About Yi Method
Yi Method is not borrowed philosophy. It is where Yí Goodman comes from.
She grew up in a traditional family in Chengdu — her grandfather a celebrated calligrapher at 武侯祠, the shrine of Zhuge Liang. 青城山, the Daoist mountain, was half an hour's drive away. That particular kind of stillness arrived early, not as teaching but as atmosphere.
She was a devoted reader of kung fu novels, absorbing the I Ching not as an oracle but as a philosophy — read the situation, move with the momentum, don't force what isn't ready. That logic became second nature.
Wang Yangming arrived through classical Chinese intellectual culture. His inversion — that truth is found inward, by clearing obstruction, not outward by accumulating knowledge — gave language to something already felt.
A love of French music brought her to Paris, where she studied mathematics, became fluent in French, and learned from a second civilisation that living well is not indulgence but craft. Joie de vivre and 安逸 ān yì — the philosophy of her hometown — are the same claim in two languages.
She arrived in London on a tourist visa and built a career in quantitative finance from there. Got married. Had a daughter during the height of Covid. Through all the spanning — cultures, careers, life stages — she found in mindfulness what the Daoists had always known: that the path through difficulty is not force, but clarity. The obstruction clears, the clarity underneath remains.
A career in quantitative finance trained a specific question: not "is this model sexy?" but "does it actually work, under real conditions, with real stakes?" That rigour is what Yi Method applies to wisdom: ancient and modern, Eastern and Western.
These traditions look different from the outside, yet all roads lead to Rome. Yi Method is how Yí charts the convergences across them — and applies them with the rigour of someone who asks the same questions professionally: Is this the right tool? Does it actually do what it claims? And how do you apply it so that it works in practice, not just in theory?