Man, sometimes life throws you curveballs that just feel like you’re stuck in quicksand, right? You pull one leg out, the other sinks deeper. A few years back, I hit one of those patches, and it wasn’t pretty. Everything felt tangled up, personally and professionally. It was one of those times where you just crave a clean break, a fresh start, but you can’t see the exit sign.
I remember feeling so overwhelmed, just constantly buzzing with anxiety. I tried talking it out with folks, pacing my apartment, making endless pro/con lists. Nothing clicked. One night, after staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, I remembered my old I Ching book, tucked away on a dusty shelf. I hadn’t touched it in ages, not since college when I was mostly just messing around. But that night, I was desperate for something, anything, to point me in a direction.
I pulled it out, blew off the dust, found my three old coins – not special ones, just a couple of quarters and a nickel, nothing fancy. I sat there at my kitchen table, just focusing on this huge, heavy feeling in my gut, this entanglement. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and started tossing the coins, six times. Each toss, I marked down the line. It was slow, deliberate. I wasn’t thinking about what they meant, just letting the process unfold. I threw them, gathered them, threw them again. One by one, the lines appeared on the paper.
When I finished, I looked at the diagram. Hexagram 40. I flipped through the book to find it. “Deliverance,” the book said. Or “Release.” My first thought was, “Yeah, no kidding, that’s what I want!” But it felt almost too on-the-nose, too simple. I read the judgment, the line statements, trying to grasp it. My initial take was, “Okay, this means just cut ties, get out, abandon the whole mess.” I was so ready for that, so ready to just walk away from everything that was stressing me out.
So, that’s what I tried to do. I started making moves to just sever connections, to pull the plug on a few things that felt like dead ends. I was rash, impulsive. I figured if I just yanked myself free, the “release” would happen. But oh man, did that backfire. Instead of release, I created more chaos. More arguments, more resentment, more loose ends flying around. It was like trying to untangle a really knotted rope by just yanking on one end – it just got tighter.
I ended up in an even deeper hole, feeling even more trapped, if that was even possible. I thought the I Ching had led me astray, or that I was just too dumb to understand it. I put the book away again, feeling defeated. Life continued to be a complicated mess for a good long while after that, probably a year or so, maybe even longer. It slowly, painfully, started to unravel, but not in the way I had wanted it to initially. It was through sheer grind, by patiently picking at one knot at a time, having difficult conversations, making small, incremental changes, that things gradually started to come apart.
It was only much later, looking back on that whole period, after the dust had really settled and I could breathe again, that the true message of Hexagram 40 hit me like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t about a sudden, violent break, not about abandoning ship. It was about deliverance from entanglement, yes, but through a process of disentanglement. Like clearing a blocked drain, or carefully untying a tight knot. It means recognizing the knot, identifying where the tension is, and then systematically working to loosen it, not just trying to rip it apart. It’s about the measured removal of obstacles, not just running away from them.
Why I know these things
That whole period of being stuck wasn’t just a bad patch, it was a multi-year nightmare. I was deep in a business partnership that started with a lot of promise but slowly, over years, turned into a toxic mess. We built something pretty decent, but the interpersonal dynamics became unbearable, a constant power struggle, a drain on my soul. Every decision was a fight, every small disagreement blew up into a massive confrontation. I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells, unable to make a move without causing another explosion. My health started taking a hit, too; I was always stressed, barely sleeping. My family could see it, my friends saw it. I was just a shell of myself.
When I initially got Hexagram 40, my interpretation of “release” was to just blow up the partnership, to walk away without a backward glance, even if it meant losing everything I’d put into it. I tried to do it that way. I sent angry emails, I threatened to pull out completely, I tried to force a quick, brutal end. That approach just triggered a legal battle, a long, drawn-out, incredibly expensive, and emotionally draining fight that lasted for years. It piled complexity on top of complexity. I hired lawyers, spent countless hours in meetings, digging through old documents, preparing for court. It was a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
It was through that grueling, forced process of legally untangling ourselves – meticulously auditing finances, dividing assets, negotiating every single clause, mediating endlessly – that I finally understood what true “deliverance” looked like. It wasn’t a quick sprint to freedom. It was a slow, painful, step-by-step unpicking of every single thread that bound us together. Each day was about disentangling one more small piece, no matter how frustrating, no matter how small the progress seemed. It forced me to be patient, to be strategic, to see the entire messy tapestry of our shared endeavors, and systematically pull it apart without tearing the whole thing to shreds.
That experience, that forced, painful disentanglement, taught me more about release and freedom than any quick escape ever could have. It taught me that sometimes, the only way to truly be free from something complicated is to face it head-on, to painstakingly unbind yourself, piece by piece. It reshaped my entire approach to problem-solving, to conflicts, and even to my own personal boundaries. It was a brutal education, but it was absolutely essential. I wouldn’t trade that hard-won understanding for anything.
