Someone asked me in an email about what special qualities you need to read the Yijing, and about how intuitive I am. Eeek. 😯
When I first started out with Yi, I would have had a short and simple answer to that second question: not in the least intuitive. The answers come from the oracle; I just interpret them, communicate them. This doesn’t require any psychic gifts – which is just as well, as I don’t have any.
Hm… well… that was then. As I’ve gone on, almost imperceptibly, tiny inklings of intuition seem to show up. Outside the work of readings, I’ve discovered I’m empathic (mixed blessing, that!), and occasionally have those bizarre ‘knowing what I can’t have known’ experiences. Interpreting readings, it seems that, quite often, I naturally focus on the story or image or aspect of a hexagram that will resonate with people.
Which, of course, still doesn’t amount to anything remotely like psychic gifts. I have a friend who’s used telepathy (we think) in readings; I’ve seen something of what true psychics can do; I know very well I don’t do anything on that level. Actually, I’m not sure I’d even want such a gift – it can’t be easy to use. Imagine a telepathic reader who didn’t know where the information she was picking up was coming from – she’d be a menace, I should think.
But this is the joy of Yi. Working with it over time may well develop whatever latent abilities you have, but there really isn’t any specific gift you have to have. By contrast, I can’t imagine how anyone could be a good tarot reader without being highly intuitive at the least, probably psychically gifted as well. And, of course, with tarot you need to have a particular kind of imagination, one that responds naturally to visual stimuli.
I don’t think there is a particular gift or a particular way of thinking you need for Yi. With the correspondence course, I work with a whole range of people, and see them develop a whole range of unique styles of divination. Each will be based on that individual’s particular blend of gifts: verbal, logical, holistic, intuitive, image-based, kinaesthetic, mathematical… All can be doorways into Yi – ways of finding answers, and of helping others.
And you can select from the whole diversity of tools available for understanding Yi – stories, etymologies, trigrams, line structure, connections between hexagrams… – according to your own natural skills. A while ago at the I Ching Community, someone asked if she should be looking at paired hexagrams. Well, I said, it works for me, works for Kevin, doesn’t work for Val… Time to experiment. Just as there’s no one skill you must have, there’s no one tool you have to use. The only special qualities I can think of that a Yijing diviner needs are patience, compassion, and a willingness to listen and to allow time and space for understanding.