This week’s energy theme is often said to be the most challenging of all the hexagrams, #47 Oppression/Exhaustion. The symbol is a dried up ditch. All the water is drained from the lake. There is nothing left. Although this is the image and it is indeed a difficult energy to manage, there is also great potential to transform the oppression… through witnessing it rather than being sucked into it.

Last week we talked about being confused in relationships… and the pressure to be certain about them (hexagram 64). This week, we’re reminded that if you try to solve matters of the heart from your anxious mind, you’ll likely end up drained of life energy, much like a lake with no water. So our advice is to have the courage to question your perspective. Be willing to take an honest look into what doesn’t work in your relationship. From an open mind and heart, meet the confusion, the mental anxiety, the oppression… as if you’re watching a movie.

When you surrender to your mind’s need to be in control, you might find your barriers melting. It is through surrender that you can relax and open to a realization about your situation. If you’re armoured and walled off because you’re right about your relationship, you’re right about the other person, you’re right in your understanding, you will likely end up feeling oppressed and exhausted because nothing else, no life energy can get in and show you a different perspective or possibility.

Once you meet the exhaustion, you open the door for a miracle. In other words, when you start to relax and watch your mind trying to understand or trying to avoid the mental oppression, you’re making way for an inner shift to occur. A helpful way to process the puzzle pieces of images and memories from the past is to imagine you’re watching a movie of your thoughts stream by until the message of the movie coalesces into something clear. In other words… give yourself the gift of time until you reach clarity.

This week has the potential to be highly transformative or highly exhausting, or both! When you meet oppression and exhaustion with your defences lowered and your heart open, we wonder what might occur? Hang in there and live true to you.