Hilary Barrett, I Ching

‘Gradual advance. The woman marries. Good fortune. Constancy bears fruit.’ Hexagrams 53 and 54, Gradual Advance and the Marrying Maiden, are what Stephen Karcher calls ‘The Great Marriages’. So what does ‘marriage’ mean? To a large extent, that depends on your perspective: in old China, marriage for the man means opening his home to a [...]

The more closely I look at the Image – the Daxiang wing, I mean – the more I think whoever wrote it was a sage. One tiny example… you know how most of the hexagrams’ Images tell you what the ‘noble one’ would do? And then there are three that tell you about the prince, [...]

I’m sorry to go so quiet lately. I’ve been having wonderful experiences with Yi, and readings, and connections and shifts happening… and all to do with clients’ readings, so I can never share them here in public. (I’m very happy that I’m blessed with clients who share my joy in these things and laugh in [...]

I always enjoy finding someone writing about hexagrams without knowing it. Here is Zoë of ‘Essential Prose’ writing about Hexagram 38, Opposing. The way she is, in fact, talking about Hexagram 38 really leaps from the page: “…the things we dismiss or reject because they don’t fit inside our perception of how things work. Maybe we [...]

On my ‘day off’ a couple of weeks ago, I went and wandered round the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, going whereever I felt drawn. Presently I found myself up on the second floor, in front of a huge wooden carving of a seated Guan Yin. There she is in her perspex box, faded cracking wood [...]

The name of Hexagram 36, ming yi, is translated as ‘brightness hidden’ or ‘brightness wounded’. The two ideas blend together in readings: the light is hidden away to escape the danger of injury. The wealth of layers of association in this hexagram hint at a complex relationship of light and dark. ‘Yi’, ‘hidden’ or ‘wounded’, [...]

… all still from Harmen. Laws 5 and 6 – If you cling to the answer you will lose the solution. The symbolic replies from the Yijing can invite you to endless lingering in the field of metaphors, chewing on every possible piece of information that might or might not be meaningful to you. Many [...]