New I Ching Video!

This is the new public commentary video on the I Ching's Hexagram #7, "the Army".

Note that members of the Yi Fa Society get access to additional videos and written materials on each hexagram. If you are interested in joining the society, please get in touch!

Join The Magician's I Ching; and the Yi Fa Society!

Only a couple of weeks ago, a blog entry informed that the Facebook group created in honor of The Magician's I Ching, but which is a general discussion group for all I Ching related subjects, had reached 1200 members.

Well, as of today the Magician's I Ching Facebook Group has well over 1300 members!  So if you haven't already joined, please consider joining!  It's free, and filled with interesting conversation and material related to the I Ching and I Ching studies.  It's open to people coming from western or eastern traditions.  It's very welcoming to newcomers to the I Ching, and you can get questions answered or useful advice. But it also has many very learned and highly experienced advanced students of the I Ching also, and if you are one of those people you'll find some excellent higher level discussion about some of the finer points of I Ching study.

While you're at it, please consider joining the Yi Fa Society.  Members of the Yi Fa Society also have a (secret) discussion group, and benefit from a complete and detailed training program for studying Yi Fa Qi Gong and the I Ching.   Members of the Yi Fa Society are taught additional Qi Gong and I Ching secrets that are not available anywhere public. At higher levels of membership, the advanced exercises of Yi Fa Qi Gong are taught, and students are provided large numbers of instructional materials (whole books', like "Secret Techniques of the I Ching", "Universal Yi Fa", "The Yi Dao", and "the Great Book of Yi Fa", among others) on how to deepen their work with Qi Gong and I Ching for self-transformation and the work of enlightenment.   Members of the Yi Fa Society can work personally with me to keep up their practice, to resolve problems in their practice, and to develop discipline and structure in their spiritual path.   Members also have the opportunity to have monthly Skype meetings with me for the same purpose.

Yi Fa Society membership is not free, but basic membership is on a monthly donation basis set by each student.


If you are interested in joining the Magician's I Ching Facebook group, just click on the link and join, and start reading and sharing with us!

If you are interested in joining the Yi Fa Society, please contact me, here or on Facebook.

On the Lineage of the Yi Fa Society

The lineage of this society begins with Swami Anand Nisarg, and then retroactively comes to include the likes of Zhu Xi, Shao Yong, Cheng Hao, Lu Dongbin, Dong Shongzhu, Zi Yi, and Kong Fuzi.

This is only the redacted list, of course, there are many other great luminaries and forgotten masters have retroactively joined the current of authority of the society.  Aleister Crowley was also offered a membership but being busy with the A.'.A.'. (another universal order but focused on western symbols, that otherwise has almost identical goals to the Yi Fa Society), he declined full involvement and took an honorary membership instead.

In spite of this remarkable list of incredible figures associated retroactively with the school, I would advise you that if what you are looking for is some kind of impressive traditional authenticity above all else, you should probably look elsewhere. Odds are that if you do, you will gladly find someone who will lie to you about how old their secret society is, and then you could happily join.

You might even be really lucky and find a school that has incontrovertible proof that it was founded centuries ago by some amazing but long since non-living Master, and then you could marvel at being a member of a society that may have once been worth something though almost certainly will not be today, after centuries of mismanagement by worthless 'lineage-holders'.

On the other hand, if what you want is to work in an authentic, modern, universal and living system of self-transformation with a breathing and walking teacher who has done it himself, the Yi Fa Society might be for you.

What is Involved in Applying for Yi Fa Society Membership, and the Benefits of Membership

The application process for becoming a Yi Fa Society member is just filling out a short questionnaire. Most of the questions in this form are used to understand the background and previous experience of the applicant, and their reasons for wanting to join.

There's usually only three reasons why someone wouldn't be accepted: if they didn't seem to have a serious interest in actually working the system, if they're interested in learning the system for totally wrong reasons, or if they were in a situation in their current moment where they wouldn't be able to have enough very basic stability in their life to fulfill the necessities of what it takes to practice effectively.

If you are a member of the Yi Fa Society, you get access to a secret group, where you will be taught additional material not available on this public blog or the Yi Fa Society Youtube Playlist. This includes more elaborate guidance to how to practice Yi Fa Qi Gong, secrets of the I Ching, guidance for meditations, other special techniques, and lots of files of teaching to help you in your advancement.

The group also provides you with the opportunity to interact with other members, and to  present your questions and experiences to me for help and advice. Members of the Yi Fa Society can write me any time (and are encouraged to do so AT LEAST once a month as a minimum) to let me know how they're doing and to keep them guided and motivated in their advancement.

This is at level 1.  There are 8 levels in total in the Yi Fa Society, and you have to fulfill certain work in order to move up to the next level each time (no one gets to go up just based on time served or special friendship or donations, or anything like that; this isn't about getting fancy titles, it's about learning how to master yourself and your inner being and outer world).

While level 1 is mainly about improving on the core and basic Yi Fa practices, from level 2 and up you get all kinds of new material including new and secret Qi Gong practices and I Ching secrets not available to the public.  You also receive training in techniques of advanced meditations (and what could be called 'magick') for working with your Qi, De and Gong (the three types of spiritual/alchemical forces you use in the Yi Fa system).  Each level works progressively in guiding you to self-transformation, an alchemical process to manifest your "Superior Individual" (as the I Ching calls it), or true nature.

In the Yi Fa society you work at your own pace, you can take it fast or slow, but the goal is to develop a regular and daily practice that can fit into your life and that serves as a foundation to more advanced work.  You are expected to be trying to keep working on this, and developing your discipline and virtue.

Membership in the Yi Fa Society requires that you give a monthly donation; the amount is your own choice, based on your own means and level of value you find in the work.

If you are interested in membership in the Yi Fa Society please contact me via private message on Facebook or G+.

The Curriculum of the Yi Fa Society, Level 2

Each level of the Yi Fa Society has its own curriculum, with new material presented for the student's growth, practice and study.  A previous entry already detailed the Curriculum of Level 1.

The Curriculum of Level 2, in brief, consists of the following points:

1. The Level 2 Yi Fa Qi Gong exercise. This is a secret exercise taught only to members of level 2 of the Yi Fa Society program.

2. "Transforming the Inferior Person": a contemplative practice, used by a level 2 student to address those parts of their persona that act as barriers to the Superior Individual, to re-integrate them and remove them as barriers.

3. The Universal Yi Fa Qi Gong: a 50 page secret text that acts as a guide to the theory and study of Yi Fa Qi Gong.

4. "The Three Offerings": devotional practice/ritual to further the development of Union.

5. Secret Techniques of the I Ching: secret methods to determine further insights into I Ching castings, including understanding the origins and further developments of aspects of the present casting, alternate resulting hexagrams, and concepts of Timing to determine duration of casting effects.

6. The Yi Dao: a 22 page text of commentaries on the study of the I Ching.


These advanced teachings are only available to those students who are members of the Yi Fa Society and complete the Level 1 curriculum.

If you are interested in membership in the Yi Fa Society, please contact me!

Who Should Join the Yi Fa Society?

The Yi Fa Society is not for everyone.  It is not meant to be a vast worldwide movement, it is not a religion, and it is not a mass-market product.

The Yi Fa Society is a systematic training program in self-transformation through a series of esoteric practices.  It's core practices are Qi Gong, the I Ching, and meditation itself (in a form that integrates body, mind and will). 

You do NOT have to already know a great deal, or even anything at all, about the I Ching or Qi Gong before becoming a member of the Yi Fa Society.  You do not even need to be specifically interested in these two, as much as you need to be very interested in transforming your being and expanding your consciousness. 

You need to have some slight inkling that there is more to your existence than what you currently define as your 'self', and want to unite more strongly with that thing that is vaster than 'you'.  You do not need to know what that greater thing is; in fact, it probably helps if you understand that you are not completely sure what it is, yet.

You need to have a little bit of discipline, and want to develop more of this especially in your spirituality.  The Yi Fa Society's curriculum is not an easy one; even though none of the practices are very hard, it requires that you test yourself through being able to make the commitment of doing them consistently.

You need to have a bit of a sense that your being has many different parts, and to want those parts to work together more harmoniously.

You need to have a sense that there is an experience that can be described as "Truth" or "Reality", and that you want to get that experience more often than you have thus far.

If this appeals to you, if you want to work in a system of spiritual discipline that will lead you to discover your true Will/Nature, and unlock the power in your own being, and challenge you in all levels of that being to grow more vast and whole; and if you are willing to place a high value on that and make the work of practicing it a priority, then the Yi Fa Society is definitely for you. 

Please contact me if you wish to apply.

Practicing Qi Gong While Ill

Contrary to those who "do not have time", there are also practitioners that find themselves in the difficult situation of being injured or unwell.  How should one approach the practice in these situations? On the one hand, Qi Gong is specifically beneficial to recovery from injury or ill-health, but ironically those conditions can sometimes make it feel very difficult to practice Qi Gong.

The following is a selection from the Level 2 text "The Universal Yi Fa Qi Gong", a special document exclusively for students of the Yi Fa Society that explains both basic and advanced concepts in Yi Fa Qi Gong practice. While many sections of that text are secret to Level 2 students (and above), there is nothing in the following section that prevents its public dissemination.

XLIII. Practicing While Ill

The practice of Qi Gong is generally beneficial to bodily health (although not always to the extent some try to claim). However, there will be times a practitioner may become ill as this is a natural consequence of life.

When ill (or injured) it may be difficult to keep up the standard discipline of Yi Fa Qi Gong practices. Whenever a practitioner is ill, they should still practice as much as they comfortably can, but without straining themselves or complicating their illness. If they are too unwell to continue the practice in full, they should only do those practices that are easy for them. If their movement is restricted due to injury or health complications, they should adapt the exercise so as not to cause themselves pain; however, they should only adjust the exercise movements as little as is necessary to avoid pain or discomfort. If a practitioner cannot stand or get out of bed due to their health issue, then they should focus their practice on Qi Breathing.

The Yi Fa Society is open to applications for membership. If you wish to join its training program, please contact me here, by email, or on Facebook.

"I Don't Have Time To Practice" and Other Nonsense

It is a simple reality of most spiritual practice that there are no serious short cuts.  Discipline is an essential virtue for growth.  Some sincere spiritual practices place very high demands on their practitioners, some place much lower demands, but all have in common that they require steady and regular practice (almost always daily practice, of at least a baseline of exercises) in order to be fruitful.

In the cases of Yi Fa Qi Gong, or of growth of understanding and development of skill with the I Ching, when students suggest to me that they are not making progress, the first thing I would ask of them is "are you practicing at least a little bit every day"?  There can be other reasons for failure in these practices, or it is also possible that a student may be in fact making progress but just doesn't feel as though they are, but the single most frequent cause of genuine lack of progress is a failure to practice with consistency and regularity.

And by far, the most common reason or excuse given for this failure is that the student "doesn't have enough time".  Some say it as though they truly wish they could have enough time, as though they would be dedicating hours of the day to practice, if only that were possible; but their schedules mean that they can't spare even enough of their time to do the most basic work.

But let's consider this for a moment:  in Yi Fa Qi Gong, the absolute most basic level of daily practice would involve the following:
-warm-up exercises
-Preliminary practices
-Level 1 "Earth" practice
-Qi Breathing

Of these, Qi Breathing does not need to be done at any set time.  Certainly, it is worthwhile to do a few minutes at least of standing meditation at the end of the Earth practice, or to do a few minutes of sitting practice. But if this was not possible (and even if it is possible and you do it) it is still very worthwhile to just do Qi Breathing throughout the day whenever you remember to. It doesn't have to be done apart from the rest of your activity. You can practice Qi Breathing all the time in just about any situation; while doing any number of other activities. All you have to do is breathe. If you didn't have time to even breathe, you would be dead.

As for the other three, it takes about 2-3 minutes total to do the suggested warm-ups. It takes about 4 minutes total to do the preliminaries, and it can take as little as 5 minutes to do the Earth practice. Certainly, it might be more preferable if you could spend 10 minutes or more doing the Earth practice, but it would be possible to do it in 5.

So the bare minimum daily practice of Yi Fa Qi Gong requires, in a conservative estimate, a total of 12 minutes of the day.  If you were to repeat the Earth exercise three more times in the day as is strongly recommended, this would still theoretically be possible to do in less than a half-hour total throughout the day.

Of course, different people have different kinds of commitment, some people have more time in their schedules than others. Sometimes schedules get disrupted, it isn't always possible to do all the practice one might wish to do in a day. Even a Qi Gong master could have days where, because of particularly busy activities, it might not be possible to do as much as one would feel is even a truly decent minimum of practice.  There may be a day here and there of absolute emergency where due to catastrophic circumstances one might not be able to practice at all. And fortunately, very occasionally missing an entire day of practice is not the end of the world.

But the idea that anyone couldn't do the minimum of practice for the most part, on a sufficiently regular basis to see the benefits and grow in the effects of daily practice, is essentially nonsense.

The situation is similar with the study of the I Ching.  The "bare minimum" of study would here be to select one hexagram, read the material of that hexagram (which in The Magician's I Ching rarely takes up more than one single page of text, and could likely be read in well under five minutes), and then try to make some effort to think about what you have read over the course of the day (which can be done at any number of moments you find convenient).

Once again, there is no possible way that the vast majority of practitioners could truly "not have enough time" to accomplish this, if the will to do it is there.

What is really happening when someone says "I don't have enough time to practice" is usually a different situation altogether: when a student says they don't have time to practice, what is really happening is that (whether they realize it or not) they are choosing not to make practice a sufficiently high priority in their life.

There are some spiritual practices which demand a very high prioritization.  Some schools require that a practitioner leave their entire life behind and live in a monastic environment, dedicating every hour of their life to the practice.  Others are less strenuous but still put huge demands and expect that the student will make their spiritual work the very first priority above every other thing in their life.

The work of the Yi Fa Society does not do this.  It comes from a tradition of the 'secret schools' which not only allowed but expected students to lead regular lives, and considered their experiences and activities in that regular life to be an important 'field' or environment in which to put into practice the teachings of the school.  Moreso even than most of these schools, the work of the Yi Fa Society has been crafted to be as easy as humanly possible to incorporate into one's life; that is, as easy as it was possible to make without rendering the practice ineffective.  For example, while many systems of Qi Gong require that a practitioner set aside a single long period in the day for practice purposes, Yi Fa Qi Gong is set up so that one can compartmentalize the practice to fit their own schedule. A student can do all the exercises listed above at once, or they can spread it out in little bits over the course of the day.

There is no practice that I could conceive of that could be easier to do regularly and still be capable of effectively allowing for a full flowering of awareness in the practitioner over time.

So in the context of the Yi Fa Society, what is a correct level of priority to put on daily practice?

Most people, in their lives, have a variety of commitments.  In some cases these commitments are in essence obligatory: things that must be done to maintain one's basic obligations in the world.  Others are in essence voluntary: things that one does as a routine that are not ultimately essential to life in the world.
Among the former are the things that, from the perspective of the Yi Fa Society, should be put in an order of priority above daily practice.  These include: whatever is necessary to keep up one's health, commitment to family (and wider commitments to community), and commitment to one's work and career (or studies).

The work of the Yi Fa Society is not merely a practice for health, or mental well-being, or a hobby. It is a spiritual practice for self-transformation, and in some sense this work, of progressing toward the manifestation of the Superior Individual and Enlightenment, is the most important thing any human being could engage in.  As explained above, this does not mean that one should abandon other essential commitments for the sake of the practice; if for no other reason than that how you fulfill these other commitments is also an essential part of applying the practice itself, vital for the development of Virtue and a genuine growth of Awareness.

But at the same time, the Yi Fa practice should not be treated frivolously.

One more thing: it has been recently reported that for the first time, the number of hours on average that people spend online has surpassed the amount of time people spend watching television.  The combined time on average of both of these activities is somewhere around six hours a day!

Now, there's nothing wrong with this, and no one is suggesting that a student should stop engaging in these or any other activities they find engaging, relaxing, or interesting. But if a student can take just a small percentage of the time they spend doing these things, or any number of other things they occupy their day with, and decide to make the practice a priority in that small amount of time, the rewards are enormous.

The practices of the Yi Fa Society should not be a burden. They are meant to enrich your life. In order to do this, they require that your become aware of the great value they offer, and give them just a small but appropriate level of priority in your life.   If on careful inspection, and understanding what this practice offers, you still did not feel that you could give that time, then recognize that a spiritual practice is not something you actually value (at least not now).

On the other hand, if you consider this and acknowledge the potential value of spiritual practice in your life, let that reflect in an appropriate level of dedication to the work.

Yi Fa Society Membership

There is a great deal of instructional material available to those who are not participating in the Yi Fa Society.  The Youtube video series provides instruction on the I Ching and Qi Gong.
There is also excellent instruction and discussion in the Magician's I Ching Facebook Group.

However, membership in the Yi Fa Society includes access to a special private group on Facebook where participants get considerably more information on the Yi Fa Qi Gong practice, on the I Ching, access to materials and writings that will not be made available anywhere else.  It likewise entitles members to personal interaction and instruction to assist their learning process and practice.

If you are finding the teaching on the I Ching and Yi Fa Qi Gong interesting and useful, please consider contacting me regarding membership in the Yi Fa Society.