The Coin Toss Mess: Finally Making Sense of Those Weird Symbols
Man, I’ve been messing around with different kinds of self-reflection tools for years now. I started with cards, like everyone else, but honestly, shuffling fifty times just to get a vague answer felt tedious after a while. I wanted something that felt… heavier. More deliberate. So, a few months back, I decided to dive deep into the I Ching, but specifically, the coin method. This isn’t about being mystical; this is about forcing your brain to look at problems differently, structured by ancient math.
My first practice session was a total disaster. I had seen videos online—three coins, a toss, write down the line. Simple, right? Wrong. I pulled out three old pennies I found kicking around in my junk drawer. I didn’t even clean them. I just grabbed a notebook and cleared a small spot on my workbench. I assigned the values arbitrarily—heads equaled the solid line (value 3), tails equaled the broken line (value 2). That was my first major screw-up, and it took me weeks to figure it out.
I started tossing. You have to toss six times to build one trigram, and then twelve times to finish the whole hexagram structure. I followed the rhythm: toss, count the dots, write down the line. Toss again. I was focused on getting the big numbers right. Three heads? That’s 9. Three tails? That’s 6. Two heads and one tail? That’s 8. The totals were what mattered, or so I thought.
I finished my first full toss sequence—the whole 18 tosses needed to generate the primary hexagram and the secondary hexagram. I looked down at my notes. It was a beautiful pattern of solid and broken lines. I opened up the dusty old translation book I’d bought, desperately trying to match my visual pattern to the sixty-four possible outcomes. That was Hexagram 32, “Duration.” Okay, cool. Duration of what?
The real issue came when I hit those tricky totals: 6 and 9. These are the “changing” lines. Everything I initially read just glossed over the meaning of a change. They said, “A 6 changes to a solid line, a 9 changes to a broken line.” Big deal. I practiced this for a full month, tossing the coins every single morning, asking the simplest questions—”What should I focus on today?”—and every time, the results felt generic, meaningless, or just plain confusing. I scrapped maybe twenty journals full of these results because they never connected to real life.
I realized I was missing the critical action word. I stopped tossing for a week and just read every commentary I could find. I focused my search specifically on the words “old yin” and “old yang.”
The Breakthrough: Deciphering the Moving Lines
The huge difference, the thing that unlocked the entire system for me, wasn’t the final line structure; it was the story being told by the movement. I finally understood what a total of 6 (three tails) or a total of 9 (three heads) truly meant.
Here is what I implemented into my practice immediately:
- The 6 (Old Yin): This is the broken line that is so broken it must change. It represents an extreme state of yielding or receptivity. When I toss a 6, I write down the broken line, but I circle it clearly. It’s screaming, “Pay attention to this specific point right now, because it is dissolving and becoming its opposite.”
- The 9 (Old Yang): This is the solid line that is so rigid it must change. It’s an extreme state of force or activity. When I toss a 9, I write down the solid line and put a big ‘X’ through it. This is the moment of peak action, indicating that the situation has reached a maximum tension point and is about to retract.
- The 7 (Young Yang) and 8 (Young Yin): These lines are stable. They are the background noise. They tell me what is currently in play without requiring immediate attention.
By shifting my focus from the resulting hexagram to the individual line sentences associated with the 6s and 9s, the whole practice snapped into focus. Suddenly, “Duration” wasn’t just a vague idea; the commentary on the fifth line, which happened to be a changing 9 in my practice, told me exactly where the tension lay—”duration in the face of the yellow bird, auspicious.” What the heck is a yellow bird? It doesn’t matter, because the overall vibe was clear: Don’t push too hard, wait for the perfect moment. That week, I applied that principle to a sticky negotiation with a vendor, and it worked perfectly because I held my position instead of rushing.
I replaced the old pennies with three beautiful, weighty bronze coins. I keep them in a specific ceramic bowl now. The actual divination coin meaning isn’t hidden in some magical ether; it’s right there in the basic math of the line totals. But you have to discipline yourself to decode the change and not just the structure.
I keep logging these sessions. It’s not about predicting the future; it’s about having a detailed, structured practice that forces you to slow down and examine the extremes of your current situation. That discipline alone is worth all the tossing.
