Quick Insights

When you don’t have days to spare

The Yijing is an extraordinary oracle of bottomless complexity. However much we learn, we’re always beginners; there’s always more to understand, always more dimensions to a reading, always more gifts to unwrap. You could easily spend days (or weeks, or months) diving into a single reading, and several lifetimes exploring the breadth and depth of the Yijing, and it would all be time well-spent.

Except that you often don’t have the time in the first place.

‘Quick Insight’ courses

I started creating these courses because I never want anyone who needs Yi’s help to feel they don’t have time.

They’re not about how to understand a whole reading from first principles. (For that, I recommend you begin with the Yijing Foundations Course.) Instead, they offer fresh ways to engage with a reading so it can help you, quickly, without having to learn acres of background information first.

Each course is short and simple, with brief videos and a pdf version for reference.

Shadow hexagrams

The Shadow hexagram is a simple interpretive tool, first described by Stephen Karcher, that shows you exactly how not to think about your question. Since, more often than not, this turns out to describe exactly how you naturally conceive of it, the Shadow is a great way to get unstuck.

The Shadow hexagrams course is available to Change Circle members.

Paired hexagrams

The hexagrams of the Yijing come in pairs – 1 with 2, 3 with 4 and so on – because these are its basic building blocks. They show you what your reading’s saying, through both context (the bigger picture of the two hexagrams together) and contrast.

(Aside: Yi works through contrasts and contexts on a lot of levels. There are grand patterns of contrasts, and great sweeping arcs of context, and the more you look, the more you’ll see. In other words, a full study of all Yi’s contrasts and contexts is a giant rabbit hole, one of those wonderful lifetime undertakings. But hexagram pairs are different. They’re baked into the Sequence, part of the core of the book, because they’re simple to grasp and immediately helpful.)

The Paired hexagrams course is available to Change Circle members.

Change Patterns

Change patterns are hexagrams that represent only which lines are changing in your reading. They give you a useful overview of what the change is about and how you can respond to it – especially welcome when you have multiple moving lines.

The Change Patterns course is available to Change Circle members.