A Resonance Journal retrospective

Over four years ago now, we first brought out the Resonance Journal: software to keep a journal both of your Yijing readings and also of dreams, synchronicities and simple daily experience, and to reveal and explore how all these things connect and resonate together.

We’ve come quite a long way since then. The Resonance Journal now has three built-in translations (LiSe’s, Bradford Hatcher’s and my own) as well as a Yijing glossary (Language of Change); all the text (interface included) is resizable; you can review a random entry (possibly my favourite feature); you can protect your journal with a password; you can print your entries… and so on.

The first seven reasons

Now we’re up to version 2.1 (with easier updates and the ability to export your entries to Excel), I thought it was time I wrote again about the benefits of keeping a Yijing journal. And then I found I’d done so back in 2014, when I came up with ‘the first seven reasons’ why a Yijing journal is a good idea:

1. You learn more about Yi.
2. You can draw on your experience to help other people.
3. You learn from experience.
4. You learn from dreams.
5. It’s an opportunity to grow your relationship with Yi.
6. It allows everything to speak.
7. Writing your story does you good.

(Here’s the original post.)

Reason number 8: you avoid a cartload of frustration.

(Probably this should have been reason #1.)

When discussing readings with clients, I often hear things like:

‘You know, my last reading had the same hexagram… that feels as if it’s trying to tell me something. I can’t remember what the reading was about, though…’

‘Yes, I’ve asked about this before a few times. I think the answers were positive…’

‘Well, I asked about the alternative and it said… hm, can’t quite remember, just a minute…’

– and then there’s the rustling of paper, or possibly the faint keyboard-rattling of someone searching their browser history, as they rummage about in the dwindling hope of finding what Yi had to say.

I know how this feels because it used to be me, too. It’s not that I didn’t care about the readings or didn’t keep them, it’s just that I couldn’t find them. Being an economically-minded sort of diviner, at first I wrote my readings on scrap paper and stuffed it all into an envelope…

…until I graduated to nice, substantial hardback notebooks…

…in which I still couldn’t find anything much, especially since I kept forgetting to index them properly.

As you can imagine, I’ve gone through the whole, ‘I know I had a reading about that somewhere…’ and ‘I’m sure I’ve seen this hexagram somewhere recently…’ thing more often than I can count. You know your present reading’s referring back to that one, you know it has something to tell you, you know you need to hear it, you know you’re missing out, and most of all you know this is completely ridiculous because you definitely wrote it down somewhere…

So… do not be like me in the last millennium. Keep a journal where you can find the readings you need – and see all their interconnections. And if you prefer to write your readings, dreams and reflections on paper, do that and use software to index them.

In short – if you don’t already use the Resonance Journal, download the free trial and get started. In addition to the features I mentioned above, it still has the most comprehensive facilities for searching for readings – by hexagram, trigram, lines changing, tag or full text – you can imagine. Your tooth enamel will thank you 😉 .