How to Choose Your Ideal Career Using Bazi Part 3: Case Study

A client came to us with an ordinary question: could we help him figure out which career path he should follow? Sure we could. But his circumstances were extraordinary.

He is a Singaporean expatriate living in Australia. Though he has qualifications for and experience in social work, he has been repeatedly advised to switch to the construction industry. He himself admitted feeling burned out by social work. Between construction and social work, he wanted to know which was suitable for him.

This should be a straightforward question, except for one complication:

He has elderly family members in Singapore.

More than just making money, he needed mobility. He needed the ability to return to Singapore to look after his family, and still make a living.

This is the crux of his question: which career path would give him this ability?

In our previous two posts, we discussed how we can use bazi to choose your ideal career. We covered the modern school, the traditional school, and the pros and cons of each approach. In this post, we will explore these concepts using this case study.

The client has one of the more unusual charts we’ve seen in our practice. His Day Master is Ren, born at the end of winter, on the cusp of spring. Ren has fire to the left, wood to the right, and they are all boxed in by a wall of earth. The image here is a pool of stagnant water contained in a deep clay bowl, unable to escape.

Indeed, all his adult life, the client felt trapped by circumstances. He has ambitions for himself, but the world seems to thwart him at every turn. He struggles just to get anything done—including getting the right job.

We see two Chen-Chou destruction combinations in his chart. This produces a sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with one’s current circumstances, leading to negative emotions such as aggression and stress. Small wonder that he feels trapped all the time.

There are three Seven Killings in his chart. It is his dominant mode of expression. Seven Killings represents drive and aggression—which in his case likely stems from a desire to break free from his current situation. Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tries, he will still feel trapped, because the dual Chen-Chou combinations are in his natal chart. They will stay with him throughout his life.

All this heavy earth absorbs and traps the client’s water. To balance his chart, he needs more water and metal elements. One could argue that he also needs wood to break through the earth—and modern masters classify social work as a wood career. However, since wood also depletes water, it is a wash—literally.

What kind of career advice would you offer him?

Using the modern school of bazi, we see that earth is the main qi in the hidden stem of his month pillar. Metal and water are the sub-qi. The quick and easy interpretation is that the client is well-suited for construction work, as it is an earth industry.

But given the chart’s extreme imbalance, as well as the client’s circumstances, the quick and easy approach isn’t going to cut it.

Construction is no doubt a lucrative career in Australia. In Singapore, however, most construction jobs are held by low-wage migrant workers. Singaporeans work as foremen, engineers, architects, contractors—in other words, skilled professionals or leaders.

The client could make a lot of money working in the construction field in Australia. But if he has to come back to Singapore, he might discover that he can’t land a job. He doesn’t have the education or qualifications to become a skilled professional. It is doubtful he would be able to become a foreman anytime soon. Therefore, he would either have to re-skill quickly, or find work in another industry.

There is also another danger: earth is the element that controls his day master. Construction is a high-risk industry, and the client already has three Seven Killings in his natal chart. Working in the construction industry could expose him to death and injury. With dependents to look after, this is not an ideal scenario.

When conducting a bazi reading, we must be mindful of the client’s circumstances. If all the client wants is a high-paying job and doesn’t mind the risk, construction would be a viable career path. But with this client’s specific circumstances, we can’t recommend construction.

Now we draw on the traditional school of bazi and look at the client’s hour pillar. We see a Ding-Wei pillar, with Wei falling into Death and Emptiness. Death and Emptiness means that the energy of the earthly branch is dispersed. Conventional thinking is that the energy is reduced by half. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In this formation, we see Ding falling into DE. When a fire element falls into death and emptiness, its ability to illuminate and provide warmth is enhanced. It is the North Star shining in a cloudless night sky, showing you the way home.

Ding is rooted in the hidden stem, reinforcing its strength as the Direct Wealth star. We also see Earth and Wood, manifesting as Direct Officer and Hurting Officer stars. This combination suggests someone who provides guidance and advice, has endless ideas, and won’t take no for an answer.

In other words: a tough but wise advisor.

Sounds like a social worker, doesn’t it?

For additional confirmation, we carried out a tarot reading to explore his career options. The construction industry would provide opportunities to make a lot of money. However, it might leave him feeling trapped. Social work, while not as lucrative, still offers a stable income. On the other hand, it could leave him feeling exhausted.

There isn’t a clear good or bad choice here. Simply choices with different sets of pros and cons. To help the client decide, we drew a final card: the World.

The World is a reminder to the client that he needs a job that is easily transferrable between Australia and Singapore. He needs a skill set and experience that is in demand in both Singapore and Australia.

This leaves him with social work as his best career path.

As social work leaves the client exhausted, we also provided him with strategies to mitigate the risk of burnout. His chart lacks metal and water, so we encouraged him to cultivate these qualities in his life. Metal carries the qualities of discrimination, decisiveness and clean separation. Leaving behind his work at the office would go a long way towards preserving his mental health and energy. He could also consider finding a position that interacts with law enforcement and the judiciary. As metal exhausts earth and generates water, we felt that cultivating metal is his top priority.

The client told us that social work is very much like consultation. He speaks with his clients to learn their needs. Then he liaises with various government agencies to get the help they need, and hand them off as necessary. It requires resourcefulness, intuition, empathy, clear thinking, persuasion and communication—which are water traits.

In the first post of this series, we explained that we don’t hold rigidly to the notion that certain careers are associated with certain elements. This case shows why. This concept of careers linked to elements is simply a heuristic, drawn up by people who don’t necessarily have actual experience in those fields. There is no substitute for studying the energies expressed by the five elements, and which properties are manifested in careers of interest.

Finally, the modern school of bazi leaves us with an intriguing alternative. Earth is the element of nurturing and growth—and this is associated with investments. Metal is associated with money, and it can be found in his month pillar. The fire in his hour pillar points to investing in self-improvement, while the wood and earth suggests affinity with physical investments, including gold and silver—which are also affiliated with metal. The client himself expressed an interest in forex as well. It may be possible for the client to create a secondary source of income through well-timed investments.

This case study exemplifies what we do in Healiss Metaphysics. We combine the metaphysical traditions of East and West to provide holistic insight into your situation. We help you make the decisions you need to achieve your best life. The divide between the modern and the traditional schools aren’t important to us; what is important to us is applying the right methodology to help you achieve your goals.

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