Saju - study of time
I began studying saju after the birth of my second son.
At the time I wasn’t trying to become a reader, and I wasn’t thinking about spiritual work. I was a mother trying to understand my children. I wanted to know how to support them. It was rooted in my desire to protect them, so I can prepare, and help them in life.
Saju is described as fortune telling. Instead it is a system that observes time. It studies seasons, cycles, of movement and how the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water can flow in relationship to each other, how they move and breathe.
What if I told you, that you are a beautiful flower that the universe, the spirits and ancestors have nurtured to bloom? I garden alot, and each plant has its requirements of care, like your saju chart.
Saju Palja, the four pillars and eight characters is not your identity, or your destiny. They are a record of conditions. In a nursery greenhouse, each plant having it’s own care card. Some require lots of sun, or shade, humidity, or care. I believe our saju works like that.
I learned because I wanted to understand my children’s charts. I learned their elements and how those elements interacted. I studied obsessively. I read everything I could find. The first book I worked from was Janet Shin’s Life’s Secrets: Learning the Four Pillars of Destiny. I read it until the book and pages, fell apart. After that I began studying bazi as well, since it shares the same elemental foundation and philosophy.
There is a saying in Korean shamanism that after a mudang is initiated, certain types of learning can become blocked. We say “it doesn’t enter.” Information that once was easy to memorize no longer stays in the mind. I didn’t understand this at the time, but I experienced it. I could study structures and symbolism, but memorizing rigid interpretations began to feel difficult and unnatural. It was too boxed in.
I started to hit issues with the meanings, definitions and interpretation of formation, stars and energies. I was told I had “the destiny of a man.” I was told I would be difficult for my husband (hahah). I was told my energies were too strong for a woman. I heard this all the time, and each time it pissed me off. The system itself made sense but not the rigid interpretations (for me).
A chart describes patterns, but it does not dictate our agency of choice. We must not forget our agency in how the energies flow through us, the choices and non-choices we make.
Saju, to me, is not fortune telling or destiny prediction. It is about understanding conditions and energy flows helping a person to navigate them instead of being defined by them.
Fire Horse 2026 has yin fire and yin earth in the hidden, that’s what I refer to as the heart/h, at its core its about our beliefs, our hearts and hearth.
