Marsilio Ficino is the guy you'd get if a priest, a philosopher, and a wellness coach were all the same person, 500 years ago, in Renaissance Florence.
He was a serious heavyweight. The Medici family basically funded him to run their academy, and he's the one who translated Plato and the old Hermetic mystical texts into Latin, which lit a fire under the whole Renaissance. Without him, a chunk of Western thought just doesn't happen.
But the part I find genuinely useful is his book Three Books on Life. It's a strange, lovely mix of philosophy, medicine and astrology, and it's basically about not burning out. He noticed that scholars and deep-thinking people, himself included, tend to get heavy, gloomy, stuck. He called it melancholy and tied it to Saturn.
And his prescriptions? Weirdly, almost exactly what a therapist might tell you now. Get sunlight. Listen to music. Spend time in nature. Surround yourself with beautiful things and bright company. He framed it as drawing in the lighter, warmer planetary energies — Sun, Venus, Jupiter — to balance the heavy Saturn stuff. Strip the cosmology and it's just: when you're low, go toward light and warmth and beauty on purpose.
He was also a devoted Christian, which put him in a real bind. How do you square 'the stars influence us' with 'God is in charge'? He didn't paper over it. He sat in the tension, which honestly makes him more trustworthy, not less.