A reading for a decision this time: Sha asked,

“If I build another tech company, what will the experience be like?”

Yi answered with Hexagram 27, Nourishing, changing at lines 2 and 3 to 26, Great Tending:

So that gave her an interesting couple of moving lines:

‘Unbalanced nourishment.
Rejecting the standard, looking to the hill-top for nourishment.
Setting out to bring order – pitfall.’

‘Rejecting nourishment.
Constancy, pitfall.
For ten years, don’t act.
No direction bears fruit.’

It looks as though the experience would be not much fun at all – but why…?

Bill asked about his dating prospects, and received – of all things – the sixth line of Hexagram 24, Returning…

…which is exactly no-one’s favourite line. So how do you respond when Yi’s answer is all doom and gloom, and really not what you hoped to hear? You explore… so we did.

Bill kindly interviewed me for his blog afterwards: here’s his article.

A listener’s reading for this month’s podcast: Ann asked,

‘How do I integrate myself as an artist with everyday life?’

And Yi answered with Hexagram 14, Great Possession, changing at lines 1 and 3 to 64, Not Yet Crossing.

(If you enjoy this, please share it!)

That’s something I asked Yi recently, and it answered with Hexagram 23, Stripping Away, changing at lines 1 and 6 to 24, Returning –

I think this is a lovely, fascinating, satisfying reading, so I’m sharing a few thoughts on it with you for this episode of the podcast. I hope you enjoy it!

(If you’d like to have a free reading on the podcast, you’re very welcome to book one here.)

An update…

Just after publishing this episode, I was sorting through some foraged chestnuts when I found the one whose photograph you can see above. I didn’t roast it; I’m going to take it with me on my next foraging walk to the local woods and tuck it into the leaf litter.

Brian asked,

“Why am I compelled to leave my job and join Greenpeace?”

and Yi responded with Hexagram 18, ‘Work on what has been spoiled’ in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation he was consulting.

This was in 1982: we’re revisiting the reading and learning from it, 43 years on.

Things we mention…

The ‘entangled pair’ – both inverse and complementary – of hexagrams 17 and 18:

And the nuclear story of Hexagram 18, passing through hexagrams 28, 54 and 27, which you can build from all its component trigrams:

And not least the I Ching Foundations Class – starting soon, see www.onlineClarity.co.uk/class !

In this episode, Natalia is asking a wide-open question: where is she to go next? And Yi’s answer combines focus with openness: Hexagram 7, the Army, changing at line 2 to Hexagram 2, Earth:

(You may notice something different at the beginning and end of this episode. The music is the same – the Allemande from Bach’s first suite for ‘cello – but since there’s some ambiguity about the public domain status of the recording I’ve been using in previous episodes, I’ve switched to a lovely, eloquent performance by Colin Carr, published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and available here in full under this Creative Commons licence.)

(Just one reading, sorry, not a universal formula.)

Paloma asked what to do about her worrying pension-less state, and cast Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing at lines 4 and 5 to 34, Great Vigour –

So we talked about patience, and self-care, and standing firm, and also not standing firm at the bottom of a hole…

If you have a reading you’d like to share on the podcast, please book yourself a slot here!

Charlie asked ‘How to navigate?’ and cast Hexagram 27, Nourishment – or Jaws – changing at line 1 to 23, Stripping Away:

What followed was a strongly resonant conversation between his inner imagery and the imagery of the Yi – and also the ancient Chinese motif of being in the jaws of the tiger. The featured image above this post shows a detail from the handle of the Houmuwu vessel, where you can just see the human face between the tigers’ open mouths. (The original photo is by Mlogic, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Here’s another example, from the 11th century BC: