Hexagram 42: Increase Changing to Hexagram 27: Nourishment

I Ching casting meaning · Yi → Yi

Increase is turning its attention to intake — Nourishment. You've been focused on outward growth — more revenue, more reach, more scale — and now the question inverts: what exactly are you feeding the expanded operation with? Not just capital — talent, information, culture, the mental diet your grown self runs on. Audit the intake with the same rigor you brought to the growth strategy. Cut the inputs that bloat without building; double the ones that nourish the core. The next level of your increase will be built out of whatever you're consuming now. Growth running on junk inputs produces junk output at a larger scale. Feed yourself what builds; the growth will follow the fuel quality.

A casting that moves from Increase into Nourishment means the situation you asked about is not static — it begins as one pattern and resolves into another. The first hexagram describes where you stand; the second describes where events are carrying you.

Highlighted in red: line 5 is moving — counted from the bottom. A moving line is where the change is actually happening: it flips from yang to yin or back, and that flip is what turns Increase into Nourishment.

The situation: Hexagram 42, Increase

True increase. Wind and thunder multiply each other.

Wind and thunder feeding each other — energy that multiplies instead of canceling out. This is one of the great draws: genuine increase, the kind where resources, opportunities, and momentum all rise together. The classic instruction has a spine to it, though: increase flows to people who use it well. See good, copy it fast. See your own faults, cut them faster. This is also the season to do something significant with the surplus — invest in people, take the meaningful risk, fund the thing that matters. Increase hoarded curdles; increase circulated compounds. You're being given more because the universe expects you to move it.

Structurally, Increase is Thunder below Wind — the inner state meeting the outer condition. That pairing is the lens for everything above.

Where it's heading: Hexagram 27, Nourishment

Watch what you feed. Nourishment reveals character.

The changed hexagram is the trajectory, not a verdict. As the moving line settles, the energy of Increase gives way to Nourishment (Yi) — Thunder below Mountain. The advice that belongs to this outcome: Audit what you consume and say this week. Feed yourself what builds.