Year of the Yang Wood Dragon: Riding the Thunder
The new lunisolar cycle of 2024 ushers in the Yang Wood Dragon, also known as the Emerald or Thunder Dragon. Wood is associated with the color green, the season of spring, sunrise in the east, with rebirth, growth, and the inspiration that feeds continuous renewal. It encapsulates the reemergence of yang qi in springtime, when thunder and rainstorms clear the ground to propagate new growth. Yang wood, and thus thunder is the return of yang after the extreme yin of winter. Thunder is the name given to the inexplicable yet vigorous qi that spawns flowers to bloom and young plants to burst forth from the frost-laden soil. The return of yang also symbolizes the overturning and establishment of a new dynasty. Thunder is the exorcist, driving out the old, rousing and opening the fields of the new. When the Thunder Dragon emerges, it is awakening, frightening, shocking, flamboyant and awe-inspiring.
The Thunder Dragon endows us with the power to destroy old forms, surpass established boundaries, creating new connections and new paradigms. It is the energy of breakthrough - expanding to the tipping point, taking things to the extreme in order to bring about metamorphosis. The Thunder Dragon represents inexhaustible transformation and ruthless innovation. As the only “supernatural” animal in the zodiac, the Dragon’s enduring quality is its composite nature. With scales of a fish, the snout of a lizard, horns of a deer, and talons of an eagle, it is a vision of hybridity. It is a reminder that the self is not a fixed identity and that our true inner nature and the nature of the universe is the capacity to change.
In the zodiac sequence, the Dragon integrates the Wood animals of the zodiac - its predecessors the Tiger and Rabbit. Tiger represents big yang qi while Rabbit epitomizes small yin qi. After Tiger lunges forward in expansion, Rabbit contracts and pulls back to reconsider. Following this sequence, the Dragon broadens our view by not being stuck in either smallness or largeness, expressing the telescopic fluidity and continuity of the whole stream. Dragon delivers the concept of scale, the macro and micro belonging in an oceanic oneness that contains minuscule droplets as well as a tsunami. This immeasurable oneness is another aspect of Dragon’s composite and fractal nature. As the emperor’s insignia, the Dragon represents a single individual who holds the vision of an entire nation. The Dragon is one body that contains limitless bodies within it.
As such, one of the challenges in a Dragon year is to move beyond our personal biases in order to understand the broader picture, to grasp context and scale. There will be an impulse to react and rebound from the enormity of Dragon qi. Don’t try to manage Dragon’s boundlessness by being small. You will be very confused if you don’t participate in scaling up - meaning getting out of your ego-fixation, your partiality and biases, your small sense of self. Riding the Dragon requires grasping the multiplicity of bodies that make up who we are.
Dragon encourages us to live in our expansiveness and plurality, the many collective bodies we inhabit, such as your family body and the body of your friend groups. You also have an ethnic body, a linguistic body, you belong to bodies based on your occupation, where you live and even your diet. What books or TV shows moved you last year? There may be millions of people that resonate with it. Your favorite music also tells us a lot about your community body. If you practice martial arts, qigong or Chinese medicine, you have a large body of qi friends. If you are reading this forecast, you belong to a body of Chinese astrology and wisdom traditions. This tradition sees the self through the view of lineage, which is a vision of a compound self. It’s an understanding that we are just the wiggling living end of ten thousand dead people. This is another way to be huge - by acknowledging your ancestral body.
Understanding your expansiveness doesn’t mean squandering your energy by acting big. This year, proper management of Dragon’s exceptional inspiration, energy, and willpower will be of utmost importance. If you felt obstructed in 2023, you learned a very important lesson from the Rabbit year. The reluctance of Rabbit teaches us the inhibition that is a prerequisite for managing Dragon qi. Like a thunderstorm, impulsivity will be at an all time high, fueling inspiration as well as distractibility and recklessness. The likelihood of exhaustion, depletion, burnout and injury is very high, especially in the spring when yang qi is rising. If energy is squandered rather than conserved in spring, you will not be able to harvest the rewards of your hard work in summer and fall. The annual qi this year will feel like being in a thunderstorm, surrounded by bolts of lightning looking to ground.
So be the ground rather than the storm. Be reluctant to get tossed up. Go inwards and downwards to find what gives you stability. In volatile times, it’s not a privilege to be grounded and emanate stability - it’s a requirement. Remember your larger body. The web of interconnectivity means we all run on reciprocity. Be stable, not just for yourself but for the whole world. Be reluctant to get pulled into dynamics of polarization, and you can help all of us survive the Thunder Dragon year. If you start 2024 entrenched in divisiveness and antagonism, - I wish you good luck.
The Yijing hexagram associated with this year is 睽 kúi, which means opposition, contradiction, estrangement, diverging. This hexagram urges us to see the principles of duality - yin and yang as the building blocks of the universe, and that all phenomena are generated by their interaction. The creative tension that is inherent in opposition is what animates all things. From the cosmic to the political to the personal, it shows us that a single perspective is not enough to generate the best results. The principles of democracy rely on at least two oppositional sides in order to garner a diversity of views. Often, the most creative and innovative ideas are generated not from easy alliances but rather through the challenges of incorporating complexity and multiplicity.
Embodying Dragon’s broad sense of scale means we do not simply identify with the side of the conflict we are on, which by its myopic nature means we are operating from false certainties. We must learn to see beyond the conflict itself, to understand the dynamic of polarization we are participating in. This year will ask us, are we responding to conflict in a way that reinforces the very thing we are trying to fight against? Remember that the only way to win against your enemy is to not become them.
In the Rabbit year of 2023, the war that erupted on the world’s stage could not have been more rabbity. On October 7th, with Hamas’ attack on Israel, we saw small going after big. (In 2022 the year of the Tiger, we saw Russia, the big going after the small). Israel’s population is not large, but what it represents through its allies and military is very big. A sneak attack, taking hostages, running away - these are the strategies of the Rabbit. In times of peace, Rabbit excels at diplomacy. When it comes to revenge, no one has a meaner back-kick. The devastation in a Rabbit year fueled by retaliation is deeply traumatic. The tools of Rabbit include sabotage, deceit, vindictiveness, ruthlessness, and extreme emotional manipulation and polarization, which filled our media and airwaves. In a Dragon year as we scale up, the potential for breeding more extremism is exponential.
Reputations are made and broken in a Rabbit year, which leads us into the opportunity presented by Dragon, the symbol of the emperor. Rabbit shows us where the vacuums of leadership are, and the ways that current leadership doesn’t work. In a Thunder Dragon (and election) year, we not only change our leaders, but we can also shake up the paradigm of leadership itself. We have the opportunity to transform our relationship to leadership and take responsibility for the power we’ve been dispossessed of.
One way to do this is to imagine your role model and the qualities you hold in high esteem about them. For example, if your hero is Mahatma Gandhi, think of the characteristics that you admire about him and pull those attributes into your daily conduct. In this way, you become Gandhi walking around in the world. Don’t wait for a new Gandhi to emerge and become the next president. As it stands, the position of leadership itself corrupts. No matter how good the intentions of a candidate are, in order to run a successful campaign in our current political system, corruption is a prerequisite.
Almost all organized religions and political movements have convinced us that we need leaders to deliver us from our tragedies. Our political narrative is predicated on the same foundation as salvational Christianity, a narrative that deprives us of our personal power and responsibility. Our addiction to being saved results in compulsive cycles of replacement - replacing this leader for that one. Our current presidential nominees are a Horse and a Dog. What these characters have in common is they don’t know when to stop - when traumatized or depleted, they both will operate through compulsive behavior and activity. Not knowing when to retire is a deep psychosis. What would be a true alternative in both our political and spiritual domains is to ask for no intermediaries. No gods, no deities, no more looking for the next superstar to save us.
Some people have sufficient qi to get going, but insufficient qi for stopping. Initiation, action, and activity is meaningless if you don’t know when to stop. This is an indication that you don’t understand the value of what you do. Understanding value and meaning puts you in touch with sufficiency, knowing when something is enough. Throughout the world, the cries for ceasefire in 2023 was Rabbit’s voice to recall, recoil, stop, and reconsider. Did you learn Rabbit’s lesson last year? It was the call to find your own ceasefire. Knowing when to stop and when to say no is immensely important for managing Dragon’s endless potential to create and destroy.
Consider the idea that the significance of praying for peace rests not in the resolution of external circumstances but in your internal state of being. Praying for peace geopolitically does very little if you are ensconced in antagonism in your daily life. If we remove our intermediaries (who we are praying to), what we are left with is simply the state of peacefulness. This also applies if you dedicate your practice to the wellbeing of others. Your dedication is you, being in well-being. That is the meaning of living in true reciprocity and acknowledging the intrinsic power of our interconnectedness. The most effective way to bring peace and well-being into the world is to emanate it exactly from where you are right now.
There is an Israel and a Hamas in you. There is also a part of you that wants to be liberated from the tools of polarization - retaliation, othering, bitterness, hostility. It was Gandhi who said that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. So what would it mean to live with both eyes open, to see with a Dragon’s view of the world that is truly broad and inclusive? This year, grasp the vastness of this scale and pull it into your own conduct. Take responsibility to act with the generosity of an enormous conscience.
2024 is about living in pluralism. Whether its political or religious pluralism, the way to ride the Thunder Dragon is to scale up and identify with a multiplicity of inclusion and belonging. Pluralism seeks complexity rather than easy answers, it praises conflict and chaos as ingredients for creativity. It is the visceral, messy intimacy of connection, the tenderness and tension of being in touch and letting life touch you. This plurality of contact and togetherness doesn’t mean everyone gets along and thinks the same thing, but rather asks if our humanity is large enough to hold the pluralism of all of our differences.
Being a human being is much broader than we’ve been told to think. From our gut flora to our mitochondria, what makes us who we are is a chimerical amalgamation of a community of bodies. The truth of our nature is composite. We are here today because of millions of years of endless recombinations that are both earthly and celestial. The iron in our blood is the same iron in clay buried beneath the soil as well as the iron released during a supernova, becoming incorporated into the next generation of stars. The very blood coursing through our bodies is part of the same stream as the blood of the earth and the blood of star death and rebirth.
This year, gather in the multiplicity of groups you already belong to and find the others. The myth of individualism tells us we are a distinct and singular self and thus our impact and influence on the world is limited. Don’t be seduced by the story of your specialness, your small and separate body. Chinese legends say that some Dragons are so large that no one can ever see their head or tail. So don’t go looking for the head - the leader, for power and efficacy. Don’t go hunting for the tail - the desire to cut off, isolate and divide for the safety of your self-preservation. Recall the true body you are in, the continuous stream. In 2024, the way to avoid getting overwhelmed, pummeled and run over by the expansive power of the Thunder Dragon is to climb on top of its enormous body. From this position, you will learn to ride the tumultuous but exhilarating journey of the plural.