The Moment I Decided to Shake the Coins
Look, I’m usually pretty grounded, right? I handle my own problems. But there are these moments when you just hit a wall with your partner, and suddenly everything you thought you knew about the relationship turns into this confusing, messy knot. This happened just a few weeks ago. We had this stupid fight—I won’t even bore you with the details, it was totally petty—but it dug up all this old resentment. I sat there afterwards, staring at the ceiling, feeling completely stuck. Should I push for a resolution? Should I back off? Was this whole thing even worth the effort anymore?
I tried talking to friends, but everyone just gave me generic advice. “Follow your heart.” Great, thanks. My heart was currently doing the cha-cha with anxiety. I needed something concrete, something that wasn’t biased by my own stress or my friends’ opinions of my partner. I remembered the I Ching set I had shoved in a drawer a few months back. I’d used it for work stuff before, asking about project timing or market decisions, and it was eerily accurate. But relationships? That felt heavier. More personal.
I grabbed the three old Chinese coins out of the pouch. They felt cool and heavy in my hand. The key to the I Ching, I learned early on, is formulating the perfect question. You can’t just ask, “Will we be happy?” That’s useless. You need action. You need context.
Formulating the Brutal Question
I decided to go straight for the gut. I sat down quietly at the kitchen table, took about ten deep breaths, and mentally focused. The question I decided on was this: “What is the most constructive action I can take right now to resolve the current tension between myself and [Partner’s Name]?” I wrote it down in my journal. This wasn’t about predicting the future; it was about defining my next move.
Then the fun started. I shook the coins vigorously in my cupped hands, letting the friction build up, focusing all that jittery energy onto the question. I tossed them down six times, recording the lines one by one, watching the combination of heads and tails. It felt ritualistic, almost desperate.
The line results came in: three broken lines, two solid lines, and then, crucially, one moving line. That moving line meant the situation was shifting, and that the hexagram was going to transform into a new one. I mapped out the first hexagram and then calculated the second, resulting hexagram.
The Answer That Knocked Me Sideways
The primary hexagram I cast was Hexagram 29, The Abysmal (Water).
Man, talk about a punch to the face. The Abysmal suggests danger, repetition of difficulty, and being trapped in a cycle. My first, immediate reaction was pure panic. “Oh great, we’re doomed. The situation is fundamentally terrible.” I wanted to throw the book across the room. I read the judgment text, and it talked about perseverance and sincerity, but also about not rushing forward blindly.
But then I looked closer at the moving line. The moving line was in the third place, which focuses on the relationship with those around you, often suggesting a temporary but risky situation. The text for that line was brutal: “A dangerous descent into the cavern.” It basically screamed: “You are making the problem worse by repeating the same anxious internal loop.”
The transformation led to Hexagram 47, Oppression/Exhaustion (The Well).
This was the ‘Aha!’ moment. Hexagram 47 doesn’t mean the relationship is oppressive; it suggests I was exhausting myself by dwelling on the problem and failing to connect with the source of nourishment (the well). The advice was stunningly simple: stop trying to fix the external problem right now, and instead, focus entirely on recovering my own internal strength.
- Stop analyzing the fight.
- Stop demanding immediate resolution.
- Take a step back to breathe and restore personal balance.
I put the coins away immediately. The message was crystal clear: my most constructive action was inaction. It wasn’t about what I needed to say to my partner; it was about what I needed to stop doing to myself.
The Implementation and The Outcome
The immediate shift in my behavior was palpable. Instead of forcing a difficult conversation that night, I went for a long run, then I sat down and worked on a hobby project that had nothing to do with him. I created distance, not out of malice, but out of necessity for self-care.
When we finally did talk the next day, the tension had evaporated. I wasn’t coming from a place of anxiety or accusation. Because I had restored my own well, I could approach the conversation calmly, which allowed him to drop his defensiveness too. We talked honestly about the root cause, and it was resolved easily—a complete reversal from the night before where we were circling the drain of Hexagram 29.
So, should you ask the I Ching about your love life right now? Absolutely. But don’t ask for a prediction. Ask for the most constructive action you can take. The I Ching doesn’t tell you who to date; it tells you where you’re stuck and how to move. And usually, the first move is fixing your own damn head before you try to fix the relationship. That experience was a real record-setter for clarity. I keep that journal entry taped up now. A reminder to check my own water level before jumping into the abyss.
