ROQs, as you may know if you came to June’s ‘Connecting with Imagery’ workshop, are Really Obvious Questions. They’re the simplest, most child-like questions you can think of: what’s this? what do you do with one? what’s it like? These are the key to getting unstuck at pretty much any stage… Read more »The joy of ROQs and making sense
Following up on my last, long post with the example reading, I thought it might help to share this tiny excerpt from Yijing Foundations, where I explain how to imagine the structure of a reading without falling into the trap of pigeon-holing the second hexagram as ‘future’: Sign up for… Read more »How I imagine primary and relating
Hexagram 3 is the first hexagram where the two kinds of line mingle, and so it’s associated with the very beginnings of life. The Sequence says, ‘There is heaven and earth, and so the ten thousand things are born. Overflowing the space between heaven and earth, the ten thousand things.… Read more »Hexagram 3 and the very beginning
Some 11 years ago (!) I wrote about people telling me they didn’t have enough time for the I Ching, and the gifts of time it offers. Well… we haven’t got noticeably less busy since 2008, and I still hear this quite often. What distresses me most are the people… Read more »Still not enough time for the I Ching
The Yijing’s full of imagery. Even though the first impression when you open it is one of wall-to-wall text, it’s also a picture book. In last month’s ‘Connecting with Imagery’ workshop I put a reading on the screen and asked people to mark all the images they could see. They… Read more »Layer cake imagery (and Hexagram 53)
What are we Waiting for? Wilhelm says Hexagram 5 is about waiting for it to rain. SJ Marshall says it meant waiting for rain to stop. So too does Stephen Field: the hexagram name means ‘to stop for the rain’, but originally would probably have had the ‘water’ radical added… Read more »Hexagram 5, and rain-making (a rethink)
Thunderbolt and earthquake The name of Hexagram 51, zhen 震, means Shock, Quake, and encompasses both thunder and earthquake. (Nowadays there is a specific word for earthquake made of the components ‘earth’ and ‘zhen’.) The old character has two components: rain, and chen, the name of the fifth Earthly Branch in… Read more »Hexagram 51, Shock
