What This Is
The long direction and the short direction set against each other. The 大运 governs a ten-year arc; the 流年 governs a single year. When the current decade branch and the annual branch form a 六冲, this is 运岁相冲 — the decade-year mutual clash, also called the decade-year battle. The ten-year trajectory and the one-year trajectory stand in opposition, and the year surfaces a conflict between where the decade is taking the chart and where the year is pulling it.
The classics name the feeling exactly: the decade governs ten years, the year governs one, and when they clash, affairs repeat reversibly, advancing and retreating without footing.
When It Fires
It fires when the current 大运 branch and the 流年 branch form a 六冲. Because the decade is fixed for its span and the year cycles through it, the clash arrives in the particular year whose branch opposes the standing decade. Its severity rises sharply if the clash also strikes the day master — then the conflict reaches the self rather than staying between the cycles.
What It Changes
It sets the chart's two timescales at odds. The steady ten-year direction and the immediate one-year direction no longer agree, and the result is a year of conflicting pulls — progress that advances and then reverses, plans that move and then stall, a sense of being unable to find stable footing between the long course and the present moment. The friction is directional: not a single blow but a tension between two trajectories.
Whether the conflict lands on the person or plays out in external circumstances depends on whether the clash also reaches the day master.
How To Read It
Read it by which cycle the chart favors and by whether the self is struck. If the decade is favorable and the year is unfavorable, the clash is the unfavorable striking the favorable — auspicious with hidden adversity, a good arc disturbed for a year. If the decade is unfavorable and the year favorable, it is the favorable striking the unfavorable — adverse with hidden opportunity, a difficult arc cracked open for a year. The polarity is never single; each case carries its counter-current.
And the reach matters: if the clash also strikes the day master, the conflict runs deep and personal; if the two cycles clash only each other without reaching the self, the conflict manifests externally rather than within. Never flat — read it as which direction the chart favors, which is being struck, and whether the self stands in the line of the clash.
Where This Shows Up
A year of this kind is felt as being pulled two ways. The long-term direction one has been moving in and the immediate demands of the year disagree, and the stretch carries a quality of advancing and retreating, of progress that will not hold, of decisions that get made and then unmade. Footing is hard to find because the two timescales are working against each other.
When the conflict reaches the self, it is felt personally — strain in the body, the home, the close relationships, the sense of one's own course. When it stays between the cycles, it plays out in external circumstances — events and conditions in conflict rather than the person. The texture is directional tension: a year caught between the decade's course and its own, where steadiness comes from knowing which pull to trust until the clashing year passes.