I met someone the other night who upon hearing that I practiced BaZi, asked me if it was difficult to live my life ruled by astrology. This was because I had been joking that I was surrounded by two Snakes that night and they were going to be the bane of my life seeing as I have a Pig in my chart. These two Snakes happen to be very good friends and drinking buddies.

One of the great misconceptions about BaZi is that it variously takes the surprise out of life, the joie de vivre as it were, and that one lives one life entirely bound by some mysterious notion about what people are and what they will be like.

BaZi does not stop anyone from making stupid mistakes. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely subcontract mistakes out of your life, simply by using BaZi. BaZi is only 30% after all. The other 30% that is man luck (aka, fuck ups that you do to yourself) is the reason why crap hits the fan as it were. Add that to the wrong flying star in the wrong palace or some other feng-shui related factor that could alter the balance, and wallah – you have mistake/screw up/error/blue screen of death. BaZi explains our mistakes to us, in the hopes that by understanding what went wrong, we can avoid the error of our ways. And even then…it is not infallible.

So by the same extension, BaZi does not take the fun or unpredictability or spontaneity out of life. BaZi suggests that a particular action may carry certain consequences. This level of suggestion varies from 100% (FOR SURE THIS WILL HAPPEN) to as low as 50% (COULD BE X or Y, depending on what you do and how you react to A, B and C). Whether it is with the low probability scenarios (the 50-50 situations) or the FOR SURE scenarios (100% guaranteed outcome will be bad), there remains some experience to be gained from it. The problem is human beings define fun, spontaneity and unpredictability in an optimistic context but never in a negative context. Meaning, everyone wants spontaneity and unpredictability to yield experiences that are positive, but absolutely no one wants to have the ‘negative’ great experiences that arise out of spontaneity and unpredictability! You can’t have it both ways unfortunately.

It is my rule as a consultant never to tell a client what to do. As I often say, I am only here to advise and offer options and considerations. The final decision, the life that must be lived, is in the hands of the client. To put it in a more down to earth fashion, everyone is free to step in dog poo, as long as they don’t mind cleaning their shoes. My role is merely to offer options and probability of success/failure of a particular course of action.  The client’s role is to decide what matter to them, but more importantly, to be able to make something of whatever their choice is. Oftentimes, that means living with a bad decision or being able to move past a bad decision or simply accepting that bad decisions have lasting consequences. The key is not to be ruled or owned by those decisions, but instead, try to “rewrite the narrative” (as political analysts are so fond of saying).

The other misconception about utilising BaZi is that it means you cut certain people out of your life or you decide who are your friends based on their charts. Again, this is not the case. One makes friends with all sorts of people in life although our individual BaZi will invariably dictate a preference or a pattern of that preference. I don’t decide not to connect with someone because of their chart. BUT, I will modify how I work with someone or change my expectations of the person, or simply be more tolerate of certain behavioral traits by virtue of knowing their BaZi. One can be friends with the greatest rogue in the universe, without necessarily compromising on the knowledge that they are a rogue!

So on the contrary, BaZi does not take the fun out of life or the unpredictability. Rather, it simply converts the challenges of life from being about stumbling into a situation half arsed, to focusing on how to manage it proactively or to come up with solutions.  It is about being in control of a situation, even when it is out of your control. It adds a layer of explanation to those things which we often assume to be inexplicable, ranging from the Law of Attraction to Sod’s Law. That doesn’t mean we don’t have stuff to figure out when it comes to life – there are still decisions to be made. But it affords it some insight into what MIGHT happen if we decide one way or another, in the hopes that we will make a decision we can live with. Because really, it all comes down to that – living with the choices one has made.