What This Is
The year reaching back to the chart's root. The 太岁 is the branch of the flowing year; the native year branch is the chart's 本命, the root seat of the family lineage. When the year branch forms a 六合 or half-combination with the native year branch, this is 合身 — the year combining with the self at its root. 三命通会 names it directly and describes its character: combination here means entanglement, dimming, and cyclical recurrence rather than clean forward motion.
It is a quieter event than a clash, but a binding one. The year does not strike the root; it loops around it, drawing the chart back toward old ground.
When It Fires
It fires when the annual branch combines with the native year branch, by full 六合 or by half-combination. As the year cycles, the combining branch comes around on its schedule, and the binding to the root recurs when it does.
What It Changes
It slows and recirculates. The classics put it plainly: in a year of 合身, affairs repeat reversibly and progress cannot accelerate. Old matters resurface; interpersonal threads tangle and re-tangle; the pace of advance drops as the chart is drawn back over familiar terrain. Because the year branch holds the family-root and elder register, the combination also tends to stir household and ancestral concerns — matters of the lineage, the elders, the place one comes from.
The motion is cyclical rather than linear: a year that returns to things rather than moving past them.
How To Read It
Read it by what the root combination does to the chart's balance and by what the combining brings into play. A combination at the root can set a favorable, measured pace — a year for tending old ground deliberately rather than charging forward — or it can drag, the entanglement holding the chart in recurrence it would rather leave behind. Where the bound branches serve the chart, the slowed, returning quality is workable and even useful; where they do not, the recurrence becomes a year that will not let progress build.
The household and elder register is part of the reading: the combination at the family-root often signals matters concerning home and lineage, which may be welcome reconnection or burdensome obligation depending on the chart. Never flat — read it as the binding against the chart's needs and its pace.
Where This Shows Up
A period of this kind feels like return. Old matters come back around; people and situations from before resurface; the year asks the chart to revisit rather than to break new ground, and refuses to be hurried. Plans that want to accelerate keep meeting a slower current. The texture is recurrence and entanglement at a manageable pitch — not upheaval, but a binding that holds the pace down.
It frequently touches the home and the elders — the family root being the register the year pillar carries — so the stretch may center on lineage, on the place one is from, on obligations and reconnections within the family. Whether that lands as warmth or as weight depends on the chart, but the shape is consistent: a returning, recirculating year that rewards patience and resists the rush.