A week of questions

There was one question I asked Cesca Diebschlag (yes, the identity of the ‘mystery interviewee’ is revealed!) during our interview that she particularly liked –

‘Why should anyone take the trouble to learn to consult the I Ching, or to get involved with it at all?’

She answered with an example of how a reading became part of a healing process – you can actually listen to this now, as it’s one of the excerpts on the preview page for the I Ching Course. (It’s the ‘Repeating Chasm’ excerpt.)

I think this is a question that really has to be answered with examples, showing how lives are changed.

I’d like to encourage you to learn enough about the I Ching that you can have confidence in your readings and really use them for change and growth. Why? Well… suppose I show you all the questions I’ve asked Yi in the past week? This is a complete listing, nothing added or removed (though the details of the background are not always share-able):

“Advice for the week?”
My regular weekly reading. This one gave me 24, Returning, with no changing lines. So I am going through the week focussed on getting back on track, and alert for opportunities to create new relationships on the path. (Finding some, too.) After weeks of hectic preparations for the I Ching Course sale, I needed this!

“Why is X doing this to me?”
This is one of those where the background details are non-shareable! But X appeared to be riding roughshod over my feelings in a quite uncharacteristic way, leaving me not sure whether to yell in protest, or creep into a corner and cry. I thought up what seemed to me a good, firm and mature response and asked:

“What about asserting myself like this?”
Yi made it clear (with 20 moving to 27) that this was not something I could do without childish pettiness, and that I should become aware of the patterns I was creating. Not without exasperation, I asked:

“OK, so what is the best response?”
– and received step-by-step guidance through the next half hour or so – at the end of which, I received what I wanted, and all with no hostility or ‘assertive’ confrontation at all. It turned out that X wasn’t being half as insensitive as I’d imagined. (The reading, by the way, was 38 moving to 2.)

“What happens in the reading space?”
A Cesca-inspired reading: the answer was 61 moving to 58, and you can read about it here. A beautiful reading, and a very moving experience.

“Why do I keep dreaming of Mum – alive, active, and demanding?”
When Dad died, I enjoyed dreaming about him and looked forward to it. My encounters with Mum in dreams are not the same at all – in the dreams, I know she is ‘supposed’ to be dead, and try to explain this to her, but she insists she’s better now, and has things I should be doing for her! Yi’s response – 44 moving to 18 – captures my feelings about this very neatly, but also made me think further about the ‘powerful woman’ – something in her nature that I can’t quite get a handle on.

“What was her strength?”
Hexagram 2, unchanging. Oh.

“Why the lack of response to the audio sale?”
Plenty of people have signed up for a free membership. The same unfortunately can’t yet be said of the numbers taking me up on my offer of £10 off the advanced I Ching course. And so – given that I don’t quite have the Zen of marketing mastered yet – I feel somewhat scared, rejected, bewildered, and so on. Yi’s response to this one was oblique: 45.6 moving to 12; not something I’d done, but something I’d omitted to do. It’s a picture of uninhibited self-expression that breaks through communication blocks. Hence – amongst other things – this post.

“What about this idea of replacing single readings with a monthly agreement?”
Someone suggested this idea to me – I’d never have thought of it by myself – and though it frightens me silly, I can see the sense in it. When I tested it out with Yi, I received 58 moving to 60. So I am trying to limit the fear and concentrate on how this new way of Communicating Joy could work.

So there you have it: one sample and fairly ordinary week of conversation with the oracle. If you’re familiar with the I Ching, feel free to look up the hexagrams involved, of course. But what I really want you to see here are the results.

I feel grounded again, and I’ve devoted my week to getting back on track – back in dao
I have not had a damaging row with X (which I certainly would have had without the readings).
I have an inspiring and beautiful picture of what happens in (or through) my work
I feel I’m an important step further along the road towards a good relationship with my mother.
I’ve lost some inhibitions in telling you why I don’t want you to miss out on the I Ching course sale
I have some reassurance (from that repetition of Hexagram 58) that a monthly plan isn’t a totally bad idea – and I feel more comfortable thinking about the possibilities.

Now, I know at least one person whose ‘results’ from an ongoing relationship with the oracle include not being dead. Mine, over the past seven days, are not so spectacular – but hopefully they’re a representative picture of why people take the trouble to develop a relationship with the I Ching.