Tuesday February 19th 2008 14.57
World ready for ba zi’s? A Nation holds its breath.
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Tuesday February 19th 2008 14.57
Hour Day Month Year
metal metal wood earth
xun ji chia mow
wei chou yin tze
sheep ox tiger rat
Month: chia yin the water Ox
Solar Fortnight: yu soi Rain water
World ready for ba zi’s? A Nation holds its breath.
This month our October 2007 interactive ba zi workshop is reviewed in Spirit & Destiny magazine. And very kind they are too. Magical, funny and scarily insightful, it says here.
A dozen or so people arrived on the Saturday morning and a similar number left with smiles on their faces on the Sunday night. In between we drafted their ba zi’s and each was invited to play with the information revealed so as to unstick lives stuck in their several ways: love, career, children, regret, loss, fear, upset and so on. Each was extraordinarily gracious with my sometimes uncomfortable glosses and each was remarkably supportive of the others. Many of the sharpest insights came from the floor. There were many tears and some weren’t even mine.
Newcomers may ask: “What is a ba zi when it’s at home?” Which is a fair question.
A ba zi is personal feng shui based on date of birth. It’s feng shui we carry about with us regardless of where we are, sometimes melodramatically called The Four Pillars of Destiny. It maps our likely choices and preferences and can be spookily accurate as to exactly how our lives have turned out. In a sense it’s a map of the path of our lives but with a major difference: once we see the map, we can change route.
If life is a series of choices, to identify those that have led us away from what we claim we want allows us to choose again. As they say, being stuck yesterday is no reason to insist on being stuck tomorrow.
Furthermore since it’s expressed in terms of too little or too much of each element, the solutions can be very simple. You need wood? Take exercise. Water? Go to bed later. And so on.
Next workshop is scheduled for the end of March; email for details or see What’s New on the Website.
The Wooden Horse
Sunday the 24th February was by some reckoning, the worst day this year so far.
If you’re thinking: “Well thanks for telling me now why everything went pear shaped last week,” you can relax (or not) as such a day, known as the sui po or Year Breaker recurs every 60 days. This is not wasted intelligence as the next one will be the 24th April. Don’t pick it for your vat return.
For train-spotters, such a day is composed of the opposite chi to the year; in other words, in an earth Rat year like 2008, it is a wooden Horse day which means that, not only are the Rat and Horse branches fighting but so are the earth and water stems. This is volatile, unfocused, distracting painful energy, a time when unnecessary fights may be picked and perfectly well-laid plans go awry.
Having been so busy I had been out of the loop, I did not know that on the wooden Horse day my daughter Jessie was rehearsing a tricky sword-fighting sequence for a stage play. Not great promo: feng shui man makes fatal timing gaffe.
Rapidly compensating, I gave her nuts-and-bolts advice about facing directions*, blessed her and cleared myself, her and insofar as the powers-that-be allow, the world, of any confusion about her well-being and let go. She completed the rehearsal without undue skewering, I am happy to report.
February being a wood Tiger month, was always going to be an odd one for me. A slightly-known writer of frothy faction invites me to her home to entrap me into her next volume. Another lady emails to ask how I justify my exorbitant prices when most of what I write is “complete nonsense.” You pay your money and you take your choice, I guess.
Still my diary which would be full 24/7 if we let it, suggests one or two people appreciate me and my choice is to go to Leicestershire where Stan is recruiting. He has hired me to sit in on the process. Although it’s less than a half-decent solicitor and only a little more than a good bricklayer, my daily rate is not negligible, so this is a serious statement. Stan’s own life is clearly a good deal more satisfying since we started work on his ba zi and initiated feng shui changes to his factory.
He is by the way, 50-ish, good-looking, prosperous, unattached and desperate to commit to a relationship. That is, he is single and, girls, he salsa-dances.
Stan’s is a niche business supplying components for classic cars. It makes money but it could make a lot more and it’s time he had a life. What he needs is a p.a. to free him up. He wants to sell the products into South America where they are apparently gagging for them and finally book himself a skiing trip.
There are four candidates for the job. These have been culled from a huge response to a newspaper ad. All are well qualified. My brief is first to screen their ba zi’s – now it’s making sense – aren’t you glad you read this far? Then to observe the interview process and comment or ask questions when the spirit moves me. It is not my role to select.
* To cut to the chase: avoid, above all facing North this year.
It’s a responsibility to use the ba zi information uh… responsibly. The Chinese is an extraordinarily informative model but a model nonetheless. Sometimes it is very precise, sometimes not. And to use it properly we have to both treat it as if it were an absolute and know that it is not. Dragons like me say, tend to share characteristics – they can be egotistical and demanding, since you asked – but human beings are complex and individual.
A ba zi will not tell us everything. Famously a Chinese feng shui master wrote a tightly-reasoned article in September 2000, explaining why Gore would win the Presidency. Choice, that is the human spirit or ren chi appears to take priority over everything.
Accordingly now and indeed as a general practice, I hold my judgement. Nothing is fixed. The only constant is change. And even this, as they say in Pirates of the Caribbean, is less law than guideline.
So I drive in with Stan from the Ramraider Hotel, Melton Mowbray, in his Ford Cosworth. He drives fast, an instinctive driver who always knows what the other traffic is doing. Like many skilled drivers, he doesn’t appear to look. He has raced competitively, he tells me, but ran out of sponsors and years to develop. We drive across the Leicestershire fields. His village like its neighbours spreads, I notice, outwards from the church with its pointed spire: far and away the highest point in the vicinity. You could navigate by spires. We arrive at his modest factory on a farm-turned-business park ? a mile or so outside the village. All you can see of the village is the spire.
I have calculated the Four Pillars (the chi of year, month, day and hour of birth) of each hopeful. This tells me not only which year animal they were born under (2008 is an earth Rat for instance) but also which month, day and hour animal; each of these in their way is equally informative.
Sometimes understanding a ba zi is no stretch at all: one I drew up was of a guy who was born in Surrey in early 1940 (which makes him a metal Dragon btw). Born to a sky full of German bombers and Hurricanes and Mosquitoes, he became an expert on military aviation. He knew about torque and lift and horsepower and actually owned a can opener that played a recording of a Supermarine Spitfire Merlin engine. This suggests a certain unhinging of course but it also illustrates the magic of the Dragon married with the respect for precision of the yang metal. Such personal information is recorded if you like, on the speedometer of our lives. And like a speedometer, we can run all four stem/branch combinations forward (and indeed back) to guess at someone’s likely choices, opportunities, strengths and weaknesses.
Stan’s year animal is a Snake. Snakes are born in the years 1938, 1953, 1965, 1977 or 1989 but also in the month of May, the late hours of the morning and on certain days you’d need a Chinese Ten Thousand Year Calendar* to identify.
I factor in lap yum or body element and a variety of esoteric glosses on the basic information. It’s remarkable what you can tell; this one may be especially assertive, this one more domestic. One is likelier to be married than another. This one may be hard to contain. But I must hold my peace until the facts emerge. I could get seriously in the way if I speak too soon.
* This is routine Chinese hyperbole. A typical one covers about 200 years.
What Stan seeks is someone who can handle everything while he plucks what Malcolm, his adviser, calls “low-hanging fruit” all over the world. There is a fortune to be made in the Czech Republic apparently but business has been so good and his presence so essential that he has not been able to get over there. Prague: just £39 by Easy Jet, by the way.
“Be careful what you ask for,” I say, “You may have to stop talking about picking up all this business and go out and do it. And get a holiday in too.”
Malcolm smiles: “And a life, maybe.”
The main thing I am seeking is candidates with year animals or branches that will cooperate with Stan. This cooperation is called sam he or Three Harmony.
“What am I looking for then?” he asks.
“A Rooster or an Ox or at a pinch, a Monkey.”
“Monkey, Rooster, Ox,” he repeats.
The reasons for this boil down to the cocktail of the five Chinese elements within each animal and I won’t stretch you with that right now.
“Not Pigs, probably not Tigers.”
“Not Pigs or Tigers,” he repeats in his methodical way. As it happens Stan has almost as much of the engineering precision of yang metal hidden away in his ba zi as the Spitfire can opener man. But you’d need his hour, day and month of birth to know that.
Stan is technically a water Snake or Snake on the Grass. There are a few Roosters and Oxen in his existing team and rather too many potentially antagonistic Pigs and Tigers. Certain animals suit certain buildings better than others also.
As we talk I learn that Stan’s heart is set on Karen, a beautiful young divorcee. She has two children and scars to heal. Like many on the rebound, the last thing she wants is a suitor who might be the real thing. So she is currently entwined with a bloke who wants no strings. Stan would kill for strings. But he can wait. He’s that sort of guy.
Before we go into the interview room, I take a call from Mark who is a civil servant with ambitions of elective office. The corridors of power are as open to wind and water as any others. Mark, mid-40’s fit and chiselled, also wants to settle down. He is unsure whether his current partner is the right one.
“Your call,” I say. “The way I hear it, most marriages were to the wrong person at the wrong time when we were on our way somewhere else entirely.”
“What about animals and elements and stuff?” he asks.
“We’ll work with those. In this case and at this moment, less important.”
This is the tao. It appears to settle him
Without sharing the information, I mark the candidates as to their probable qualities. One, a Dog, for instance, may get stuck on points of self-styled principle. Another is a Monkey who may work well with Stan but on her own terms. I factor in the weirder criteria while staying aware that an individual is an individual.
There follow two afternoons of interviews.
I take time between the interviews to fix the chi trail from the factory’s incoming Dragon, or main chi source which interestingly appears to be that church spire. I run a trail of pre-programmed crystals from church to factory. Some of the detail of the church suggests it is on a ley line, the long straight tracks discovered by Alfred Watkins, that crisscross our landscape: easy to see when the land is this flat and unmistakeable on an Ordinance Survey map..
Ley lines appear to be wells of yin energy. Great places for churches, not so great to live on. The Chinese abhor straight lines; they move chi too fast and it took me a few years to make the connection. Where there are no real mountains or rivers, these yin wells tend to be the source of the energy that the yang or living dwellings draw on. So when in keeping with Imperial feng shui, I am looking for the line from the incoming dragon, I often find the parish church.
“So the energy is coming from the church?”
“It’s a bit more complex than that but broadly yes.”
“Shall I put some crystals down myself?”
“Good idea.”
The four candidates are very different. Before each interview I brief Stan and Malcolm as to each’s probable characteristics. We meet the first. She is older, sane and reliable, a Mummy figure for Stan who remains boyish beyond his years. She is the Monkey. Monkeys are well….monkeys, mischievous often and unpredictable but also skilled and dextrous and with the sort of understanding of things mechanical that rotates Stan’s piston rings. I hold my tongue.
The second applicant, Amy, is appropriately qualified, smart and capable. She has experience of freeing up a sales-oriented boss. But there is a mystery in her cv. Why did she give notice to the employers to whom she had been devoted for several years on the strength of a verbal promise (which evaporated) from a competitor? Skull duggery and/or affairs of the heart is what the ba zi says.
For the first time I butt in:
“You’re clearly a very smart woman and these actions don’t look smart. What was your relationship with the person who made this offer?”
“Relationship?” she responds, involuntarily ruffled.
The word “relationship” does a lot of work: it can mean all sorts of things but one meaning is more emotive than all the others. Does the mystery matter? Probably not if she’s the right candidate.
The third one, Daphne appears to be looking to settle down. She is youngish, childless and recently married. As she leaves, Stan confides that she didn’t seem very dynamic. It’s true.
The fourth is likeable and competent but she does not seem to have the initiative we’ve seen in Amy. We all agree that Amy alone has what is required to cover Stan’s office while he forages.
“She may just call your bluff,” I say and he laughs.
“Just what I want.”
As it happens, Stan has identified a possible production manager locally. This is brilliant: he now has the skeleton of a plan for world domination. And the candidate is an Ox too. Malcolm suggests we let Daphne know how much we liked her and invite her to reapply as Amy’s assistant in six months if everything pans out. This is a very smart idea as well as a compassionate one.
Outside I turn on my Blackberry. There is a message from Terry. He is trying to decide whether to respond to a valentine card inviting him with biological innuendo to become romantically involved. I’m not sure I want to say much. Anyway what sort of man takes a week to decide about something like that?
“It’s a question of risk and reward,” I advise him.
“Teach me to ask questions I know the answer to,” he says.
Terry is single, late 30’s, serious spiritual agenda by the way; send him a card next year via me if you like. But seal it, for God’s sake. He’s doesn’t salsa dance to the best of my knowledge.
Stan’s plan has all fallen into place: Amy has the job on merit. There is a just a little horse-trading to do on salary. For a wheeling-dealing Snake this should be easy, particularly when the trade is with a Rooster, the Snake’s natural lieutenant. Amy, I can now reveal, is just such a Rooster seeking a Snake to work with.
Karen looks in on her way home from work. Stan’s eyes defocus for a moment. He is right, she is beautiful. They talk. She leaves.
“She was born in 1968. What animal is she?” Stan sighs.
A Monkey, I tell him. Softly, softly.
Richard Ashworth © 2008
Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.
My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:
Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books
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