THE DAOIST OCCULT

What does 明白 mean in Mandarin?

明白 (míngbai) is the word for clarity in spoken Mandarin, and it doesn't mean bright the way a single character may suggest to an anglophone. It means to understand, to see a thing plainly, the moment insight comes to an otherwise occluded mind. 明 (míng) on its own describes light, sun and moon set side by side, the notion of solar and lunar illumination. 明白 takes that light and turns it into comprehension, adds 白 (bái), plain, clear, laid bare, and the two together describe light landing being received. The reception of light denotes relationality, clarity comes through an animated interplay between two or more parties.

This is the word I grew up hearing and speaking.

Spiritual bypassing, a term introduced by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, describes the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep unresolved emotional wounds, personal accountability, and the demands of being in relationships.

Spiritual bankruptcy is what happens when bypassing becomes the perspective of an entire self-concept, a system so complete it no longer needs to avoid the work because it has learned to perform the work instead, to the degree that it often does not recognize it in itself.

Spiritual practice in any serious tradition makes the demand that we become more truthful as a fruit of committed practice. The sacred is meant to implicate us, arouse accountability in our perspectives, behaviour and relationships, and dissolve the performed self rather than decorate it with more trophies.

Severance is a loss of felt obligation to something outside the individual self, re-animation understands spirit as relational rather than personal, and treats community as the intersection where accountability, and by extension repair and healing, gets to happen. Mimi Young discusses how the loss of animacy relates to the loss of intuition, and what to do to regain relationship.

Archetypes require a protagonist. Stories need a main character. Tarot, Western astrology, and other symbol-based divination systems are about identifying yourself at the centre of an image and read outward from there. And while this can produces insight, it also produces a ceiling, where the reading reflects your psychology back at you with permission and even indulgence.

How is the I Ching different from Tarot, astrology, or other oracles?

The I Ching is not primarily symbolic or intuitive. It is a structural oracle that maps how change actually unfolds. Rather than centering personal story or archetype, it describes the configuration of a situation and what that configuration tends to produce if it continues. This can be disorienting at first, because it pulls us out of the narrator’s seat and into a logic closer to mathematics and natural law. Like patterns found in weather, crystals, or cells, the I Ching works through binary relationships and line structures that exist independent of an over-emphasis of needing spirituality to make us “feel good”. Instead, it helps us understand.

Is it appropriate to study the I Ching as a non-Chinese person?

You do not need to be of Chinese ancestry to participate in the I Ching series. The I Ching is a classical text and living system that has traveled across cultures because it speaks to universal patterns of change and decision-making. What matters is how it is studied and from whom. As someone of Chinese heritage, I am explicitly inviting you into this work. This series is taught within a culturally grounded, lineage-aware framework that honours the I Ching’s origins rather than abstracting or diluting them. Participation is not about ancestry, but about respect, responsibility, and relational learning. This series welcomes those who engage with care, rigour, and integrity.

The reasons people find their way to a Shamanic Mediumship Reading with me are more varied than one may expect at first glance. If you have an occult practice, there are reasons here specific to you, too.

Cross roads and Decision-Making

You are at a turning point and need clarity on direction. Career, relationship, location, a life change that feels too vast to navigate with the information you currently have.

Ancestral and Spirit Contact

You want direct communication with beloved deceased humans and animals, ancestors, or other spirit beings. Grief may be part of it, but the desire is for continued relationship on different terms, to maintain or reopen the conversation.

What this means for the hexagrams

Every hexagram is a corner of that shape. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Yes the hexagrams are presented as symbols, but in reality, they not only take up space, they are space. A specific and unique position on a hypercubed map.

Each corner has exactly six neighbours. Those six neighbours are the six hexagrams you can reach by changing one line. One line changes and you have moved along a single edge to the immediately adjacent position. Two lines change and you are two edges away. Six lines change and you have crossed the entire diameter of the space, from one corner to the corner furthest from it.

A Tarot spread, a hexagram, a ceromancy reading should not be search engines returning results that match your query. When functioning correctly, they are indifferent to your query. That indifference is vitally important. Remove it, and what remains is an elaborate mirror that we false claim that our guides “told us”. 

What has eroded is something that is more fundamental than being open-minded, to have the ability to sit with what does not resemble you and your views. Collective accountability depends on that capacity. So does clear perception. When we lack that ability to be able to sit with non-sameness or discomfort, we have lost the condition that makes reception possible.

I am hungry, famished, even. At first I thought it was long Covid, and maybe it was, but then it blurred into something else, and though I was exhausted, it was more than that, and though I was grieving, it also wasn't only that, either. I was starving for a reprieve while the seams of my clothing were also bulging of irritability, the despair, the murderous impatience, the heat rising, the isolating shame, the madness, and also the clarity, oh the clarity!

My body has been strange to me, each day traversing a portion of an unmapped wilderness. The sleep that no longer reconstitutes me the way it used to. An emotional intensity and perceptual sharpness that my usual restraint keeps lidded. I am spiky in some places and softening in others. I am a practitioner of Chinese metaphysics. I read bodies and life trajectories through BaZi, the I Ching, the slower language of Daoist cosmology. I know how to sit with complexity without demanding resolution. And still, this transition has surprised me, its fed-up, pent-up, let's-fuck-it-up rage has made me question more times than I care to admit in writing, whether I am becoming the trope of the angry woman in midlife. Good lord, is this the archetype I am now becoming?

What surprised me more was how little I was offered, in the way of language, or willing company, for what was happening.

Perimenopause is not a symptom list or a meme. While it's true that sleep disruption, hot flashes, rotator cuff issues, bloating after salad have been my reality, the physical instability is mirroring something that goes considerably deeper, and that deeper territory is where I live. For me, early perimenopause arrived as a medical event and an identity crisis simultaneously, and the grief of it, and grief are not two separate conversations, it turns out, was as disorienting as anything physical. It is a terrain of questioning, reassessment, unsubscription, and negotiation in all aspects of my personhood and relations, and the terms seem to change often and with no warning. And underneath all of it, a kind of yearning I would not call nostalgia, because it points forward.

For many of us, we begin our journey in magic practice by engaging in attractant spells. Much like learning math, we learn addition before we learn subtraction.

Subtractive magic works by removing or reducing. While it can be about an unwanted pattern, an unwanted person’s influence or presence, a harmful policy, or something else that has grown beyond its life-giving proportion, the fundamental quality of this style of spell is about removing it one degree at a time, working with allies that are suited to the task.

A spell or magical working has two layers of communication. One is the petition itself, that is, what you are asking for. The other is the form the spell takes, and that shape or modelling tells the receiving spirit(s) and energies involved what kind of relationship you are proposing or have committed to.

In witchcraft rituals and spell work, this alignment between form and petition is one of the most overlooked reasons a working succeeds or falls short.

Earlier this spring, I sat down with Allison Audrey Weldon of Sangre de Fruta for a conversation about ritual, plant intelligence, and what it means to work with botanicals as beings rather than ingredients. We touched on the difference between routine and ritual, how scent moves through the body before the thinking mind can intercept it, and what I'm actually listening for when I pour tea for someone.

The full interview is published on the Sangre de Fruta journal.

Rachel Cusk wrote something I have returned to many times, about how children teach us to love and in doing so reveal, slowly, the full extent of what we ourselves were never given. I think about this often with Luca, and more so this spring, when the shape of our relationship is visibly changing and I am finding that what is being asked of me now requires something I was not taught either.

I’ve been sitting with the I Ching more than usual this spring, as I tend to do when I’m in a period that doesn’t have language yet. What keeps coming up is Hexagram 53, gradual progress, the image of geese crossing water, each one taking its place in sequence, as biology has directed them to do. The commentary says the student must come to the teacher, not the other way around. If we were to push the West’s hierarchical interpretation of student and teacher, I think about how much of my parenting has been the inverse of the hexagram, showing up unrequested with the thing I thought he needed, certain I knew what it was, and being met with the withering look that teenagers reserve for exactly this kind of blunder.

What is the definition of ritual? Ritual, at its core, is a set of actions performed in a specific sequence, within a defined container, that carries symbolic or sacred significance beyond the actions themselves. To define ritual accurately is to distinguish it from habit or routine, and that distinction lives in the orientation of the person performing it. Ritual is consciously directed toward something outside the ordinary, whether that is a deity, a spirit, a natural force, or a state of heightened attention. The ritual meaning of any practice is not located in the action itself but in the coherence of the container it is held within, and the awareness brought to the threshold each time it is crossed.