Here’s an example reading of mine, showing how trigrams can cast more light on changing lines. The background I was contacted a while ago by someone (I’ll call her S) who wanted to invite me to participate in a project of hers. Actually, that’s not quite how it happened. S… Read more »Using trigrams in a reading
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
Integrating trigram imagery into a full reading is sometimes tricky: we don’t, after all, know what the trigrams represented to the people who first wrote the book. So attempting to justify text in terms of trigrams can get one tied up in all sorts of over-elaborate knots. However… those original… Read more »Drums in the lake
Each year on my birthday, I ask Yi for guidance for the coming year. Then over the course of the year I revisit the reading, finding guidance and gleaning understanding as I go. At least, such is the theory. Last year’s reading, cast on 7th December 2015, was Hexagram 55,… Read more »Meeting the Yi lord
I imagine anyone who’s lived with Yi for a while has also got used to the idea that the world around them gives them signs, and often these signs resonate strongly with readings. I had a ‘big’ Hexagram 10 reading a few years ago, and saw tigers everywhere. (Pictures of… Read more »What is resonance?
Wouldn’t it be nice if I broke my excruciatingly long silence here with something in-depth and profoundly meaningful? Well… too bad… On a car journey today, I noticed – Gen, the mountain, meaning a barrier, stilling, stopping. Kan, chasms and flowing water,… Read more »Traffic lights are trigrams
It’s a worthwhile exercise to look through the Sequence of hexagrams and see how it occasionally uses trigrams to tell stories – not just in its larger landscapes, but on a small scale. I’ve written about this quite a few times before, but I just noticed one that I’d missed… Read more »A trigram sequence vignette
