7th September 2004
…
Feng Shui Diaries
bak low: white dew
Solar fortnight beginning
Tuesday Sep 7th 2004 15.44
Hour Day Month Year
water earth water wood
yum gay quai gap
shen yuw yuw shen
monkey rooster rooster monkey
I’m often warned that a client – or more often their partner – is sceptical. Which I welcome. If what I’m saying won’t bear honest scrutiny of what value can it be?
So I was particularly pleased this week to be asked by a very old and sceptical friend to do a compatibility exercise for him. Had he at last found the love of his life?
Establishing compatibility can be very fiddly. First you draw up two ba zi’s: personal elements drawn from the exact moment of birth. These consist of what the Chinese call stems and branches. The date at the top of this page is expressed in stems and branches. As you can see, the branches are the Chinese animals. Each stem and branch is either yin or yang and belongs to an element.
Together stem and branch are called a pillar. Above are the four pillars of the late afternoon of the 7th September 2004.
If you have read just a little about feng shui, the odds are you know the animal sign you were born under. Few however know their stem. Are you a water Rabbit or a wood one? Even fewer have any idea of the stems and branches of their month, day or hour of birth.
A master would tend to identify your central characteristics via your day stem which of course is quite individual, rather than the year animal.
Once the ba zi’s were drawn up – several hours drafting – I could start to make some sense of them. It was pretty good news. All the three approaches I took said much the same thing. These two would get on. There was work for them to do but there was every chance of a long-term fulfilling relationship.
Feng shui is much like this. Whether you’re looking at a house, a date, a person or a potential couple, whichever approach you take the same picture tends to emerge. A house with the North West missing for instance will tend to lack oomph. The ba zi’s of the occupants will show a certain stuckness. The father may be absent for long periods. The road is likely to be a slow one and so on.
These ba zi’s said much the same thing whether I matched the pillars, the individual stems and branches or the relative Hexagrams of the I Ching. .
Last week someone asked me whereabouts to sit elephant figures.
The NorthWest is a candidate. An elephant on its side according to Master Peter Leung, helps a father to listen. Classically however, the elephant lives in the North East. Broadly this is the area for withdrawal, meditation and prayer. It belongs to the Trigram –Mountain: Stillness. As this area belongs to gan the youngest son, paying it attention will tend to settle the minds of the younger males in the house. Keeping the area still will tend to reduce hyperactivity elsewhere.
The Chinese character siang stands both for elephant and wisdom – as reflected in the Western tradition that elephants never forget – and also divination. In Hindi of course the elephant figure is ganesh, the favoured son.
Now the year progresses into the month of yin metal: yuw the Rooster. Interestingly, for the Chinese, the Rooster is the beast that serenades our sleep rather than the one that wakes us. The Rabbit is the early riser. So autumn arrives with the Rooster. The Rooster represents the nights drawing in, the lights going on and the windows closing. Now is the peak metal time of year. We can feel this in the changing of the light. Although it is hot the sun is lower and the shadows are where they should be.
The nature of metal is competitive. Positively this can signify excellence and increase: negatively disagreement. Yin metal can be argumentative, yang metal can be warlike. If I remind you that the monkey is metal too, you can see (above) that there is an awful lot of metal in today’s date. Now is a time for patience. Misunderstanding is just too easy.
The pillars of this afternoon, as the chi changes, can be used to divine the month to come. We can expect a more-than usual concentration of metal. To divine the events of September we can look at the way these characters interact. It is always the interaction of the elements that is meaningful.
Next time or the time after perhaps we will look at this more closely.
This autumn I am teaching:
I attach, technology permitting, a flyer for my One-Day Workshop in Godalming on Sunday 26th September and Friday evenings starting the 8th October. Do come and do circulate the flyers. There is a contact number on the flyers but if all fails do email me.
As usual, I apologise if you never wanted to read this in the first place. An email telling me just that will ensure that you never suffer my ramblings again. Otherwise, I’ll be in touch at the onset of the next Solar fortnight: chow fun, the Autumn Equinox.
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richard was featured in the July issue of Spirit & Destiny magazine and is on Channel Five’s Housebusters from September.