A reading where we already knew the outcome – which really gives us a chance to learn from it! The reading’s about a family argument, and pausing to find a new way to respond, and the advice was Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing at lines 2 and 3 to 3, Sprouting:… Read more »With hindsight
In this episode, Katie – a psychotherapist in training – asks, “What do I most need to know right now?” Behind this question lies a worry that she ought to be doing more, or achieving faster or maybe starting a side business: she was wondering, she said, whether she ought… Read more »The Inner Truth of Waiting
Measuring Hexagram 60 is called Measuring, or Limits – not in the sense of imposing restrictions, but of knowing where the edges are, and discovering or negotiating what’s workable. The original concept is the knots and segments of bamboo, and hence all ways of dividing up something big into smaller… Read more »Hexagram 60 as relating hexagram
In my last post, I talked about how the Daxiang paints pictures of individual hexagrams, as a whole. In this one, I’d like to try a change of perspective, zooming in and zooming out, to see what comes into focus. Commentary on the lines The Image builds on and humanises… Read more »The genius of the Daxiang (part 2)
This post is for Liz, who commented, “Hi Hilary,Ok. Point blank – what does crossing the great river mean?” How does it feel? This is a better question to ask, because divination does not work by replacing images with what they mean. First, you use your imagination to get inside… Read more »What does ‘crossing the great river’ mean?
Ni, 泥 , simply means ‘mud’ – soil, putty, to daub with plaster. It’s the clay that was baked into bricks and tiles. I normally look for how a word is used in the Book of Songs, or the Book of Rites, but ni doesn’t appear anywhere in either of… Read more »Nothing quite like it
What are we Waiting for? Wilhelm says Hexagram 5 is about waiting for it to rain. SJ Marshall says it meant waiting for rain to stop. So too does Stephen Field: the hexagram name means ‘to stop for the rain’, but originally would probably have had the ‘water’ radical added… Read more »Hexagram 5, and rain-making (a rethink)
