Your journal

Why keep a record

A single reading is a snapshot. Twenty readings across six months is a pattern — you start to see the questions you keep asking, and the ones you keep avoiding. That is the part of the tradition that actually works, and it costs nothing but a habit.

Write down what you asked, the hexagram you received, the changing lines, and one sentence about what you decided. Then leave it. Reading your own journal back is usually more useful than casting again.

Where your readings are kept

In this browser, on this device, using a mechanism called localStorage. That is a small private store every browser keeps for the sites you visit. Nothing you save here is sent anywhere: there is no account, no server, no database, and no copy on our side to lose. If you want to confirm that, the page's own network traffic shows no requests when you save or delete a reading.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it cuts both ways. Your journal is private to the point of being fragile. Clearing your browser data, using private browsing, or switching to a different device or browser will hide the readings — they are not gone from the world, but they are gone from your reach. If a record matters to you, use Export as JSON and keep the file. It is plain text and will still open in ten years.

What is worth writing down

The reading itself is the least interesting part of the record. The cast captures what the book said; the journal is where you capture what you did with it, and those are rarely the same thing.

Four things are worth a line each. The question as you actually asked it, not tidied up afterwards. What you felt on reading the result — recognition is a real signal, and so is irritation. What you decided, even if the decision was to wait. And what happened when you come back to it, which is the only entry you cannot write at the time.

Reading your own record

Two patterns are worth watching for, and neither is visible from a single reading.

The first is repetition. If the same hexagram keeps arriving, the usual explanation is not that the universe is insisting. It is that you keep arriving at the same situation without noticing, and the book keeps describing it back to you in the same words because you have not changed your part of it.

The second is the gap between question and outcome. Look at what you feared when you cast, and what you recorded afterwards. Over a dozen readings that gap becomes measurable, and almost everyone finds it is narrower than they expected. That is the entire argument for keeping a journal rather than casting once.