Hexagram 27: Nourishment

頤 (Yí)

Proper nourishment of body, mind, and spirit.

Overview

To understand what this period brings you, look at the parts this sign is built from.

A time has come when you can act freely inside yourself, but what you begin in the outer world tends to meet obstacles.

In other words, you are again in a situation where you have to act at your own risk, without counting on help from outside. Think of your path as a search for food for the mind and the soul.

The right move is to go both up and down: up toward your goal, and deep into yourself, finding new qualities and discovering new abilities. This is hard, but you need it to grow.

The way you used to push forward has to stop for a while. If you insist on your own way and act as if nothing has changed, you will soon see that you have come to a standstill.

You have to adapt to the changed conditions, so that you do not slide back to where you were before.

People around you

The change touches your relationships with the people around you more than anything else. You cannot count on help from outside right now, and you have to manage on your own. So it is worth keeping contact with friends and colleagues to a minimum.

Work and rest

Try to use this period for your own good: go back over your old plans and correct them. On your own you may see opportunities you did not notice before.

Balance work and rest sensibly. If you cannot divide your time between the two, it can lead to exhaustion and strained nerves. Look again at your daily routine.

Do not expect everything to work out by itself. Organize your time with skill. Waste fewer days and hours on things that bring nothing to your soul and mind. Your results can then go beyond anything you expected.

Your wish

Your wish seems set to come true, but not all at once. It comes in parts, and the last of it keeps you waiting. Do not be sorry about that. In the end things may turn out more beautiful than you imagined at the start.

This Overview is one traditional reading of the figure, offered as a prompt for reflection and perspective rather than a prediction of a fixed future. Where this material comes from.

New to the sequence? See how lines, trigrams and changing lines work, or cast your own reading with the three-coin method.

Structure

Read from the bottom upward, hexagram 27 is Mountain over Thunder. Its two inner, or nuclear, trigrams are Earth over Earth. What the eight trigrams mean.

Upper trigram (lines 4–6): Gèn · Mountain Still and stopping
Lower trigram (lines 1–3): Zhèn · Thunder Arousing and moving
Upper nuclear (lines 3–5): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted
Lower nuclear (lines 2–4): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted