Monthly Reflection: Justice & The Empress

It might be a new year, but it’s also a new month, and with that, comes a Monthly Reflection, just a little later than usual! This month, I used the Prisma Visions deck and pulled two major arcana cards, which feels rather fitting considering the shifting energy, between these two years (you can read about 2025 here and 2026 here).

Justice unsurprisingly concludes what has been a tough year for many, with The Empress being a welcome soft introduction to 2026. Let’s break this down, shall we?

December Reflection: Justice

The brutal rebalancing of Justice feels like a fitting conclusion to 2025. Justice finds balance through removing and so, what this means is that December was about tying up personal loose ends, that free us up to start making the progress we’ve been hoping for in 2026.

And this speaks to the wider themes of 2025 and 2026. 2025 was all about the internal work, with The Hermit being Card of The Year. The thing about internal work is that it can feel like we’ve made no progress, simply because we can’t see the progress we’ve made. But this is in fact not true, because often it is the internal work that is instrumental to us taking necessary action and moving forward. It is, in essence, the foundation upon which you are going to build your success. You can’t see the foundations of a building, but the building wouldn’t be there without them. 2026 is where the energy starts to shift and where we start to see real change. 2025 laid the foundations. 2026 is when we start building.

And so those things we hadn’t dealt with yet - what we were holding onto, what wasn’t serving us, these may have become more evident in the month of December. This brings to mind a line in the animated Christmas movie That Christmas. “I always think that Christmas is a bit like an emotional magnifying glass. If you feel loved and happy, Christmas will make you feel even happier and more loved. But if you feel alone and unloved, the magnifier gets to work and makes all those bad things bigger and worse.”

It’s a fantastic line on its own, but really illustrates the point. December (and Christmas) brings a myriad of social activities and expectations, family dynamics to navigate, financial pressure, the reflective/nostalgic side of the season, along with a sense of urgency to close out the end of the year ‘right’. In all respects, the good things can be very, very good, but when these things aren’t working, or when you wish things were different, it becomes that much harder to ignore. For example, it’s easy to dismiss or excuse difficult family members on a random Tuesday, but on Christmas Day when you’re stressed out, juggling three roasting trays, making sure everyone’s glasses are topped up and the kids are overstimulated because they ate too much chocolate, that family member’s problematic behaviour becomes that much more noticeable. Likewise, when you’re sat at work late on Christmas Eve trying to get everything caught up even though everyone else has already gone home, it really puts into perspective the unfair distribution of workloads between you and your peers.

In essence, anything that hadn’t been addressed by December made itself known, asking you, “Do you really want to carry this forward into the new year?”

You could say that Justice is a natural conclusion to The Hermit’s year. We did the work, we figured out who we really are and what we really want, and so, as the year came to a close, it was really obvious what was no longer in alignment, giving us an opportunity to shed the last of that skin that no longer belonged to us. Being a Year of The Snake in the Chinese Zodiac and a snake literally being on this card (despite not being a common symbol for Justice) really highlights this notion of ‘shedding’.

No doubt, this signals it may have been a difficult ending to a difficult year, but it is fitting nonetheless. And let’s not forget, Justice is about rebalancing. While its approach may be brutal, the intent is to make things right, and if you’re owed a break, Justice is drawing you the map to it.

In this way, even if some of the things in December were tough, you may have felt like you turned a corner by the end of 2025, which aligns perfectly with the energy that greets us in January.

January Outlook: The Empress

The Empress’ maternal, nurturing arms welcome us into 2026, wrapping us in the embrace of a warm blanket.

I know there can be a lot of pressure to be uber productive in January, but being the height of winter, all that productivity talk feels sort of unnatural. At the end of the day, nature is in hibernation mode and so it is in our own very nature to want to do the same. Add a difficult 2025 to the mix, and I would not be surprised if you feel like you need to catch your breath for a minute before you plow forward.

And that’s exactly what The Empress encourages us to do. This is a card focusing on self-care and nurturance, so this is all about refilling your cup. What would feel restorative to you right now? What can you do for yourself? Maybe it’s slowing down, or making some time for yourself, or doing something cosy and comforting. Maybe it’s spending some time getting your house in order or reviewing your budget. It’s about catching up with the speed of life, physically and/or energetically, so that you are then in the best place to move forward with the rest of the year. December was the rebalance, now this is the reset.

This is also about reducing the noise. The Empress is the card of creation and creativity. How will you find inspiration if you can’t step off the hamster wheel of life? The Empress is calling you to find some stillness this month so that you can find inspiration. When we remove things from our life in Justice, it leaves space in our lives that needs to be filled with something else, and The Empress indicates that we get to bring that in very intentionally. It wouldn’t make sense to rush that.

2026 is the Year of The Wheel, with The Magician as the backdrop. This means there is fertile ground for change this year, and so beginning the year with The Empress makes a lot of sense. We need to allow ourselves a bit of freedom to mould our vision and plan for 2026. What is it that you want to grow this year? What do you want to give your heart to?

These questions are more important than how many days you went to the gym, how much water you consumed or how many hours you spent at the office. Pushing yourself too hard only leads to those failed New Year’s Resolutions, only to be revisited when January rolls around once again. We don’t want that for you. You can create something beautiful this year, something befitting of what you deserve.

Take good care of yourself, and perhaps, by the end of this month, you’ll have the energy to start growing something really beautiful.

Did this resonate? Let me know in the comments!

N x