Tuesday June 6th 2006 04.34
Mong Chung – Grain in ear
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Tuesday June 6th 2006 04.34
Hour Day Month Year
metal fire wood fire
geng bing chia bing
yin yin wu xu
tiger tiger horse dog
Month: chia wu the Wood Horse.
Solar Fortnight: Mong Chung Grain in ear
Football Not Coming Home Just Yet
There is a flurry of excitement about the World Cup right now. Over the last few weeks several radio stations have asked me for predictions and what people should be doing with their front rooms while they watch. They’ll be asking me if Elvis is really on the moon next.
However….
These sorts of things are right on the frontier between magical and fatuous. A feng shui master can offer a serious answer to the question “Who will win?” but would generally leave the colour of the sofa you watch Sky Sport on to you. 70% of feng shui is external; you can place water to hold chi but you’ll need a JCB to build the mountain from which it descends.
Some however, for whom feng shui works on levels that a purist would disdain, are at ease with both questions. Anyway since this is a “Three” year and therefore the Year of the Foot, I’ll offer some predictions:
1. England will not win the World Cup. I think we will come second which is pretty respectable (although not so great in a Test Match).
As I predicted last week, Rooney will be back in time. Ours will be a relatively injury-free competition. We will be much more consistent than in previous tournaments. There should be little of the traditional agony of losing to nations that would struggle against Reading Seconds. Generally we will put away penalties. By the time of the Quarter Finals we will look like winners but we won’t win. I expect either the holders (Brazil) or the hosts (Germany) to do that. I expect one of these to eliminate England after we take an initial lead.
How do I arrive at this squirming,complaining hostage to fortune? The answer is I base it on the year pillars method of prediction. This year is bing xu, the year of the Fire Dog. Chinese Metaphysics and in particular prediction, is based on cycles. Years run in cycles of 60. That is to say that the same chi or energy recurs every 60 years and we can expect similar sorts of events in years of the same chi. A good example is that of the years of the Metal Snake ding si: 1941, the year of Pearl Harbour and 2001, the year of 9/11. In both years America was on the wrong end of an unprovoked attack which brought her into an unpopular war she had been explicitly staying out of. Politically I know this is simplistic but bear with me.
1966 was a Fire Horse year bing wu. There are Horse years every 12 years but there is not another Fire Horse until 2026 because as I said, they are 60 years apart. We put in a decent showing for instance in 2002 which was a Water Horse Year Ren Wu. Under certain circumstances the Water Horse becomes a Wood Horse and these circumstances arose in June and July of that year. Close.
This year June & July have some fire in them – there’s always plenty in June – but I doubt it’s quite enough.
So if you’re following me, I’m not expecting football to come home again until 2026 when the chi will again be represented like 1966 by the Fire Horse bing wu. That’s 60 years of hurt then, I’m afraid.
Nancy
Nancy’s teenage son wets the bed. Nancy is a single mother who is like the rest of us, doing her best. How do you keep your children safe, happy and whole and still have some sort of life for yourself?
There was some misunderstanding between her and her mother over the boy’s inheritance. The grandmother’s view was that the Nancy had stolen it and she told her grandson so – privately. So far so murky.
Nancy was clear she had done her best for the whole family under the circumstances; she also has a 10-year-old daughter. This would not be the first time a Building Society had been raided to keep a family afloat. Nonetheless I asked Nancy gently if she had asked him for forgiveness. The answer was “No.”
“How about it?” I suggested.
We placed water strategically outside and I advised her to lop the upper growth from a tree that was dangerously high at the Imperial Heaven Star tin sat ( Heaven Curse)
We also moved the aquarium that was against the wall at the foot of her son’s bed.
Joey Yap.
I’ve spent several days studying with Malaysian master Joey Yap this week. He has broken the Classics starting with the mediaeval Green Satchel of Grandmaster Yang, into structured learning. This is an astonishing achievement and I recommend him to any serious student. I will be writing this up in the Journal of the Feng Shui Society in the fullness.
One aside he made was remarkable. All feng shui of course derives from yin feng shui, that is burial planning. He was talking about the South East Asian practice of pre-burial whereby a (living) client purchases a perfectly located burial plot. The client then inters some nail-clippings and plucked hairs so as to receive the benefit of the chi while still able to enjoy it. Significantly cheaper than a perfectly-located urban home in Malaysia I imagine.
Who does this affect? Those who share dna with the nailclippings in proportion to how closely they are related. Now there is no Western scientific model that is going to begin to explain how nailclippings facing South can affect the fortunes of anybody but there is a committed logic to it. Just as there is none that can explain how it is that both homoeopathy and acupuncture work in their different ways.
But notice that while there is pressure to withdraw NHS funding from homoeopathy after recent tests found it ineffective, parallel tests have proved acupuncture which of course is derived from the same model as feng shui, to work as a drug-free anaesthetic.
Take all these ideas together and you have something very interesting.
Janine
I visited Janine this week. She is of the South African persuasion –a brittle sort of pioneer thing – waiting for her equally South African husband to come and join her over here. Everything in her house was too big; as if she were used to much more space. Which of course she was. Hampshire doesn’t stand comparison with the Serengeti. And she didn’t like her house. It was as if she had decided that any house was going to be small and unsatisfactory, that everything about England was poky and inefficient and unsatisfactory, so why bother choosing? I was able to perform some ancient feng shui procedures that. as they so often do when they’re supposed to, just clicked into place. I left her with a smile on her face which I hope will stay there.
Feng Shui and the Book of Changes
Just for good measure here is a simple procedure involving one of the Hexagrams from the Book.
This procedure is related to and derived from Hexagram Yuen Hom Feng Shui which is a skilled art in itself. Like all authentic Imperial feng shui, yuen hom is a very precise body of formulae, involving careful measurement and calculation. As I say this procedure is my own derivation and not part of that.
Each Hexagram belongs somewhere. Some are obviously favourable. Some not so obviously. The implications of some are totally changed if a particular line changes. And all need to be considered in context. Number 34 Da Zhuang Great Strength sounds perfect until you realise that it depicts the moment of maximum strength from which the only way is down. Feng, Number 55, Abundance has a similar resonance.
But Number 24 Fu The Return is pretty unambiguously positive. With its single yang (continuous) line at the foot and five yin (broken) lines at the top it signifies comebacks and resurgences. Appropriately, its location on the compass is in the North East where all things end and begin. In terms of the year its time is just as the days start to lengthen again after winter. Technically it’s in gen mountain between 45 and 51 degrees.
Because the chi travels up a Hexagram, the continuous line at the foot suggests the beginning of something, something substantial replacing the less substantial.
If return, recovery or comeback is your focus, place a small light Buddha indoors at this point on the compass. As you place it remember why. This is your house and your choice and you may choose exactly what you want as and when you want it. That is your business rather than mine. If there is magic in this you are putting it there.
Feedback is encouraged including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case.
Richard Ashworth
Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
Names have been changed to protect ..uh…me