective energy or the same Universal Year. Truly, knowing which calendar to use when calculating local energy makes a difference. Allow me to further explain why:

Consensus reality is shaped by our common agreements, choices and behaviors. When large groups of people believe and structure their lives around a concept, they give it power. Consensus reality is thus constantly being rewritten, even though it's not always on our timeline. Some things, meanwhile, remain true even in spirit until enough energy is put in to shift it. This is why knowing the spiritual geography of where you live matters, and why attempting to totally ignore its local politics can bite you in the rear. To quote every bored person at every cocktail party who needed a solid one-liner to show baseline participation while discreetly checking their Twitter feed, "it's all interconnected."

The above should be kept in mind when reading about and discussing “Universal” years. They’re universal only in the sense that the West has dominated so many corners of this planet, we’re almost all influenced, operating or planning by Gregorian calendar. Almost.

In my personal practice, I don’t consider Universal years cosmically-relevant in the way that others might, at least not in terms of some master plan. The less-saintly and revisionist activities of the Christian churches in Europe during the Middle Ages were wretched, spiritually.  The first waves of colonialism were wretched, spiritually. And now we’re collectively trying to navigate the world in the messy, tragic aftermath of all that and more. If we were to collectively decide to switch to and plan around any other calendar, say, tomorrow, the upheaval would be incalculable.

Almost.