Weekly I Ching reading

This entry is a follow-up to my post on ‘Life lessons from Yi‘ a few weeks ago. Like that one, it’s more personal-journal-ish than I usually write, but I hope it’ll provide a couple of ideas you can use yourself. (Please let me know what you think of this style of entry!)

Inspired – not to say prodded – by Yi, I committed to complete the course, and I did so. And the Radical Change promised is making itself felt, powerfully – a massive improvement in my mood, my energy levels, and how much I get done.

It’s not particularly that I’ve been learning things I didn’t already know. More that I’ve been prompted, every day, to do things I already knew I ‘should’ (deathly word!) be doing. I’ve been getting into better habits. Powerful things, habits.

This got me thinking about the benefits of regular practice, of making important things part of the routine. Why not get back to a regular, weekly I Ching reading? So this is what I’ve done. My intention is to ask an open-ended question and allow Yi to set the curriculum. I asked:

“What should I look out for – what should I study – in the week ahead?”

And Yi answered with Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, changing at the second line to Hexagram 23, Stripping Away. That’s the moving line about ’embracing the ignoramus’ and the child taking charge of the household. So I’m trying to put my ‘beginner’s mind’ in charge in here, and to strip away what I ‘know’ about ‘how it just has to be’. (Dethroning the inner ‘because I say so!’, as it were.)

Thanks to Yi, I’m looking forward to a week spent studying what I don’t know! Which is a slightly tricky thing to undertake – I started writing a list of sentences starting ‘I don’t know…’, and the first item on it probably ought to have been ‘I don’t know what to do with this reading’.

And then over the washing up last night, I listened to Steve Pavlina’s latest podcast.

It’s very good – as all his things are – and I won’t attempt to summarise its full scope here. But his starting point was what you might call those ‘lose-lose’ situations, where you are forced to choose between options, none of which you like. And early in the audio I heard this advice:

“Make it OK for you to have a problem that is unsolved, where you don’t know what the solution is. Just allow the problem to be.”

Well, I stopped with the wet sponge half-way to a saucepan and started paying serious attention. This is the effect of doing a reading for the week, or just of having a reading in mind: it makes me that much more awake, and more likely to learn from things that might otherwise just have washed over me.

The rest of the podcast gave me a new and interesting idea for ‘studying what I don’t know’. Steve points out that by staying in the space of not knowing, you invite ‘third alternative’ solutions to come into being. (I think this is where Hexagram 4 starts to move towards Hexagram 5.) He talks about applying this method (and many others) when you are actually grappling with one of these unpleasant choices. But why not use it to re-open issues I’ve labelled as ‘unsolvable’, where I’ve already settled for the lesser of two evils? Now there’s a way to use Hexagram 4 that I’d never conceived of before: getting from ‘it can’t be done’ to ‘I don’t know how’.