Hexagram 27 · Nourishment (頤 Yí)
Mountain ☶ over Thunder ☳
Still jaw above, moving jaw below · an open mouth that feeds and speaks
Nourishment is the hexagram of how we feed ourselves and others — not only with food, but with words, thoughts, company, and care. Yí pictures an open mouth, and asks the simple, searching question that mouth represents: what are you taking in, and what are you putting out? Wellbeing, it teaches, is built or eroded at this everyday level. Choose your sustenance wisely, give what is wholesome, and fortune follows; feed yourself on what is empty or corrosive, and no amount of luck repairs it.
Mountain holds still above while Thunder stirs below, and the shape of the whole figure — two firm lines enclosing four open ones — recalls a pair of jaws, the upper still and the lower moving as it chews. Mountain is calm and containing; Thunder is the living movement within. Their image is the act of nourishment itself: stillness and motion together, the steadiness that holds and the energy that takes in, working as one to sustain life.
What this hexagram counsels in a reading
When Nourishment answers your question, look closely at your inputs and outputs. What you read, eat, watch, and listen to is shaping you more than you notice; the company you keep is feeding or starving something in you. The counsel is to be deliberate: seek out nourishing sources and refuse the junk, whether literal or mental. Guard your speech as carefully as your diet, since careless words feed others poorly and rebound on you. Tend, too, to those who depend on you — providing well for them is part of the same discipline.
In love and relationships
Ask what a relationship is feeding you, and what you are feeding it. Healthy bonds nourish both people; draining ones quietly hollow you out. Mind your words especially — what is spoken in closeness either sustains or corrodes. Offer encouragement and real care, choose company that leaves you fuller rather than emptier, and let mutual nourishment be the measure of the tie.
In work and money
Sustainability is the theme. Pursue work and income streams that genuinely feed your life rather than consume it, and beware ventures that look rich but leave you depleted. In money matters, be measured — neither starving your real needs nor overindulging. Invest in what nourishes your capacities over the long run, and provide soundly for those who rely on your support.
Moving lines and the changing hexagram
A moving line in Nourishment usually points to a particular source of sustenance — one worth seeking, or one worth refusing — or to the temptation to feed on what does not truly nourish. The hexagram it changes into shows the consequence of those choices, the condition that follows from how you have fed yourself and others. Read it as where a diet of inputs and words is carrying you next.
Its Tarot kin
Nourishment resonates with Temperance, Tarot’s angel pouring liquid between two cups in perfect, patient measure. Temperance is the art of right proportion — of blending, moderating, and taking in only what sustains. Like Yí, it counsels the balanced intake that keeps body and spirit whole. Both figures distrust extremes and excess, and both find health in the steady, mindful tending of what flows in and what flows out.
Cast the coins and you might draw this one — try the I Ching tool, or see all sixty-four on the full hexagram grid. For reflection and insight, not fortune-telling — see our disclaimer.