Twelve Life Stages十二運星

The Twelve Life Stages describe where the Day Master's strength stands as it passes through the twelve branches, borrowing the arc of a human life. The cycle opens with Sprouting, grows through Bathing, Dressing, Standing, and Peak, then passes Easing, Resting, Stilling, and Storing before Severing, Conceiving, and Nurturing prepare a fresh start. It retells, like a story, how the force of Wood or Fire rises and falls with the seasons. Even where a traditional stage name borrows words for falling ill or passing away, this service does not link it to health or events. Some English books call the set the Twelve Growth Phases.

• 十ten (Korean reading: sip)
• 二two (Korean reading: i)
• 運to move along (Korean reading: un)
• 星star, heavenly body (Korean reading: seong)

Stars moving through twelve steps: a strength that keeps going round.

Each stage comes from looking up the pairing of Day Master and branch in a fixed table. Stems of yang polarity count forward from Sprouting through the branches and yin stems count backward, a method known as yang forward, yin reverse. Earth stems get no table of their own: yang Earth shares the table of yang Fire, and yin Earth that of yin Fire, under the rule that Earth follows Fire. Hidden Stems play no part here.

Your results put one stage name on each of the year, month, day, and hour branches, and one on each Luck Pillar branch. Several Standing or Peak stages lean toward a Day Master able to stand on its own, and several Resting, Stilling, or Storing stages toward saving strength and drawing it inward. A stage that looks low on strength can also point to deep thought or long endurance. It remains a secondary gauge, and this one measure does not settle how strong a chart is.

For a 甲 (Jia) Day Master, 亥 (Hai) brings Sprouting, 卯 (Mao) brings Peak, and 午 (Wu) brings Stilling. The yin stem 乙 (Yi) runs the opposite way, so 午 is where its Sprouting falls.

• A common idea

  A Stilling or Storing stage in the chart brings unwelcome events.

  How we read it

  That worry comes from readings wary of the low-strength stages, but this service does not use any stage as advance notice of events. It reads Stilling as a time to halt and sort things out, and Storing as a time to gather in and keep.

If yin stems turned in the same direction as yang ones, a 乙 (Yi) Day Master would find Sprouting at 亥 (Hai), the same seat as 甲 (Jia). Under the method that pairs Earth with Water, 戊 (Wu) would find Sprouting at 申 (Shen), as 壬 (Ren) does. This service defaults to yang forward, yin reverse and to the rule that Earth follows Fire.