Man, I have to tell you about the last month. It was an absolute dumpster fire. I mean, usually, I keep my stuff pretty buttoned up, but this situation—it just hammered me flat. You know how sometimes you chase that one big thing? That massive contract, that client that’s gonna stabilize everything for the next year? I was running after that white whale for five months, pouring in research, meetings, late nights, skipping meals. My entire financial setup was riding on closing this one deal.
I was so sure. I even bought some new equipment based on the verbal confirmation. I was already mentally spending the money. And then, bam. Silence. Not even a rejection email. Just radio silence from the VP. Ghosted. Five months of work, gone. And I was left staring at a massive gap in my cash flow and a mountain of anxiety. I felt trapped, absolutely stuck in the mud, reviewing old emails, obsessing over where I went wrong. It was consuming me—worse than when my old partner stiffed me on the equity split, honestly.
I realized I was in a spiral. I couldn’t move forward because I was still fighting the battle I had already lost. That’s when I remembered Hexagram 40. Deliverance. Release. Relief. I’ve messed with the I Ching before, mainly for fun, but this time I needed real answers, not just philosophical fluff. I needed a strategy to get out of this mental prison I had built.
The Process: Casting and Grasping the Hexagram
So I didn’t get fancy. I didn’t use yarrow stalks or some online app. I grabbed three old pennies—two heads, one tail, doesn’t matter, just three coins—and I sat down at my kitchen table one Tuesday morning, still pissed off about the client. I shook them up in an old coffee mug and threw them down six times. I wasn’t asking, “Will the client come back?” I was asking, “How do I find deliverance from this mess today?”
The result? Hexagram 40, Thunder and Rain. Deliverance (or Release). The Judgment is basically: “Deliverance. The Southwest furthers. If there is no longer anything where one has to go, return brings good fortune. If there is still something where one has to go, haste brings good fortune.”
When I read that, I didn’t immediately feel better. My first thought was, “Great, thunder and rain. My financial situation is a storm.” But then I broke down the lines, and that second part hit me hard. Two paths to deliverance, right?
- Path 1: Return (if there is nothing left to do).
- Path 2: Haste (if there is still something to do).
The core message for me was: Stop standing still. The problem wasn’t the loss of the contract; the problem was my attachment to the idea of the contract. The hexagram was telling me, look, either you are totally done with this situation and you need to retreat and clean up the damage, or you have to sprint and deal with the remaining issues immediately. Hesitation is the enemy.
Applying the Relief Strategy
I decided the first path applied. I was done with that client. There was nothing left to do. The door was closed. Deliverance, then, had to be about cleaning up the aftermath and returning to simplicity.
My immediate actions were brutal but necessary. I literally deleted every single document, every communication, every piece of research related to that failed gig. I archived the whole client file into a “Never See This Again” folder and cleared my desktop. I physically removed the stressor from my sight. That felt like scrubbing off old muck.
Then, the “Return” part. Where do I return? I returned to the simple, small, bread-and-butter projects I had ignored while chasing the whale. These are the small, reliable gigs that keep the lights on—boring, sure, but predictable. I stopped trying to achieve a massive leap and focused on achieving six small steps.
This required a shift in attitude. I had been so focused on proving I could handle the big leagues that I had started looking down on the reliable work. I started spending two hours a day just crushing out the simple tasks, the ones that guarantee a check in two weeks, not two years.
The hexagram also has a line about hunting and capturing what you need, but immediately releasing the catch you don’t need. I started applying this to my thoughts. Every time I caught myself replaying the failure scenario, I mentally released it. It was gone. It was just a distraction now.
The Real Deliverance Arrives
Here’s the thing that surprised me. The moment I fully executed this ‘clean house and simplify’ strategy, the relief wasn’t financial, it was physiological. The constant tightness in my chest vanished. I started sleeping better than I had in months. I had surrendered the fight, and the release was immediate.
And then, maybe two weeks later, the universe did its usual weird twist. That financial gap I was panicking about? It didn’t get filled by a new huge client. It got filled by three separate, tiny, weird consulting requests—stuff I would have scoffed at a month earlier—that required minimal effort and paid out instantly. One was a rush job coding five pages for a startup. Another was just advising an old colleague on their platform structure. None of it was sexy. None of it was the “white whale.”
But together, they covered the missing cash and then some, with almost zero stress overhead. I was delivered, not by a miracle reversing the failure, but by simply choosing the path of low-stress movement and returning to what I knew worked. I was spending my time actually producing income, not chasing a ghost and maintaining the illusion of success. That’s the real meaning of Hexagram 40 I found: Deliverance isn’t having the problem solved for you. It’s realizing the moment you decide to stop fighting the reality of the loss, the path forward becomes obvious.
