Luck pillars (大运)

They are not read off your chart; they are counted out from it. Starting from your month pillar, the decades step through the cycle of sixty one pair at a time — forward if you were born in a yang year and are male or a yin year and are female, backward otherwise. That is the whole rule, and it is why sex is an input to a reading: it does not change your chart, only the direction the decades run.

The starting age comes from a distance: how many days from your birth to the nearest month boundary in your direction — the next solar term if forward, the previous one if backward — with three days counting as one year, exactly, no rounding. Everything before that first handover is 童限, the years before the decades begin, and they are shown as a state rather than scored.

before the decades   0 – 7     童限         not scored
癸未                  8 – 17
甲申                 18 – 27
乙酉                 28 – 37    ◂ current in 2026
丙戌                 38 – 47
丁亥                 48 – 57
戊子                 58 – 67

direction  forward · 顺行     from 壬午, the month pillar
first handover  1997-10-28    exact: days × 120

A decade is a pair — a stem and a branch — and 明命｜MING reads the pair as one thing, with the branch counting for more. The two halves can even fight each other: when the stem controls the branch or the branch controls the stem, the side being controlled is muted, and the decade reads as a quieter version of itself. The old convention that the first five years follow the stem and the last five the branch is kept, but as a secondary emphasis — the pair is the unit, not the half.

It does not change your chart. Your eight characters are fixed; the decade is new ground they stand on. The classical rule is one line — the decade’s characters are read against what your chart welcomes and resists — and that is exactly what happens: the decade’s stem and branch are checked against the elements your chart needs, the 用神, and against what would damage its structure.

The result is a tone, and the product names it in three words: supportive, neutral, or attention. Supportive ground brings what your chart leans on. Attention ground brings more of what it resists, and so asks more of you. Neutral is neither — or supportive tempered by a hard year inside it. Note what is missing from that list: good and bad. The tone is a description of the ground, not a sentence passed on the decade.

The decade also outweighs the year. Each year has its own faster wheel, read the same way, but it turns inside the decade — the decade sets the terrain, the year sets the weather. The tradition put it in one line: fortune hangs on the decade, and on the year as well.

This is the question the whole page is for, so here is the plain answer: no.

An attention decade is not a punishment and not a forecast. It is ground where the things your chart resists are stronger for a while — where work carries reworks and detours, where money wants precision, where close bonds keep small tallies. 明命｜MING names the mechanism and what it asks — slower is cleaner here; repair beats winning here — and never a doom. There is no event on the page, because the method does not contain events; what 明命｜MING will not tell you keeps that on the record.

The honest thing about the two kinds of decade is that neither is the good one. A supportive decade with nothing to spend itself on is a wasted ten years. An attention decade met well is where the craft in a life gets made — the redoing, the precision, the repair. That is what the product’s third line means: 顺其时, move with your season. Not wait for a better one.

Decades change on a date, but lives do not change on a date, so 明命｜MING treats the six months either side of a handover as its own condition: two decades at once, the old one winding down and the new one settling in beneath it. Effort can feel less effective in a handover. That is the season changing — not you doing something wrong — and the reading says so rather than pretending the ground is steady.

Before the first decade there is no decade. Some schools fill those childhood years with a smaller cycle, 小运; the schools contradict each other on how to compute it, so 明命｜MING shows the years as a state and does not score them — what 明命｜MING does not compute records the reason.

This is the part of the whole subject you are best placed to judge. My Season shows every decade of your life, not just the one you are in: the ones already walked are written in past tense, as what those years emphasised and asked — never as advice for years that are spent. The current one carries what it asks of you now. The ones ahead can be opened and read as terrain.

Read the walked ones first. You were there. If the decade the reading calls attention ground was, in fact, the stretch that stretched you, and the supportive one was the stretch that built quietly, the method has earned some trust for the ground ahead. If not, it has not — and that is worth knowing before you read another line.

The decade is read against what your chart needs, so that page is the one underneath this one: what your chart actually needs. And the cyclic model the decades run on — why a chart has slow wheels and fast ones at all — is cyclic time. Or open My Season, and start with the decades you have already lived.