The Yang Wood Dragon 2024 Ritual Health Acupuncture & Herbalism for Da Yuan Circle
Happy Lunar New Year 2024!
What can we expect from the year?
presented by Dr. Anne Shelton Crute, LAc at Ritual Health for Da Yuan Circle
The Yang Wood Dragon Year features exciting, inspiring energy! Big displays! Ideas gain momentum quickly, and the year bursts in right away with very little transition period.
My teacher Liu Ming always punked the dragons, saying “You’ll do whatever you want, so why bother telling you about the year?!” This year, we may all have a bit of that feeling. I’ll summarize the qi qualities here, but this year I’m giving a free chat for Liu Ming’s foundation Da Yuan Circle, if you want to listen. Recording will be live soon! (Update: it’s live! Listen here!)
This Yang Wood Dragon, aka The Laughing Dragon, gives us a year of projects pushed quickly into motion, and new concepts rolled out with an innovative quality. The Yang Wood nature means this dragon has youthful, teenager energy! It wants big sweeping reforms but may lack the patience for analysis. The impetus for change is strong and will last far beyond this year, or even this 12-year cycle. Actions initiated now will grow and develop for many years and may not be fully understood until the year 2048. This relates to the immense size and gravity of the cycles of dragon energy.
There is an aspect of selfishness to dragon energy. Coupled with the erratic quality of the wood element, we may see half-baked, foolhardy attempts at visionary growth affecting large populations. Wood dragon energy may express as “fake it till you make it” on a large scale! “Now or never” is in. “Wait and see” is out. This is the emotional urgency of the wood element driving the immense-scale power of dragon energy as it seeks stability as earth element.
So, this year, exercise mental flexibility and embrace the new! At the same time, be sure to guard your energy. Do not expend yourself recklessly. Stay in tune with the seasons and keep up self-care, acupuncture, exercise, diet. There may be the temptation to overdo things, especially in the springtime.
Things will tend to feel very fast-paced and large. For some, it may seem like an unstoppable juggernaut. Caution in summer and autumn, pump the brakes. Winter can feel very expansive. Use the valuable opportunities between the seasons for recalibration.
This year’s annual quality has an eternal springtime feeling, yet with any springtime planting, some seeds that go in the ground this year will take and others will not! Either way, in the years to come we will likely notice a sharp division between approaches from before and after this time.
The year’s movements will simply not be confined to the single lunisolar year! Think of this year as an initiatory announcement of the wild ride we’ll be on for the next 60 years and more.
Each individual must decide how we engage the Wood Dragon energy. Auspices vary according to your animal, specific natal chart, and the progressions of your star array. Be conscious of your movements and conserve your energy. We must embrace the unabashed freshness of this year! Allow your mind to be flexible and embrace new concepts, even as you prioritize personal cultivation.
Next, we’ll discuss general auspices for the year!
General Auspices
Leadership
Whenever we are considering financial and political influence, we are looking at leadership patterns. There is an opportunity in Wood Dragon year to get beyond traditional ideas of leadership which is normally conceived as a structure culminating in a singular (usually white, male) leader.
Although the dragon image isn’t necessarily one of egalitarian, democratic group-mind, it does give us an opportunity to be visionary! We can think outside the box about our leadership issues. Let’s experience ourselves as so much more than we ever thought possible. Beautiful opportunities for rectifications of problematic injustices or leadership deficiencies may arise, if we can just take them!
Business/Politics
On a more mundane level: watch for big movements, big thinking, big projects. Efforts will not necessarily be well considered before implementation. It’s a year where “the perfect is the enemy of the good-enough.” Large populations will be affected by corporate and political changes.
In your personal business concerns, think carefully whether you are good at thinking on your feet and if you can withstand making investments of time and energy on rapidly changing terrain. This will be a great year for risk-taking for some, but risk will be tricky or catastrophic for others. Know your strengths and weaknesses. (Know your personal natal chart.)
Science/Tech
This is a year for Complexity Theory to shine. Same with Systems Thinking. Anywhere we see overlapping of different modalities: this is the future and it really becomes clear in the Wood Dragon Year. Tech will continue go nuts, as usual. Expect complications, failures concerning electricity/electrical tech/computers.
Education
Multidisciplinary solutions will be the best solutions in many arenas. In education, we will see that better subject-integration yields more creative problem-solving. More fun, more inspiration: we have better chances at a society that flourishes when we offer this to our students and young people.
Environment
Environmental management will absolutely require a multidisciplinary approach. There is no way around it. We’ve been seeing increasing challenges and this year will be no different. However, this is the first year that the world will be ready to accept that environmental remediation and solution-sourcing must needs be a primary topic of conversation.
Health Services
In healthcare, the best practices emerging in the years to come will have less emphasis on niche medicine. In a Wood Dragon year, the public will be ready to start to consider the limits to the ways in which a specialist can help you. Same with natural medicine. We’ll see that the Chinese doctor who succeeds will be the one who deeply understands the medical theory of their tradition, instead of acupuncturists with a narrow specialization and a bag of clever tricks. The latter just won’t be up to the task of meeting rapidly changing needs. Whatever the medicine—modern or ancient—those capable of holding a multifaceted view of health and factors influencing it in a holistic way will be well-equipped to serve our society through many seasons of health challenges.
Personal Health
It is important to pump the brakes as much as you can in this runaway year. Good luck with that, haha! Recognize health as a resource to manage, same as your pocketbook. See to self-care and supportive practices like napping and diet and acupuncture to get out ahead of issues which could balloon. Mental-emotional health is important in a volatile year like this one. Keep your cool and work on your anger. Caution overeating or emotional eating, especially later in the year. Use acupuncture (passive!) and conscious movement practice (active!) to attune to the smaller seasons, or solar qi nodes. Care for your liver, brain, and nervous system, which relate to wood element. Dragon years are years with a big appetite, so watch your Chinese medicine earth element spleen and stomach health: this is both a good year to heal digestive complains, but also a year where indulgence can catch up with you.
Relationships
Dragon qi is a bit selfish and self-absorbed. However, we’ve just come through a powerful rabbit year, which defined (ore redefined) our alliances. So, longer term relationships just had a good reset and deepening phase. Newer relationships are perfectly primed to see what’s next. Both seasoned and fresh relationships can use dragon year to vision together.
But these folks aside, Wood Dragon year is really the year for single people to shine! Wood Dragon might be when the world finally understands that single people are not broken! Single people: enjoy it! Nontraditional relationships will also have space to be recognized as just another thing that happens in our amazing, diverse world!
Spiritual Life
Dragon energy is big, so it’s a great way to connect with how much bigger you really are than you might often feel. If the outer world feels shiny in a dragon year, go take a good look at the inner world: spectacular! Enormous and visionary! Wood is about what is inspiring and motivating, but hidden. Wood dragon offers a chance to trace the rhythm of your daily sadhana all the way into a connection to something sweeping and much bigger than you.
Every year, but especially this one, don’t forget to express generosity as a practice. Do so consciously and regularly. Whether it is cleaning up your local wild space or serving soup. Put your body into it, not just your dollars.
Next we will look at the 12 Qi Profiles in relation to the year!
Auspices for the 12 Animals:
Rat +/+
Not a bad year! Rats aren’t freaked out by big energy. You’ll just break down this massive year into tiny pieces, bite by bite, same as every other barn!
Ox -/-
Nothing really stops you oxen from doing whatever it is already doing! Do you even notice the shift in qi? Lack of awareness of the need for occasional re-evaluation and course correction makes this a good year to lay low.
Tiger -/-
Your strength and intensity makes you want to match the big energy of the year. Don’t! Embrace your black stripe and rest instead. Better yet, meditate! The visionary quality of the dragon will inform you deeply in the inner dimension.
Rabbit +/-
A little overwhelming of a year for rabbit, but you just did a lot of work, so you’re in the right spot! Your intuition led you here: trust it!
Dragon +/+
So productive and amazing new prospects abound, but omg please calm down! Consider your conduct and reign things in so you don’t blow out. Other than that: sky’s the limit!
Snake - / +
Snake is often regarded as oppositional energy to dragon, but it’s more like the negative space. You snakes already understand enormous energy, but you don’t get what the commotion is about. Since you already like to hide in plain sign, it’s a perfect time to keep with that. Or better: retreat!
Horse +/+
Finally, a year for you! You’re in the barnyard, but you’re OP! In fact, you’re like a miniature dragon yourself with your magical speed, bright intelligence, and spirited energy. Able to be set to ordinary tasks, You can take the expansive vision of the dragon year and turn it to something beautiful and practical we all can enjoy!
Goat -/-
Conserve your energy. No big changes, ok? Dragon year resists group energy like yours. So, what’s been working will be fine this year. Keep your head down and listen to your friends.
Monkey + / +
Your flexibility and agility sure comes in handy this year! Use your clever and inventive tactics to make the most of the year. Use it to help other people, too!
Rooster + / -
Not the easiest, but since you’re always paying close attention, you’ll be able to make it work! Nothing gets past you!
Dog -/-
Dog, your love language is loyalty, which dragons don’t speak. This year will feel like foreign territory: far from the home and far from master’s side. Check your allegiances: are you being loyal to something unworthy of your dedication?
Pig + / +
When in doubt, chill out, right? Coming in as the last sign of the cycle, you’re not surprised by much. Adaptability means you can enjoy the world. Help others do the same!
Listen to the full recording of the live zoom talk here!
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