What does Temperance mean for health?

Recovery and rebalancing, and one of the deck's clearest healing cards. Sagittarius rules the hips and thighs in the traditional correspondence.

Read as reflection rather than diagnosis, its counsel is proportion in the literal sense: intake, output, work, rest, movement, stillness. Moderation in everything, including in moderation, which is the card's own joke and a serious point about regimens that become their own burden.

It is associated with the long middle of a recovery rather than its crisis, and its consistent instruction is small and repeated over large and occasional. Nothing here is diagnostic, and a recovery that is not progressing is a matter for the person overseeing it.

Moderation, blending, patient recalibration. Find the middle without making it a compromise nobody wants. Healing follows here, and it follows slowly.

It is one of the best cards to draw after any of the deck's harsher trumps, because it describes the period afterwards: the recovery, the adjustment, the slow work of getting a life back into proportion. The Tower knocks something down and Temperance is what happens over the following year.

In an advice position it favours a small adjustment repeated over a large correction made once. It is a poor card for decisive action and an excellent one for anything that has been oscillating between extremes.

Excess or imbalance. Overcorrection. Impatience with a process that only works at its own pace. It can also mean two things being forced together that genuinely do not mix.

Overcorrection is the reading most worth watching for, because it looks like progress. Somebody who was working too much and is now not working at all has not found the middle; they have found the other end, and the card reversed is often describing the second swing rather than the first.

The last reading is the harshest and is occasionally correct. Not everything blends, and a great deal of effort gets spent proving otherwise before the conclusion arrives anyway.

Upright: balance, moderation, patience, blending, healing, proportion

Reversed: excess, imbalance, impatience, overcorrection, discord

For reflection and entertainment. Not medical, legal, or financial advice.

Tarot does not diagnose. A card that mentions a body system is describing a symbolic association, not a medical finding. If something is wrong, see a doctor, and if a reading is making you anxious about your health, that anxiety is worth taking to a professional too.

• Where am I at an extreme that a small adjustment would fix?
• What two things in my life need blending rather than choosing between?
• What am I rushing that only works slowly?