3 Green WoodThe nine starsNine Star Ki 九星気学

Three Jade Wood sits due east, on the Zhen trigram — thunder. Zhen is movement in the I Ching: sudden, loud, splitting the quiet open. East is where the sun rises, the day's beginning. So Three Jade's subject is ignition and voice.

It shows up in you like this: you react fast and speak fast, often before it's fully formed; you can't stand dragging — a long meeting makes you physically restless; and your anger arrives quickly and clears quickly.

Running well, Three Jade is the sound that starts things: when a group is stuck, the sentence you say is the beginning. There's no substitute for that role. Blocked, it goes two ways. One is thunder without rain — more said than done. The other is aiming the impatience at people, so what you lit runs away from you. Three Jade's practice is turning speech into a first step: do one smallest thing immediately after saying it, and the sound becomes action.