Hilary Barrett, I Ching

In the Festival of Change, Claire Hayes will be helping with the integrating phase of a reading. You know… the moment when you understand what it’s saying to you, and the only minor detail left to deal with is actually changing in response. Occasionally this is easy – as simple as buy A, not B – and more often than not it really isn’t. Very often, I find myself saying apologetically to a client that yes, I get the easy job, providing a nice, clear interpretation. Then they’re left with the task of gathering resolution to act, or taking the risk of contacting someone, or letting an emotional attachment go… and this is not easy.

This is where EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique – can help. And when I started asking round to see if there was an EFT expert who would be willing to join us and teach us how to use the method to help get readings through into reality, I was naturally pretty chuffed when the person who volunteered had the domain name EFT4change.

I don’t have a share-able reading with Claire, but you can get a good sense of her ‘voice’ from this article, ‘All is Change’, and from her excellent free ‘pocket EFT’ series – all good, immediately-useful stuff.

I asked Yi what gift Claire brings, and received Hexagram 55, Abundance, changing at lines 2, 3 and 4 to 19, Nearing. This one is taking a little more thinking about than previous ‘gift’ readings, but I think I’m starting to get it…

Hexagram 55 describes that moment when you’ve received the sign – the eclipse at noon making the Dipper visible, the oracle that tells you not to hide away in the mourning hut but to make your offerings and march out… – and now you have to decide and act. There’s pressure, there’s perfect darkness, and there’s the imperative to be the king and take on responsibility.

Abundance Nearing… this means partly that it’s a growing presence, I think, and partly that you’re growing in strength and presence yourself, which is certainly an aspect of 55. (It’s ‘the Nearing-experience of Abundance’.) 19 tends to mean becoming the responsible adult, the one with the overview, who is most definitely not a victim. In this case I get the feeling that it points to personal strength ‘nearing’, rising within you as a kind of inner ally and approaching the challenges of 55.

(I think there’s a lot more to be understood about 19 here, though… not least since it’s also the relating hexagram in the reading about Tori Janaya’s gift.)

So Claire comes in at just this moment of ‘easier said than done’ as you understand what you’re called on to do. Then the moving lines…

Every time I mentioned some new aspect of the Festival of Change to a certain friend and mentoring client, she’d tell me I really needed to talk to James about that. Looking at his various websites, I could see what she meant – lots of breadth there, signs of a wholesome, down-to-earth attitude and a willingness to call things ‘utter twaddle’ – and went to talk with Yi.

(I did this for all the people I considered asking as speakers, probably more asking about other people than I’ve ever done before. But in the context it made sense: there wasn’t any other practical way to get the understanding I needed, and I couldn’t imagine initiating a partnership like this without asking Yi’s take on it first. I just leant on readings rather more for this than I usually would. The resultant readings were, without exception, very revealing and helpful. They also relate to one another in some fascinating ways…)

What gift would James bring people?

Hexagram 26, Great Taming, changing at line 3 to 41, Decrease/Offering. (That is, changing to the primary hexagram in the reading about Tori Janaya.)

Greatly accumulating with and through Decrease, purposefully cultivating mastery by making simple offerings… and with that idea, from 26, of accumulating skills and energy with a view to going further, ‘not eating at home’, being of greater service -

‘Great taming,
Constancy bears fruit.
Not eating at home, good fortune.
Fruitful to cross the great river.’

Whatever mastery is to be had on this scale, it always contains the hidden possibility (nuclear hexagram, 54) of being like the Marrying Maiden, who comes home into a new situation far beyond her scope/scale, and must grow into it. This isn’t going to be about ‘becoming intuitive’ as if that were an end in itself.

‘Taming’ stands in for one of those Chinese characters that isn’t remotely adequately translated by any English word I can think of. Great Taming, Nurturing, Accumulating, Restraining… the idea is of containment and control as a kind of caring, one that allows for growth. Given the word’s roots in fields and farming, it makes sense to think of this as Great Self-Cultivation. This post at Living I Ching talks of 26 as restraint, study and practice. After talking with James about magical ritual as a spiritual practice, this strikes chords for me.

Specifically, James brings a fine horse, and the means of training it:

‘A fine horse for pursuit.
Constancy in hardship bears fruit.
Daily training, chariot driving, protecting.
Fruitful to have a direction to go.’

My first sense is that this is something we need: the training, the developed skills, to make full use of our intuition, our energy – whatever name you give to that inner capacity for moving fluently with Change. (It also dovetails intriguingly with the reading about Jen Louden and the ‘great chariot to carry loads’ – the chariot, and how to drive it!)

Left untrained, the horse is very beautiful, strong and swift, and it runs with the herd. Here’s what I have in my book for this line:

“Before you think about what you are pursuing, you need to concentrate on how you pursue it. The energy and spirit you have for this are of great potential value, like a fine horse. And you cannot have a horse without a duty of care – nor yet a fine, well-trained horse unless you accept the daily work (and discomfort, struggle and sacrifice) of training it. Through constancy, the work becomes the gift.

The horse will follow its instincts and run with the herd. For your power to pursue to become a strength rather than a liability, these impulses must be restrained, boundaries safeguarded and energies redirected – so that you control the direction of travel.

Having your chosen direction in mind gives you the motivation to train a fine horse. But what you are really mastering here is freedom of movement, so that it becomes meaningful to choose a direction to go.”

I only got to know Tori because a friend recommended her as a speaker for the Festival of Change. I started reading her blog, was smitten, and then downloaded her audio about full spectrum listening. Normally this is only available when you sign up on her site, but she’s given us this excerpt you can download for a flavour of it with no sign-up required. (Right-click the link and choose ‘save target as’ to download.)

In about the first 45 seconds, I think you’ll understand what grabbed my attention. Tori describes how come we can hear things and not get them: ‘how we can get stuck in the psychological game of acquiring fabulous insights that seem brand new and fresh, but they don’t result in us having really true, lasting transformation in our character.’

Or in other words, a game I’ve certainly played with readings in the past, and I’m reasonably sure I’m not the only one. What makes the difference is the quality of listening… and this is what Tori goes on to talk about. (In this audio it’s about communication with another human being rather than with an oracle, but the principle of listening is the same.)

When I asked what gift Tori would bring as a participant in the Festival, Yi was quite specific: Hexagram 41, Decrease or Offering, changing at line 6 to 19, Nearing. Line 6 reads -

Another example reading for you, this one for Jennifer Louden, whom I just introduced. I’m reading for as many of the Festival of Change speakers before the event as would like to be read for – obviously, not everyone has something share-able going on that calls for a reading. But Jen does… she’s moved by a strong sense that change wants to happen, that her work wants to move or evolve and something different wants to emerge, but she’s not clear or confident about its shape.

Hence her question:
‘What’s my next creative calling?‘
Yi answers with Hexagram 21, Biting Through, changing at line 1 to 35, Advancing. I think this is actually answering one of her unasked questions just beneath the surface: she has plenty of ideas, but how to discern? And I think that in another layer, it’s also directly answering the question she asked.

So here’s the reading (right or control click and choose ’save link as’ or the equivalent to download).

It launches straight in without the initial ‘hello’s, because we spent the first five minutes or so talking about how dodgy the Skype connection was, and this is not hugely exciting.

And here is a blog post Jen wrote as she was responding to the reading.

Jennifer Louden’s an opening speaker – and a speaker about ‘opening’ – for the Festival of Change. I asked her to participate after I discovered her ‘listening to the question’ audio. As you might imagine, the title caught my attention – I spend a whole lot of time listening to questions, other people’s as well as my own. So I travelled through Jen’s audio retreat with her, listened, opened… enjoyed it but felt grumpily that nothing much had happened… and then over the next couple of days experienced some of the most revealing synchronicities I’ve ever encountered. Hmm.

So this experience, plus enjoying what she writes, plus the fact that her wonderful Virtual Retreats were what first gave me the idea of running an event that would be a whole, coherent experience rather than just a string of information… all meant that asking her seemed like a Very Good Idea.

Then naturally I talked with Yi (as I did with all the speakers), asking what it would mean to partner with her on this. Yi said 14.2.4 changing to 22: Great Possession’s Beauty. I think this refers amongst other things to the fact that she’s the most well-known among the speakers. It also shows the richness of what she offers, how she can provide a big enough ‘vehicle’ to carry us through, and how it would be best if I didn’t try to impose my ideas on her too much!

Timezones permitting, Jen’s call will be the first of the event, on 4th September. We’ll be talking – as you might have guessed – about questions: why they’re important, what knots we tie ourselves in with them and how we might untie a few. And Jen will take us through a guided meditation for listening to questions. (Something similar to the one that led to such amazing experiences for me.)

We’ll take questions during the call, as many as we have time for – but what would you say I should definitely ask her?

I’ve been talking with each speaker for the Festival of Change, bouncing ideas around, discussing what we’ll cover in their call, and getting to the point where – never mind the whole running-an-event, selling-tickets thing – I’m really looking forward to this just for what I can learn from these people.

Anyway… I’ve tried to give the Festival the shape of a reading, or of any experience of connection (as the event isn’t just for people familiar with an oracle), such as perceiving synchronicity or interpreting a dream. The idea is that as we travel through this structure, it opens up a space where each participant can have that experience of connection, rather than just listening to a bunch of theory about it.

The ‘shape’ is one I’ve been talking about for a few years: opening, connecting and integrating.

Opening is all you do to become ready to receive a response.
Connecting is all you do to receive the response.
Integrating – also sometimes called ‘fixing the omen’ – is all you do to carry the change embodied in your response through into practice.

Working with this very-neat structure in practice is a little like trying to carve the ocean into neat slices. The ‘opening’ creates the container for the whole experience, and its dimensions are a function of willingness to ask and receive. It has to be present as you connect with a response and allow it to say what it says (and think of perceiving a synchronicity – opening-connecting in a single moment?); it has to carry through into ‘integrating’, so I’m still awake to keep learning from the reading.

When we were preparing for Opening Space for Change, I asked people in the I Ching Community why it was important to them to open space for change. Martin, who was a wise man, responded at once,

‘Why is it important to you to keep space for change closed?‘

That’s embarrassingly easy to answer. I feel secure in what I know, I don’t want that threatened, I want to know what I’m doing next, I want to have things under my control… erm, OK, so I want the illusion of things being under my control… I like living in fantasy-land, thank you very much…

So opening turns out to be not-so-simple, as well as not so readily isolated.

And then connecting – which is a whole lot more than just decoding a transmission and ‘understanding what it says’. A Yijing reading will often give you a new image to see yourself with, a new story to think in – and then of itself this ‘fixes the omen’ into your awareness. Without any conscious intent to change, the shift in perception brings about a change of being, and connecting turns out to encompass integrating.

By the same token, integrating isn’t just ‘doing what it says’ (thank goodness!). Something that’s struck me, talking to one speaker after another – as well as how much I’m looking forward to this – is how everyone seems to be talking about questions. Opening, you listen to the question you’re asking; connecting, you ask questions to create a flow of conversation; integrating was described to me just the other day as ‘keeping the enquiry going’. Or in other words, sustained opening, which means living in connection, which…

Some background to this… Pamela Moss is one of the speakers for Festival of Change; I asked her to talk about integration, carrying change through in practice, as I happen to know she’s Very Good At This, and she said ‘yes’, and I danced round the room a bit, in a reserved, English sort of way.

It occurred to me that if I gave each speaker a reading, that reading might turn out to be the kind we could share, and then the recording would be a really good introduction to the speaker. Plus it’s an example reading, and that’s never a bad thing. (I may or may not be able to follow up with readings featuring all the speakers – they might not need one now, and if they do it might not prove ’share-able’. But I’ll post as many as I can.)

So here, with Pam’s permission (thank you, Pam ) is a reading I did for her about her possibility portraits. To explain… she has a two-branched sort of business. She started out painting portraits that help people see and remember their real self and real possibilities; now, she’s branched out into business mentoring for heart-centred people. (What I’ll be asking her about during the Festival draws on both of these – what it is that helps people who see the possibilities move from there to realising them.)

Anyway, the business mentoring has been growing and getting time and attention, and Pam asked for her reading to be about the possibility portraits and what to do with them. So here it is: right-click to download the mp3.

(Oh, about the beginning part about complementary hexagrams – Pam is somewhat familiar with the Yi; I obviously wouldn’t start off like this with someone who wasn’t. And the previous reading, the hexagram 20 one, is mentioned here.)