I’ve written before about Yi’s kindness, but it’s something I keep rediscovering. There’s the gentleness of its responses to people in crisis – all degrees of crisis, without judgement. One of my own favourite readings comes from a moment when I suddenly felt I’d experienced the final straw, had nothing left… Read more »More of Yi’s kindness
Episode 37 of the I Ching with Clarity podcast features a listener’s reading. She’s wondering whether her desire to create a business is her real path, or whether she could be losing herself. Her reading – Hexagram 48, the Well, changing at line 3 to 29, Repeating Chasms: changing to… Read more »Creating a business?
It probably shouldn’t surprise me to discover that 57, Subtly Penetrating, as relating hexagram is very hard to pin down. That seems to be just the nature of the hexagram. But the most general way of looking at a relating hexagram still works here: imagine how the primary hexagram is… Read more »57, Subtly Penetrating, as relating hexagram
Hexagram 63, Ji ji, Already Crossing, is followed by Wei ji, Not Yet Crossing. Wei 未, ‘not yet’, is the opposite of ji 既, ‘already’. It occurs three times in the Yi in addition to its appearance in Hexagram 64: in the Oracle of Hexagram 48, and in 49.5 and… Read more »Not yet
This was going to be a simple post A worried client emailed me. He’d just been organising his journal, listing all his readings, and found there were a whole lot more on one topic than he’d thought. He said he was wondering if he’d become ‘a bit of a Yi-aholic.’… Read more »Too many readings?
Hexagram 47, Confined Confining is de’s test. It is hard-pressed, and wholly connected. It is used to lessen resentment. Wilhelm/Baynes calls 47 the ‘test of character’, which is memorable – but the meaning isn’t so much what ‘puts you to the test’ as the test that identifies something by differentiating… Read more »‘Character’ hexagrams: Confined, the Well, and Subtly Penetrating
Ni, 泥 , simply means ‘mud’ – soil, putty, to daub with plaster. It’s the clay that was baked into bricks and tiles. I normally look for how a word is used in the Book of Songs, or the Book of Rites, but ni doesn’t appear anywhere in either of… Read more »Nothing quite like it
