Xun Palace

The palace layer of a chart is the ground a matter stands on — the surroundings the person asking is in, the space they live and work in, the compass direction, and the part of the body that answers to it. Xun holds the southeast and belongs to Wood. Its trigram is drawn with the base line broken and two solid lines above it, and what it takes its character from is wind: nothing here is met head-on. Wind looks for the gap, goes in through it, and fills a whole room a little at a time — the arrival is usually noticed only after the fact. The same softness that makes Xun impossible to shut out is what leaves it circling a decision long after the moment to make it has gone.

• Places and settings: long, narrow things, and things you pass through — roads (the narrow straight kind), defiles, passageways, corridors, cabling and pipework of every sort (drains, gas, mains water, heating), cable cars, lifts and conveyor belts; also grassland, bamboo groves, temples and monasteries, post offices, docks and airports.
• People and affairs: the eldest daughter; anyone who lives by a craft or a technical skill (skilled makers, technicians, designers, brokers in timber and building materials); anyone whose work runs on speaking and writing (teachers, instructors, negotiators, writers); and monks, nuns and those who practise cultivation and breathwork.
• The body: the breathing passages and the windpipe, the intestines and gullet, the gallbladder, and also the sinews and nerves, the thighs and upper arms, and the hair.
• The state it describes: entering slowly, spreading without anyone noticing. Xun advances by seeping rather than by striking — and by exactly the same token, it can sit on a decision for a very long time.

Two systems of body correspondence run side by side. One is the set of organs the trigram itself governs, which is the list given above. The other lays the human body over the nine palaces as a map, and in that system this cell stands for the left shoulder and arm. Settle which of the two is in use before taking a body part off a chart.

Nature

Sensitive and even-tempered, and quick to register a shift in mood or in what somebody actually means. Head-on conflict holds no appeal for the person involved; the softer route is the one that gets taken. Easy to be around, and weighing things up the entire time underneath.

Style

Nothing showy about it, and yet the thing keeps moving. Momentum is borrowed rather than manufactured, and matters get settled through conversation and adjustment instead of force. When a situation locks up, the instinct is to go looking for the crack to get in by.

Strength

Persuasion, and a talent for talking parties with opposed interests into a position they can share. Negotiation, advisory work, integration and management are the roles that fit the person involved — and the more the current is worked with rather than against, the further the influence carries.

Impression

Easy to talk to, mild, with no weight pressing down on the room — and still that soft insistence turns up everywhere. The lead is never claimed, yet the final call usually has a piece of this person in it, which is precisely why they get underrated.

Pitfall

A position sanded smooth for the sake of keeping things pleasant. Accommodating too far costs the person involved their own direction; a dislike of conflict turns into one concession after another; effort scatters across too many places at once. What is left at the end is the surroundings doing the steering.

Read for a dwelling, the Xun cell gives two things: how the whole house presents itself when Xun energy is in season and when it has fallen out of season, and which kinds of place outside the house belong to Xun.

• When the energy is strong: the house is finished with care, and the style of it is elegant.
• When the energy is weak: a house left standing out in wind and rain — broken walls and ruined stretches.
• Outside the house, what belongs to Xun is anything built to be passed through: pipework and cabling, defiles, passageways, long corridors, lifts, conveyor belts; along with post offices, temples and monasteries, grassland, bamboo groves and reed beds.

The strong-energy and weak-energy descriptions characterise the whole building, not one room inside it, and the "places" are types of environment out of doors. At the palace layer there is still no table matching a palace to a particular room indoors.

When the indicator lands in this palace, the direction you take is Southeast. This mapping is fixed and does not vary by matter.