Hexagram 3: Difficulty at Beginning

屯 (Zhūn)

Initial difficulties that require patience and perseverance to overcome.

Overview

Do not be afraid of the name. Take it calmly and with patience. This sign is about the meeting of light and darkness, and of the inner and the outer. What matters most for you now is how you deal with other people.

The difficulty belongs to the situation itself. To act well in the present and in the future, you first have to get past what the past has left behind. You have to clear the path before you can walk it.

That is hard to do without help. The pull of the past is still strong, and you may lose interest before you see any real result. Or you may push through the difficulty and clear the path, and then have no strength left to walk it.

People around you

This is why it matters so much that you keep good relations with the people around you. You have had some success in building relationships. Keep to the same approach and you will get the help you need. You do not have to tell everyone about your problems. You can tell the people you know about some of them, but not about all of them.

Trust, even partial trust, will help you build warm and friendly relationships. And your friends will usually be honest with you in return.

Work and rest

Your work and your rest will both depend on how well you build useful contacts with a lot of people. Work that goes well will give you the energy for rest that is creative and interesting.

Your wish

The sign points to a longer wait for your wish. This is not because you are slow or because you keep changing your mind. The reasons lie outside you. Step by step, clear away everything that stands between you and what you want. If you keep at it, you will soon see the obstacles fall apart and the way to your goal open.

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 3 is Water over Thunder. Its two inner, or nuclear, trigrams are Mountain over Earth. What the eight trigrams mean.

Upper trigram (lines 4–6): Kǎn · Water Deep and dangerous
Lower trigram (lines 1–3): Zhèn · Thunder Arousing and moving
Upper nuclear (lines 3–5): Gèn · Mountain Still and stopping
Lower nuclear (lines 2–4): Kūn · Earth Receptive and devoted