Man, sometimes you just hit a wall, right? Like, a real, solid brick wall staring you down. That’s kinda how I felt a few months back. Everything was just… stuck. I kept trying to push things, pull things, even just wiggle things a bit, but nothing moved. I was getting frustrated, really annoyed with the whole situation. It wasn’t about work, not exactly, but more about a general feeling of being out of sync, like my effort wasn’t matching the outcome.
I remember just sitting there one evening, staring at my bookshelf, and my eyes landed on my old I Ching. It’s been sitting there for ages, you know, one of those things you pick up, flip through, and then it just becomes part of the furniture. But that night, it felt different. It was almost like it was calling to me, saying, “Hey, maybe look here for a bit.”
So, I pulled it down. Dusted it off. Felt a bit silly, honestly, like I was trying some ancient magic trick to fix my modern problems. But what did I have to lose? I thought about my situation, just laid it out in my head, all the frustration and the feeling of being stuck. Then, I grabbed the three coins I usually use for this stuff – a few old quarters I keep in a little pouch – and just started tossing them. Didn’t even really think about it too much, just let my hand do its thing, a few times over.
I wrote down the lines as they came up, one after another. And when I finished, I traced out the hexagram in my notebook. Took a look at it, and there it was: Hexagram 14. It immediately hit me, just seeing the structure of it. The top trigram, the Heaven one, strong and clear, sitting right over the Fire trigram, all bright and active. I remembered, vaguely, some stuff about it meaning “Great Possession” or something like that. My first thought was, “Possession? What am I possessing? My pile of problems?” I chuckled, but it was a bit hollow.
Digging In and Getting My Hands Dirty
But that initial reaction quickly faded, and I felt this pull to really understand it, not just read a quick blurb. I pulled out a couple of different I Ching books I had, ones with different interpretations, and started to compare them. I read one passage, then another, then flipped to a different book for the same hexagram. It wasn’t just about the words on the page; it was about how the words made me feel and what they stirred up inside me. One book talked about “abundance” and “success that comes from inner strength,” another about “holding fast to what is great.”
- I grabbed a pen and my journal.
- I wrote down keywords from each interpretation.
- I started free-associating, just jotting down whatever came to mind when I saw those words: “abundance,” “inner strength,” “holding fast.”
- I thought about what “Great Possession” could actually mean for me, right then, in my specific stuck situation. Not money, not things, but what else could be a great possession?
It slowly started to dawn on me. The books kept hitting on this idea that this kind of great possession wasn’t just handed to you. It was something you had to cultivate, something inside. The strength wasn’t about brute force, but about a clear, bright inner vision and a steady focus. The “fire” under “heaven” wasn’t just about things burning bright, but about being illuminated, about having clarity.
The Light Bulb Moment
Then it clicked. Like a big, bright light bulb switching on in my head. My “great possession” wasn’t something I lacked or needed to acquire from the outside. It was already within me. My experience, my resilience, my ability to think clearly when I wasn’t bogged down by frustration. The reason I felt stuck was because I was looking outward, waiting for something to change externally, instead of tuning into that inner strength and clarity I already had.
Hexagram 14 wasn’t telling me to go get rich or grab more stuff. It was telling me to realize the richness that was already there, in my own damn mind and spirit. It was about recognizing that I had the resources, the inner “wealth,” to navigate whatever wall I was facing. The key was to access that, to act from a place of inner clarity and confidence, not from a place of panic or complaint.
So, what did I do? I stopped trying to force external solutions. I took a step back from the problem that had me so jammed up. I spent a few days just focusing on myself, on what I knew I was good at, on what truly mattered to me. I meditated, not in a fancy way, but just sat still and tried to clear my head, reminding myself of my own capabilities. I reaffirmed my own values, what I truly believed in, and what I stood for.
And you know what? Things started to shift. Not dramatically overnight, but little by little. I approached that “wall” with a different attitude. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle that needed to be smashed through, I saw it as something to understand, to work around, to climb over using my own tools, my own ingenuity, which I suddenly realized I had in abundance. The true message for me was about owning my inner resources, recognizing my worth, and using that as the foundation for everything else. It wasn’t about being given something; it was about realizing what I already possessed.
