Direct Resource and Indirect Resource is called mother spirit in bazi. Mother spirit gives to you, nurtures you, and prepares you for life. Your mother is called resource in bazi because, when you are a baby, your mother is your first food. The Chinese character for mother spirit is imprint. Your mother is what imprints onto you.

Your mother spirit is the season that gives birth to you. If you are wood day master and you were born during the winter, then you might have a lot of mother spirit because winter is the season of water and water births wood. Same goes if you are fire day master and you were born during the spring, if you are earth day master and born during the summer, if you are metal day master and born late or early in any particular season, or water day master and you were born in the fall.

Direct Resource and Indirect Resource is mother spirit

Mother spirit is big nerd energy. Why? Because your mother spirit is the spirit of preparation. If your mother spirit is strong, then you have someone who is educating you, guiding you, and telling you what to do. You have someone who is sending you to school so that you can learn how to prepare yourself for the situations that life throws your way.

If you have a lot of mother spirit in your chart, then you like to be prepared. That’s why you have a researcher’s mind. You like to look for all the information that you can possibly find about a thing before you get involved. You study. You read. You learn. You get ready for the things that you want to do—or you have someone who prepares you for life around you influencing your life.

If your day master is weak and you’re the type of person who is very responsive to what other people tell you then you might thrive with more preparation, more education. But what happens if your day master is strong and you have this strong mind that doesn’t like to accept education?

Then you might feel smothered by your mother. You might feel as though you are in school for too long, like you’re being imprinted on by your mother or teacher or mentors and as though you’d rather just break free. Having a strong day master can mean that you struggle with mother spirit.

People with strong mother spirit tend to be cautious people. You know those little babies or toddlers who don’t try and run around all the time? The ones who are very careful with their bodies and look for their mothers whenever they try anything new? That’s mother spirit.

But mother spirit isn’t just about formal education even though part of parenting is teaching. Mother spirit shows us how to accept love.

People who look for mentors and for education and accept education know how to ask for help, know how to accept love. You can see it on their faces. Their faces are full of curiosity because, yes, they do want to know more about you and the struggles that you have faced and all of the lessons that you have learned. Mother spirit people visit elders. They take the time to go and see elders. That’s like a hack on life because elders know so much and, by going to see them and visit them and ask them questions, they can teach you great lessons.

That’s why the spirit of this spirit is to make life easier. If you have mother spirit as your month command, then you find ways to make your life easier. You ask for help. You have support from the older generation and you learn all kinds of things from them because you follow their example. You are curious, you accept love, and you take the time to prepare.

Direct Resource

Let’s talk about people who have strong Direct Resource. Direct Resource is what we call the direct face of mother spirit.

The quintessential quality of mother spirit is that it prepares and supports you in life. What do you think a direct version of support looks like? When you look up people who have strong Direct Resource in their charts, you get people who worked as scientists and chessmasters and musicians. Now, if you know anything about science or chess or music, you’ll know that these fields of study take an enormous amount of time and practice from your life. Music isn’t the same as painting. If you learn how to paint, your hand never forgets. If you learn a song, you forget how to play that song unless you put time into practicing each and every day.

The things you’ll notice is that a lot of people who were born into wealth will have strong Direct Resource: Kim Seokjin, Donald Trump, and Lee Kuan Yew all have Direct Resource as their month command. All three of these people were born into very wealthy families.

Not all Direct Resource people are born into money but the meaning of Direct Resource is that you receive support from your family. That support can be financial. It can be moral. You might have been raised in the church. That support might be physical. You might live in your hometown and in the home where you grew up. You might continue a family trade. Direct Resource is something that instructs and guides you and gives nutrition to you.

Typically, people who have strong Direct Resource have it easier. They’re supported. They’re prepared. Their families might give them an education or a trade.

So, these people can be quite dutiful. They carry on the work that their parents or teachers or mentors taught them to do. Now, you might be thinking that someone like Donald Trump is very evil. Yes he is. Isn’t Direct Resource supposed to be someone who is learned and wise and knows right from wrong? Isn’t that the point of receiving an education?

Direct Resource people learn from their teachers. That doesn’t mean that their teachers are always going to be good people. People who are dutiful to the church don’t just get a shortcut to morality. They still have to learn right from wrong and, if they just follow what their teachers tell them, then they can do some very bad things. Trump’s teacher was Roy Cohn, one of the people who were most instrumental during the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. Trump basically follows the same rubric as Cohn. He is Direct Resource. The pupil follows the teacher.

Direct Resource is just education. One of the world’s greatest chessmasters, Bobby Fischer, has Direct Resource month command. His mother was homeless and they were Jewish refugees from Europe. But his father, who was a mathematician and physicist who had been a child prodigy, took an interest in Fischer’s education. Paid for the whole thing. Bobby started playing chess at age six. He became a grandmaster when he was fifteen.

That’s Direct Resource life. You study something day in and day out and you become an expert. You’re given schooling. You’re given education. You’re a genius and you absolutely hate to be wrong. Direct Resource people hate to be wrong and they’re often not wrong.

Indirect Resource

Indirect Resource is the indirect expression of mother spirit. Again, mother spirit is what supports you, what nurtures you and comforts you and educates you. It’s the influence of those who make an impression on you, those parental people who imprint onto you.

When you have strong Indirect Resource in your chart, you actually experience distance from your mother. Remember that mother spirit is about family support. Direct Resource people are actually born into families that can support them. That support is often material, educational, or moral.

What about Indirect Resource people? Let’s take a look at some Indirect Resource seasonal pattern people: Rosa Parks, Suha Arafat, and Dave Chappelle. Each of these three individuals had very powerful mothers. Rosa Parks’s mother was an educator. Suha Arafat’s mother was a journalist and scholar. Dave Chappelle’s mother was a politician, minister, and professor.

Traditional bazi tells us that Indirect Resource people experience their mothers as being faraway. If you were reading someone in a court drama, that person’s mother might be like a consort who was sent away or suffered a fall from her position. Of course, that’s not applicable for most people.

Rosa Parks, Suha Arafat, and Dave Chapelle all had mothers who pursued education and philosophy and did things out in the world. These people were not raised by mothers who only stayed at home to give them endless attention. They received education from their mothers. Their mothers were also busy working to challenge colonial domination.

That is a form of support, of moral guidance. I know that we have this typical image about what mothering means and what it looks like. Your mom is supposed to sit you down and teach you how to read so that you can get good grades. Okay, that’s one face of mothering. That’s Direct Resource. Indirect Resource is a little different. Yvonne Seon worked for Lumumba. Raymonda Tawil wrote against the Israeli occupation. We know less about Leona McCauley, Rosa Parks’s mother, than the other two but we know that she fought for Rosa Parks’s education during a time of segregation. We also know that Parks started working as a child and that she learned about Black liberation in a multifaceted direction. She didn’t go to school to study liberation politics. She learned her politics from life.

But back to the mother. Indirect Resource is not a mother spirit who sits down with you and teaches you how to pass the grade so that you can get the credentials that you need. These are mothers who give you the lessons of life another way.

Indirect Resource is just as much of a nerd as Direct Resource. These are also people who like to think very hard about things and come up with brilliant epiphanies. However, Direct Resource is learning from books that are written about the knowledge that we already have. Indirect Resource is trying to create new knowledge. Indirect Resource is trying to work with the knowledge that we don’t yet have.

These are people who ask the right questions. They’re curious. They know that what they want to learn is not available in a book or in a school. What they want to know is embedded in life itself and they have to go through it in order to learn. And they do learn. They’re curious enough to turn anything into a lesson.

The stereotype about Indirect Resource people is that they don’t make any sense when they talk because their minds are always skipping around. They’re so freaking smart and they take all of these intellectual shortcuts because they’re used to thinking very fast. That’s why they make huge logical jumps when thinking that makes them seem crazy. People find them hard to follow.

Indirect Resource people do have a logic, though. They’re not delusional. They’re not making anything up. They’re just thinking so fast that they don’t have time to explain. If you really follow their logic, then you’ll see that they’re incredibly systematic thinkers who put real effort into asking questions that unsettle what you think you know.

That kind of logical jumping around—do you know where it comes from? That kind of logical jumping around is what smart kids who spend a lot of time alone do. When you’re learning on your own, you don’t need to explain everything because you’re used to the idiosyncrasies of your own mind.

Indirect Resource people are thinkers who have grown used to thinking on their own. They have mothers who are not sitting with them but out there doing something that is giving them moral education. And they have a lot of time for themselves. The more time they spend on their own, the more vibrant their imagination becomes. They’re like latchkey kids who build their own universe in their minds. They don’t know how to explain themselves and the logical shortcuts that they have created but they’re very, very smart.

What if you don’t have any mother spirit?

Both types of Resource spirits are really just about support. They both give you support because they both work to give you curiosity. That’s what mother spirit really does. Mother spirit doesn’t give you all the answers. Mother spirit teaches you how to ask questions. That’s real nurture because question asking is vulnerable.

No one’s bazi chart has absolutely no mother spirit. If you didn’t have a mother, then how can you exist? We come from our mother’s bodies. If you had no parenting whatsoever, then you would have already died as an infant. So, we all have some level of mothering or nurture or education. Because of that, we all have some curiosity.

But there are chart structures where the mother spirit is not supported. You might have very little mother spirit and official spirit and your self spirit might be really strong. Your wealth spirit might be very strong, harming your mother spirit. You might be too strong or you might have a lot of siblings, draining your mother.

If you have a hard time with mother spirit, then you might not know how smart you are because you didn’t have enough nurturing support to let you know. You might not see your intelligence. You might not accept yourself as a thinker and, because of this refusal to celebrate your own mind, you refuse to prepare yourself for anything. That makes life harder.

If you have a hard time with mother spirit, then you might make life harder than you need to. You give too much. You are hard on yourself. You find it hard to receive love and to remember your compassion. You become too controlling in your mind because you are trying to replace the stability of nurture with complete control. You believe that you live in a world that will punish you for any infraction so you are deathly afraid of losing your hold on things. You feel as though you must keep things together. You can’t afford to rest. You think that you don’t know how.

And, you’re not sure where you belong. Where is that place? You feel like you’re a stranger no matter where you go. That’s why keeping shit under control is so crucial.

The best thing to do if you have a hard time with mother spirit is to learn to rest. Take things easy. Lean back. A lot of people try to replace mother spirit with child spirit, try to replace rest with play, but two are not mutually exchangeable. Child spirit is the love that you give and the creativity that you put effort into producing. Child spirit is about having fun but resting is not about having fun. Rest is rest. You can’t replace your need to sleep by going out to have fun. You can’t teach yourself how to receive love by giving more. You will not belong more by giving more.

Rest is your body teaching you how to make a home where you are. Mother spirit is supported by official spirit and studying history can give you more context too. But the action of mother spirit is laying back and resting. Find a chair, a bed, a rug—anything that will hold your body. Mother spirit is your sense of home. If you feel pain about belonging, then start by laying down. That gravitational pull that you feel? That’s the earth itself embracing you.

Someone mothered you. Probably, a whole bunch of people. Your birth mother might be one of those people, might not be. The earth itself is one of your mothers. Without her, you would not be here. So, lay down. Let the earth, your mother, hug you.