Patterns to look for

… in your I Ching reading journal.

Recently I’ve been thinking (with help from some wise and generous mentoring clients!) about what can show up when you review a series of readings. The way they start to fit together, unfolding a single story or interweaving many themes, always gives me goosebumps.

Sometimes it’s unmissable. I recently spoke to someone who’d asked ‘What to do about x?’ and followed up with a series of ‘what about this option?’ questions, all of them ways of tackling ‘x’. One of these brought the exact same response, line for line, as the original ‘what to do?’ reading. Hm. Could this be a hint?

But these things can be, and often are, more subtle. It wasn’t until I’d written out a whole series of readings and colour-coded the trigrams (with a set of 8 felt pens!) that I noticed how before a blockage was faced, mountain appeared as outer trigram, and after the blockage had been overcome, the mountain was the inner trigram. Obstacles, overcome, turned into a solid foundation.

(This is a language the Sequence speaks in, too: the way trigrams move from outer to inner positions from one hexagram to the next tells some good stories.)

The way whole hexagrams change position between readings also carries its own meaning. A primary hexagram might move into the second, relating position: one of those wise clients interprets this as a challenge that’s been faced and become part of her inner nature. A relating hexagram can move out into the primary position – the picture of ‘something coming up’, a theme surfacing and giving you the opportunity to engage with it directly.

Sometimes a hexagram that features in a significant, ‘theme-setting’ reading will show up again as a pattern of change – the hexagram that shows which lines ‘light up’ or ‘open up’ with change. It shows that original reading is still active in the situation, as a driving force or as a way through.

Or a hexagram may recur as a step of change (zhi gua) for a moving line: a sign that you’re revisiting this theme from a new perspective, travelling through it again.

And then, of course, there are the nuclear hexagrams, indicating an inner theme that you’re working out as it shows up in its various incarnations.

And then there are the images and stories that flow together continuously, in a way that has nothing to do with structure. Maybe the same figure from myth keeps making an appearance, or there’s a series of vignettes about horses, or you have a cluster of hexagrams (like 40, 41, 25) that all point to reducing or simplifying your involvement in some way. It doesn’t have to be very complicated; you don’t have to have a very detailed knowledge of the oracle (or a huge sensitivity to structural patterns) to start seeing a bigger picture. You just have to have a journal of readings and a little time.

The Resonance Journal makes all this easy!

It’s surprising what you may find simply browsing through past readings… but looking actively for patterns can be truly eye-opening. To do this, it helps (no end!) to have a specialist Yijing journal, designed by and for people in conversation with the oracle.

The quickest, most immediate way to find patterns is through the ‘cast history’, in the right-hand pane of each reading entry:

(click for a bigger image)

You can search for the identical reading, or every time you’ve had the same primary hexagram, or anything you think might show you something interesting.

For more in-depth searches, you need the ‘advanced search’ button (bottom left), which brings up a tremendously versatile set of options:

Search by hexagrams, trigrams, patterns of changing lines, themes, or any combination of these.

Happy exploring!

(One more Resonance Journal trick: if you’re not sure what to look for, use CTRL/Command + M to open a random entry – invite synchronicity!)