Hexagram 23: Splitting Apart

剝 (Bō)

Decay and disintegration that must be endured patiently.

Overview

Lately your life has been full of worry and of actions that did not count for much. There was the look of busy effort and a wish to impress people, but it brought nothing new and nothing creative into your life.

In fact you stayed in one place and lost the ground you had won.

That is what this sign points to: no results and nothing achieved.

Whether you noticed it or not, your life has been going downhill. Many plans you were completely sure of suddenly fell apart, or turned out to be far from finished. New projects have been put off with no date set. Be honest with yourself: lately your affairs have been going from bad to worse.

What should you do in such a situation? To begin with, stop being anxious. That is very hard, of course. You are already in this situation, and the main thing now is to work out how to get out of it.

People around you

First look carefully at your relationships with the people around you. If something can still be repaired, take the chance.

After that you will have to act step by step, without hurrying. The period of breaking down is only starting. Right now be very careful with anything you say that touches other people's interests. Do not forget tact, so that you do not have to put right annoying mistakes later.

Try not to react sharply to offensive remarks from friends, even when they hurt you. If you keep hold of yourself, you can avoid a serious quarrel.

Work

Be careful in your work. Do not take on several matters at once, even if they look very attractive. Deal with the old debts first, or you risk failing in what you set out to do.

Your wish

You already know that it is very hard right now for your wish to come true. The sign points to many obstacles, and to irritation with them.

There is one exception. If you have been working toward your wish for quite a long time, and the wish itself is realistic, it can still happen.

This Overview is one traditional reading of the figure, offered as a prompt for reflection and perspective rather than a prediction of a fixed future. Where this material comes from.

New to the sequence? See how lines, trigrams and changing lines work, or cast your own reading with the three-coin method.

Structure

Read from the bottom upward, hexagram 23 is Mountain over Earth. Its two inner, or nuclear, trigrams are Earth over Earth. What the eight trigrams mean.

Upper trigram (lines 4–6): Gèn · Mountain Still and stopping
Lower trigram (lines 1–3): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted
Upper nuclear (lines 3–5): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted
Lower nuclear (lines 2–4): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted