This is a walk-through of the 2026 Metaphysician’s Day Planner (MDP), highlighting new changes and edits from previous years’ MDPs and how I use my MDP. Just a reminder: If you’d like to order your 2026 MDP, go HERE.

But also, I’ve provided all the digital MS Word templates that I use to create the MDPs year to year so that you don’t even have to buy mine, but can build your own. You can download all the digital templates HERE.

My favorite part about the MDP offering is you choose your own cover art design. On THIS PAGE where you can find the template downloads, you’ll also find Dropbox links to download various cover art design options, or take the specs (you’ll find this in the MDP General Guide PDF) to design your own from scratch.

For my 2026 MDP, I’m going with this 15th century ink scroll Buddhist art of the Six Paramitas, which in Mahayana Buddhism often gets associated with the Six Bodhisattvas. This then inspired one of the journaling self-reflection page spreads that I added to this year’s MPD.

I would consider the very red cover design out of character for me. For the last three years I went with very blue choices, and heck, didn’t even get all that creative this year for my 2025 cover. I just thought, hey, this worked for 2024, I’m just going to re-use it for 2025.

The front interior cover page is where you can include customized text, be that your name, a key phrase, your power word of the year, anything you want. It’s part of your custom order. Instead of specific prompts for each of those boxed sections, this year I went with general aphorisms that can be left up to you to interpret.

For example, “Small steps every day build great journeys” might be space used for front page daily reminders or top priority goals for 2026. In that space under “Energy flows where attention goes,” I’ll probably place a Fu talisman or sigil for what it is I most want to manifest in 2026. And maybe I’ll just ignore the “Don’t count the days; make the days count” note and in that space put whatever the heck I want. That’s why I like these aphorisms over the specific goal-setting prompts; now it’s more versatile and adaptable to whatever you want to put here.

Also customized for your own MDP order is a page spread with your natal chart and your solar return chart for 2026, though cast to your day of birth rather than sun degree. For the purist astrologers who go by sun degree, it’s an easy adjustment on your end — you already know your natal sun degree, so you adjust the degrees forward or backward on the solar chart accordingly.

For the year-at-a-glance pages, the first page spread is focused on the present year, 2026, as you see above, and this year I’ve included the planetary year notes in the footer (as you can see above to the right).

Then you have Year Past and Year Ahead now as a set page spread with planetary year notes in the footer. I also really like carrying “lessons learned” from the prior year into the current, so there’s some space under 2025 to write down your most important takeaway from 2025 that you want to bring with you into 2026. To me, it’s really important to identify this and be intentional with it.

Also new in the 2026 MDP is a page spread on the lunar year info. 2026 is going to be the year of the Fire Horse, and above to the left you can find a box for your own Chinese zodiac sign and look up what year of the Fire Horse means for you, the Tiger, or the Rabbit, the Dragon, or the Rooster, etc. On the right side you log in your Tarot Year Card, and also you can see that the Base Year, 2026, is going to be a Wheel of the Fortune or Fortuna year. There are some quick-reference notes on core themes for each tarot year card.

ABOUT YOUR TAROT YEAR CARD: HERE you can download an expanded reference handout talking about each Major Arcanum as a Tarot Year Card. FYI, you can learn more about the concept of Tarot Year Cards HERE from Mary K. Greer’s Archetypal Tarot and take a free, self-guided video workshop on the subject.

There’s also an I Ching Hexagram of the Year, similar to the Tarot Year Card concept, one popularized in East Asia. The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching correspond with the 60-year lunar-solar calendar, plus 4 hexagrams corresponding with the 4 cardinal eras, similar to the concept of the equinoxes + solstices and the four directions “centering” geo-location. Based on that assumption, 2026 as Year of the Fire Horse corresponds with Hexagram 45. We also provide the hexagram references for 2025 and 2027.

The MDP always has a page spread for you to do month by month forecasts prior to the start of the year. Tarot readers will often draw a card per month for a 12-card Year Ahead spread. You can do this with any divinatory tool of your choosing. The first column under the month label is where you note the divinatory result. The middle column is where you write notes for your interpretation of that result. Leave the right column blank until the month concludes, and then you return to this page to jot in how that reading manifested for the month.

New to the 2026 MDP are page spreads for a couple of major projects you want to track throughout the year.

Old from years past but scaled back are the quarterly planning pages. This year I’ve opted to leave it blank, with no text prompts. That way you can be a lot more personal, customized, and creative with how you want to organize these page spreads.

Year to year, I’ve used this section of the MDP differently, for myself. This past year, I crossed out the default prompts that were here for the template and simply used this space as a post-quarter reflection, to jot down the highlights, lowlights, key events, world events, local events, and how I had been feeling that month/that quarter. That was what gave me the idea to remove the template prompts altogether and keep this section blank. Drawing doodles, sketches, or using stickers for symbolism to represent your visions for each quarter or for a mood board would also be cool for this section. I think that’s how I’ll be using my 2026 quarterly planning sections — sticker collages! =)

After deciding to go with the Six Paramitas for my own 2026 MDP, I was inspired to create the above page spread tying Six Life Achievements to the Six Paramitas in an everyday self-improvement sort of way and creating goal-setting and self-reflection prompts to keep you focused on these achievements.

Also some minor changes in the month-at-a-glance pages. Now on the left side accompanying the month-at-a-glance page are blank lines for you to jot in personally important dates and holidays, or any other high-level notes you want to add here.

The US Letter and A4 European versions do have some differences in this section, as you can see here:

The ephemeris tables that used to be opposite to the month-at-a-glance page is now its own section, like so:

And again, just some minor differences between the smaller Trade version in this section and the larger US Letter and A4 options:

Basically, to balance out the spacing, the larger size versions have additional self-reflection and goal-setting prompts for each month.

New this year are page spreads right there in your MDP that help you to interpret those ephemeris tables and learn basic mundane astrology (i.e., global forecasting with astrological charts).

So if from the ephemeris table you see that on Sep. 27, the moon is in Sagittarius, Mercury is in Libra, Venus is in Virgo, and Mars is in Scorpio, you can locate general global forecasting notes for each of those transits and put together your own interpretation of the energies prevalent that day. Jupiter and Saturn are the slower moving planets, and so there are page spreads for the few Jupiter and Saturn transits happening in 2026.

The daily pages, or week-at-a-glance spreads are largely the same, with the same set of diverse, inclusive global holidays as we had in past MDPs. The layout has been cleaned up a bit. I took out the weekly affirmations and some of the more specific category prompts, now keeping it very general and generic. I’ve also added more lines for additional space to write.

Please note there are other design, layout, and formatting differences between the three size options (Trade, US Letter, and A4) just due to the fact they’re different sizes and you have to noodle with the design and layout so things look okay.

For the US Letter and A4 sizes, the week-at-a-glance daily spreads have more note-taking space plus the daily habit tracker to track up to three goal-setting habits, like meeting word count targets if you’re a writer, caloric deficit or exercise and fitness goals, meditation, quiet reflection practices, or reminders for taking medications, or an extension of the project tracker pages from earlier in the MDP. Then there’s the extra line for “Daily Energy/Mood Rating” where you can draw an end-of-day emoji to sum up how that day went. =P

As for the blank “Notes & Reminders” space, use it meal planning ideas, to-do checklists, task lists, logging books you read that week, content creation brainstorms and ideas lists for content creators, or cover this entire space with a sticker collage as a mood board, or weekly vision board.

In the back there are some blank lined pages, which I like to turn into tables. I use a ruler to draw columns to track divinatory readings by date (I removed the card-of-the-day logs from the monthly section that were in the MDPs in previous years), a dream log, mileage log for those who run their own businesses and track that for tax purposes, content creators who want to track subscriber count, or just for creative brain dumps — unstructured notes, more doodles, brainstorms, paste in clippings, write out recipes, etc.

Then there are the “grimoire” pages at the end, which are just a set of reference tables I like to have within reach all the time throughout the year. They remain the same year to year, but for 2026 we do have a few new adds, and a few subtractions. Above right you’ll see one of the new adds, a correspondences dashboard for the Sacred Seven.

I also made minor updates to some of the page spreads and reference tables, as you can see above (those who have old versions of MDPs will see the differences).

Some stuff got taken out and replaced with updated stuff, which I hope will be more practical to beginners.

I updated the tarot keywords and correspondences page spread, as you can see above, so this year it’s a bit different from past years.

Also, I took out the Lenormand reference table and swapped it with an additional supplemental tarot reference chart. When I helped write the guidebook to the Verdance Tarot for US Games, I assigned archetypes to each of the 78 cards. My SKT deck had epithets for each of the cards. Even if you’re not using either of these decks, having these archetype references help give you a sense of the personality or persona each card embodies, which I find helps beginners with understanding card meaning.

There are a few more page spreads that I’ve updated with minor changes throughout the grimoire section, and other sections I’ve removed, like the palmistry pages. You can download the palmistry references if you’re interested in that, but it was taking up a whole lot of space in this back section that I personally wasn’t utilizing, so it’s not part of the 2026 MDP.

Above right you’ll find a very fun new add, and a very easy fortune-telling method in folk Chinese traditions called Six Omens divination 小六壬, based on the lunar-solar calendar and the classical concept of the Six Omens in lunar-solar astrology. In this fortune-telling method, you assign the Six Omens to parts of your index, middle, and ring fingers, and run the count based on the date and time of the divination (similar to horary astrology reading methods). Step-by-step how-to is right there on the page, and the month-at-a-glance section of your MDP gives you the corresponding Month number. You then count the days from that Month number for your Day number, and the Hour number reference chart is right there on the page. Super fun, super easy to do, and super easy to remember how to do. And all the astrological references you need are right there in your MDP.

The final end pages include some reference tables I think are going to be useful, or at least interesting. Any free moment I have in, say, a waiting room waiting for an appointment, or while traveling, I’ll pull out my MDP and study these pages to try and memorize some of this stuff. I just think it’s cool stuff to commit to memory.

Astronomical times you’ll find throughout the MDP are per Pacific Time Zone, but now you have an easy-reference time zone conversion chart, so you can do the conversion quickly and without much fuss. I chart my days according to sunrise and sunset, so the above right page is important to me. Once you print out your MDP, make sure to write in the hours of sunrise and sunset per your longitude/latitude location. This information is fairly easy to source online.

Before the year begins, I like to chart out 12 goals for a holistic approach to life, based on the 12 astrological houses. In that “Personal Care Notes” section, I tend to use this space to write out my skincare routine and the products I’m using that year, or the recipe for my go-to scents that I formulate for myself. Any personal reference of importance that you want easy access to goes here.

Finally, the bottom half of the page to the left above is what you complete at the close of the year. The right side is for you to get scissors and cut off that gray shaded area, then tape it with the page behind it to create a little folder pocket for your MDP.

Order the 2026 MDP, $17

CLICK HERE to order the 2026 MDP. Like before, you can choose between Trade, US Letter, and A4 European size, get a custom keyword, phrase, or your name printed on the interior front cover page, plus have your MDP feature your natal chart and 2026 solar returns chart. However, this year it’s an “MDP Lite,” meaning you won’t get the accompanying Forecasts for the Year (the almanac-like handbook) that detail the year’s astrological and astronomical events and predictions.

For those who have been following my postings, at first I had intended on retiring the MDP, so that 2025 would be its last year. It just became a ton of labor in every fourth quarter, and for those of us working corporate jobs, you already appreciate how Q4 is always the busiest and craziest.

But that didn’t mean I personally wasn’t going to create my own day planner for 2026. The origins story of the MDP is that every year I design and create my own day planner organizer and I’ve been doing this since high school (I am at this point in my mid-40s, to give you a sense of how long this has been going on).

Back in 2017 (well, actually, 2016 to be precise), I was going about making my personal day planner organizer document when Hubby looked over my shoulder to see what I was doing. (Yes, similar story to my first tarot deck, the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot.) And Hubby said, holy smokes, you should sell that. I thought it was a dumb idea. It’s not like we’re going to physically print them for people. All we can do is offer the digital PDF files. Who the heck wants that? Hubby then asked, well, where do you get them printed? So I showed him that Lulu.com print-on-demand site. And he said, yeah, that. Just point people to that site.

His suggestions sounded ludicrous to me, but then that first year for the 2017 MDP, we sold over 2,000 copies. Every year after, it was in the thousands. In recent years, 2024 and 2025, the numbers came down significantly, but the upfront investment of work and labor didn’t change. Not to mention, there are so many copycats on the market now. I swear back in 2016 I didn’t see any other day planners or organizers that included metaphysical reference tables or were designed specifically for practitioners in mind, and now there are bunches. So this year I made the (initial) executive decision of stopping the MDP.

Anyway, like I said, that doesn’t change the fact I still need to create the template for 2026 for myself. And while I was at it, I had a couple of in-real-life friends who also wanted a copy of whatever I was going to be making for myself. So then I started making it with them in mind, too. Before you know it, here we are with an updated version of the MDP and so Hubby came in and said, “You should sell that.” (Don’t blame him, he’s a business-finance guy. Every family needs one. Every time I start a new hobby or craft something for funsies and he happens to see it he says, “You should sell that.” Most of the time I give him the stink eye and he drops it, but other times, he gets pushy because he really does think it’s a great idea. And you know what, good thing, too, otherwise we would have never had the SKT, or this MDP.)