Using Yi to help others

(Where have I been since my last post? Following Yi’s guidance through the emotional minefield that is house-hunting. Still in one piece, though, and starting to see a way through.)

Sometimes people will ask you to consult the Yijing on their behalf, or to help interpret their readings. It’s a daunting challenge (and doesn’t get any less so with experience), but at least ‘the rules’ are simple: put your own assumptions and prejudices to one side, and communicate what the oracle has to say as completely and clearly as you can.

The situation’s far less simple when you want to help someone who isn’t asking you to read for them – maybe someone who never would. You might well feel that you could be of more help if you understood better – so is it OK to ask Yi for background information the other person isn’t telling you? Is it OK to ask for advice on their behalf? There’s not much of a dividing line between seeking understanding and invading privacy – more of a broad grey area.

Yet in this grey area, I’ve found Yi to be a huge support in understanding and helping people who are living through things outside my experience. In the first place, its images help me to understand. Then they help me to listen better, because I have something to recognise. If Yi says Hexagram 47, and the person I’m talking to mentions feeling ‘imprisoned’, I ‘hear’ the whole hexagram behind their words.

Because Yi talks in the language of imagination and mental imagery, having the guidance of a reading allows you to communicate in the same language. If their world is dark and watery and draining inward, you can participate in the same landscape, and avoid the mismatches of imagery that would break the rapport.

This is a very subtle, powerful way of deepening communication – it means you can almost ‘identify with’ things you’ve never experienced, and without loading them down with your own associations. Also, the reading may show you a next step within that inner landscape, one you can introduce without becoming a well-meaning dispenser of advice that might as well come from another planet. (What if the person who feels imprisoned reaches downward and inward, what might he find in the depths? If someone is hiding their light away from a hostile world… look, the light is still shining on the inside, because you have kept it safe.)

I haven’t tended to try asking for advice for someone else. That feels unworkable to me in lots of ways – partly that people don’t tend to ask me for advice anyway (and I wouldn’t be good with the unsolicited kind), and partly because I know that if I do have a message from the oracle for someone, then I also have a huge, inescapable responsibility to pass it on. Dropping ideas into conversation as if they were my own might or might not be enough to discharge it.

Questions that have worked well:

• “How can I help?”
• “What role can I play, for the greatest good of all?”
• “What do I need to understand about X?” (“What do I need to understand?” is fast becoming my favourite question.)
• “What does X need from me now?”