Hilary Barrett, I Ching

This is just a speculative post, or a starting point for speculation… I’ve started thinking of the trigram li – fire and light – as being like eyes, particularly when it’s the inner trigram. Then sometimes it seems to look out at the outer trigram, and sometimes it seems to look through the outer trigram, [...]

There’s a deep humour to the last two hexagrams of the Yijing. 63: Already Across. Already Completed. Every line is in what was traditionally said to be its ‘right place’ – that is, the yang lines are in the odd-numbered positions, 1, 3 and 5, and yin lines sit quietly in the even-numbered places, 2, [...]

A thought about Hexagram 58, line 5… not yet completely confirmed by experience, just a thought… Hexagram 58 is Opening, Joy and Communicating: the human figure with the great mouth who seems to dance and sing. This post is about its fifth line – the peak and culmination of the hexagram, as a rule, and [...]

Do you cast a reading for the year? For many years now, I’ve cast mine on my birthday – I’m lucky to have a birthday in early December, so there’s plenty of time for the reading to start to sink in during the depths of winter. Winter is an utterly natural time for introspection: the [...]

One of the fascinating things about the structure of the Yijing is the way one hexagram in a pair (an odd-numbered hexagram with the even-numbered one that follows it, that is) can point to the other. It might contain it, or imply it, or give you a different perspective on it, like looking at the [...]