Thursday November 8th 2007 03.32

Streaking Bacon

Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Thursday November 8th 2007 03.32

Hour	Day	Month	Year
metal	fire	metal	fire
gung	bing	tsun	ding
yan	wu	hai	hai
tiger	horse	pig	pig

Month:	tsun hai	the metal pig
Solar Fortnight:	lap dung	Winter Begins

Streaking Bacon

Pig month in a Pig year; pigs all over the place.

Last week I was surveying in Tamworth which is famous for the Tamworth Two. If you don’t recall, these desperadoes were not political prisoners but a pair of pigs who escaped from a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse. One, apparently already christened Butch Cassidy, had manoeuvered himself to the back as if he knew where he was going and how to get out, He was followed by a smaller, younger porker, inevitably dubbed the Sundance Pig. They were smart enough to stay at large for weeks and when they were finally caught were spared the slaughterhouse and for all I know are living yet. My son Thom then 13 or so, was so touched that he became a vegetarian.

The Pig in the Chinese canon is reckoned to be especially versatile. Don’t get cocky if you were born in 1983 (like Thom) 1971, 1959 or 1947 however; the main reason for this reputation is that the pig can be cooked so many different ways and that no part of its body whether hair for rope and musical instruments or feet for adhesives, need be wasted.

The traditional Chinese character for a house is a pig under a roof. It’s a little-known fact that the Chinese invented central heating: underfloor pigs. In their unsentimental way the Chinese would house the living pork under the house from where the warmth would of course permeate upwards. Scraps would go down to the pigs and every now and then a volunteer would be required for dinner. Anyone who was born between the hours of 9 and 11pm or at any time during the month of November is part Pig and should take take this as a reminder of the hidden price of versatility.

Business thinker, mogul, true original and all round inspiration David, who you will recall, following some powerful ba zi* work and a survey in June, showed me how to get onto the M4 from Membury Services, has sold his business for a great deal of money this month. And he hasn’t even got the water fountains in yet. Movie mogul Paul has found himself with three big opportunities lining up to embarrass him with riches just as his swimming pool is finally filling up this week. Just as well as it’s taken him over two years to work up the nerve to put it in. A big move of course. And young Tyrah down in Bristol has got her dream job even if reality came with a bit of a jolt. And following the ba zi workshop last weekend, one young man who had been relationship-free for close to two years found himself a new woman.

As it said on the packet: Radical Change in a Day or Less.

By the time you read this I will be in Singapore for the IFSC Feng Shui Conference. It’s all been a bit of a rush with my press pass only coming through this week. It is thanks to the legendary Derek Walters that I got it at all. And I still have to renew my passport.

Which is part of why I’m way behind with these diaries; the last one was in September which is disgraceful. Like you, I expect, I’ve been so busy but I’m never impressed with that. Life is not a competition to get the most things done. On the other hand if we are to leave it better than we found it we may feel the need to be alert. My excuses include that I’ve been editing the professional journal as well as travelling all over the place surveying, often with half a-dozen ba zi’s on my knee and then last weekend we held the aforesaid first ever ba zi workshop.

The ba zi of course, is sometimes called a Chinese Horoscope and sometimes (rather melodramatically) the Four Pillars of Destiny which is actually the title of a rather wonderful book by Master Raymond Lo who will also be in Singapore this weekend.

The workshop which from my standpoint consisted of drafting and interpreting a dozen ba zis simultaneously, was remarkable. There were twelve of us plus my son Jaime, my wife Sheila and my daughter Jessie, who were dealing with admin and logistics. I told the participants that it was probably the only time they’d have the eleventh principal in a Hollywood movie waiting on them hand and foot.

As it was a dummy run, the format was experimental. There were technical modules each morning to instruct those who wanted to know how to draft a ba zi followed by sessions of filling in all the boxes Then each day consisted of examination of the ba zis as they grew before our eyes. It was extraordinary to see how powerful it was to reflect on the relationship say between the Day and Year Pillars that is the stem and branch (or animal) of the Day and Year of birth.

The Day stem – that is the chi on the precise day we were born – is the focus of the ba zi. Some call it the self or day master. The Year on the other hand represents ancestral patterns, sometimes literally the father.

* New Readers Start Here: A ba zi is personal feng shui based on moment and date of birth. Because like Chinese years, months and days and indeed hours run in cycles of sixty, each of our moments of birth boast a unique chi signature. Given the starting pattern (which is laid out in pillars like the date at the top of this diary.) we can decipher what the chi might be like at any point between then and now and indeed in the future. This can lead to remarkable insights about our character, potential, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. Now read on.
So how they relate is very telling: a yang metal Father with a yin metal Self, speaks for instance of being in the parental shadow whereas a yin metal self with a yang wood Father is pin kun (or the Seven Killings in Joey Yap’s terminology), sometimes called the poison tongue. I do this every day of course but it was humbling to see the participants themselves armed with just a little bit of knowledge, literally picking out the outline of their own relationship with their parents simply by examining these characters. To see a relationship you’ve lived with all your life as a simple elemental combination can be very sobering. It was an extraordinary experience that got more extraordinary as the weekend wore on.

When I first came across the Chinese stuff in the early 90’s, I had spent more than a decade on and off sitting in transformational workshops seeing life change take place as people became aware of how they experienced the world and thus how to change their view and their lives. If we can choose, we can unchoose. In a flash of clarity (that took about three years) I realised I had come across possibly the most powerful tool for transformation devised by human beings. Here was a model with its own vocabulary and 4,000 years of diagnostic records. It was then (1995?) that I envisaged workshops using this model wherein rapid positive radical change could become commonplace.

I am barred by the confidentiality agreement we all signed to not discuss each other’s process outside the workshop but you should be on the next one if you find this as gripping as I do.Suffice it to say that we dealt with the pillars that relate to relationship, to career, to children, to past and present and probable future. As they used to say in The Sunday People, “All human life is here.”

Last weekend was a dream made real. Now to do it on tv.

Until the next time – hopefully a solar fortnight from now – keep a smile on your lips, a song in your heart and a spring in your onion.

Richard Ashworth

Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..