Hilary Barrett, I Ching

I have an email asking me for “some instruction on how to identify the past, the present and the future through I Ching reading. I would like to receive any useful comment relating to this topic. My intent is to have more confidence when doing a reading for myself.” Well, the first and easiest way [...]

Hexagram 20, line 5, has a cryptic brevity – ‘Seeing my own life. The noble one is without mistake.’ – and even more so when you consider that the sixth line differs from it by just one word: ‘Seeing their lives. The noble one is without mistake.’ As you move up through the lines of [...]

I’ve become aware recently of an emotional pattern that makes people reluctant to try a reading with the I Ching. These are open-minded people, interested in spiritual growth and self-knowledge. So they don’t dismiss the idea of divination unthinkingly, as something that obviously couldn’t work. Nor do they avoid it because it’s forbidden by their [...]

Jessica Morrell is the author of several books on writing, and here she’s branched out to create an I Ching for writers, specifically applying its imagery to their concerns. The book’s first few short chapters are introductory material. In a nutshell, this contains much insight into divination, interspersed with the occasional factual muddle (like the [...]

Here it is: T-shirt I Ching. Choose your hexagram, moving line and quotation, and wear it. I can see the attraction. The examples they offer include 24, 42 and 46, all very quotable. It’s easy to think of other lines that have that ‘wearable’ quality: how about 18.6, for a political edge, or 27.4 for [...]

That’s not a specially-contrived poetic title: I really did dream Yijing last night. I think the idea was a hexagram-by-hexagram Yijing of love. It’s natural (I dreamt) to experience love as having depths, to feel it as something inward. Hexagram 1′s expression of love is about heights – heaven above heaven, all space and light, [...]

One of the meanings of the “I” in “I Ching” is “easy” or “simple”. Given the smallest opening, it will speak to your heart, reconnect you with the deeper patterns and meanings of your life, and let you move with the flow instead of swimming doggedly upstream. But it doesn’t have to be that way. [...]