Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Yesterday was my birthday, and - as I always do - I cast a reading asking for guidance for the coming year. I’d just spent a couple of days reviewing the previous year: the plans I’d had, goals I’d set… and forgotten all about, or missed utterly… . It wasn’t exactly heartening (and nor was [...]

I asked,
“What is it about Yi that makes it precious as a spiritual ‘tool’?”
And received Hexagram 15, Integrity, with no changing lines.
This is one of those answers that gives me an immediate glow of recognition - and then unwraps like a gift, with more and more shining layers.
The name of Hexagram 15 is made [...]

intuition is an immediate perception. Analysis brings you to a conclusion step by step; intuition happens straight away. I Ching interpretation involves a mixture of intuition and analysis (which in turn creates more food for the intuition), but it all hangs on a single moment of intuition, when you perceive the connection between question and answer.

My husband and I go out on the back lawn when the weather’s good enough, and play badminton.
Let’s see… David’s six feet tall, lean and wiry and a natural athlete; I’m five foot two, about two stone overweight, and hopelessly uncoordinated - you know the one who can’t even catch a netball and who’s always [...]

One of the trickier aspects of interpreting an I Ching reading has to be working out what scale the oracle’s using. By which I mean, if it says ‘good fortune’, is that a lottery win or a pot of jam in the raffle (for instance)? Does ‘misfortune’ mean mild inconvenience, or threat to life and [...]

My personal ‘hexagram for the week’: 23, unchanging.
Eek.
Not so long ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. I know many people are nervous of the ‘bad’ hexagrams and anticipate disasters whenever they receive hexagrams 23, 44 or 12 (the three most often labelled as ‘bad’). I’ve never believed in this easy categorisation. The [...]

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 hexagram 20, Seeing, you have steadily [...]