My personal reading for the week ahead is Hexagram 23, Stripping Away, changing at lines 4 (eek) and 6 to 16, Enthusiasm. I only cast the reading on Saturday morning, and by Sunday I was altogether stumped by the demands of ‘stripping away’. Unsubscribe from about 30 email publications, clear junk off the desk, stop filling my mental space with ‘busy work’… yes, I could manage all this. But I was itching to plan things. I had a shortlist of things I could do next, and didn’t know where to start, and I had a strong desire to choose one, write plans, and forge ahead. It seemed like the only reasonable or plausible way to stop spinning in giddy circles between the possibilities. Then Yi said there was ‘no harvest in having a direction to go’ and left me completely at a loss.
So I took myself away from computer and books, breathed, and visualised my reading’s trigrams.
Before I get any further, I should just say that I am really not good at visualisation. I never really forget where I am, or get a consistent, complete mental image of the scenery I’m trying to visualise. It’s more a matter of scattered glimpses, capturing tiny fleeting first impressions of what might be there. Although I describe my attempt at visualisation as if it were a continuous experience, it’s really just a series of intermittent snapshots, impressions and guesses. In other words – if I can benefit from visualising the trigrams, anybody can.
So first I took my current ‘issue’ – not knowing what to do. For some reason I thought it might be a purple, spiny kind of thing, sort of like a giant sea-urchin (
). I wrapped it up in a yellow cloth and tied this to a smooth stick to carry, and noticed with some amusement that now I was kitted out pretty much like the Fool in tarot.
Then I set off into the landscape. I enter the hexagram from the bottom, and so I found myself in an expansive field. At first it seemed like raw earth, then there was grass, without limit. I walked across this, and reached the mountain in front of me. I thought of scrambling up to a low ledge, which would be about where my first moving line is (line 4), and stopping to look round. When I remembered my burden, I thought it was lying on the ledge next to me – and I caught a glimpse of it wriggling. There was a live, small animal in there, and it turned out to be a kid – a young goat, that is. It ran off by itself, of course. I had another moving line’s perspective to reach, so I scrambled on up the rock-face, barefoot to feel for toe-holds.
And there I was, at the top. What had become of the kid? Looking at me over the edge of a crag was an adult mountain goat – very much like the one at the top of this page. So I sat down, looked down over the fields below the mountain…
…and realised I can go anywhere from here.
In line 6, the small people just strip their huts – re-arranging the furniture, not creating real change. (Sounds like the kind of ‘planning’ I usually indulge in.) The noble one gets herself a cart, the freedom to travel long distances in any direction. Before this reading, all I could think of to do with the burden of ‘not knowing what to do next’ was to plan my way out of it: set a priority, choose my ‘direction to go’. I was utterly bewildered when Yi told me that planning myself a direction would bear no fruit at all. Of course, I ‘know’ about stripping away being no time to have a direction to go – how making plans before you’ve really cleared out the old stuff only leads to repeating said old stuff. But not until I (and my unexpected goat) looked out over the trigram-landscape and realised I can go anywhere did I really ‘get it’.
Every time I try this ‘trigram walkabout’, I come away with some new understanding or insight that I suspect I would have missed – or just not quite grasped so vividly – if I’d limited myself to just reading the words on the page. I’d definitely recommend you try it – and if you do, I’d love to hear how it goes.