Hilary Barrett, I Ching

(This post is about the basics. If you know them already, you can skip this and seek out something more sophisticated.) ‘How important are the changing lines?’ Someone emailed me to ask that: his ‘I Ching’ book had taught him to read one hexagram with one changing line for every reading, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) he [...]

I like reading tarot blogs – there’s a whole supportive culture out there of readers, and the challenges they face are not so different from   those encountered by Yi people. For instance, here’s Brigit writing warmly and with a good dose of common sense about dealing with difficult clients. It’s actually odd how few [...]

When people ask me how they can become more fluent and confident with their readings, I always, predictably, say something about experience. Consulting with Yi is a relationship and a practice – not something you can learn how to do first, and then start doing it. You get to know hexagrams and lines when you [...]

This is a topic that came up in the I Ching Community with reference to weekly and annual readings – how people can be frightened by them, maybe scared into paralysis by a sinister-looking line – and it got me thinking about the scariness of readings in general. What is it that’s frightening about readings? [...]

Or annual readings, or readings for the season or even just for the day… all the readings where the question is just, ‘What do I need to be aware of for this period of time?’ or maybe just, ‘Advice?’ You might have some ongoing issues in mind – we usually have, after all – but [...]

Oh dear, oh dear. Another one – someone explaining how the Yijing is not just an oracle, but ‘so much more than that’. I do wish people would not say this without pausing for a moment to contemplate what an oracle is. A variation on this ‘just an oracle’ idea (…I think this post is [...]

I don’t do tarot readings, or know anything worth mentioning about tarot, but I still like reading what wise tarot people write. They seem to have a creative, flexible, improvisatory approach to divination that I think Yi people could learn something from. And a lot of the problems/ questions/ possibilities in tarot reading are things [...]