Hexagram 33: Retreat

遯 (Dùn)

Strategic withdrawal and knowing when to step back.

Overview

You have come to the moment when you need to start putting your plans into practice. Until now you have studied, gathered experience, and joined old knowledge with new. The new period of your life can be as successful as that stage was.

But this sign advises you not to rush straight into action. Gather your thoughts. Go through the plan again and build a clear order of steps. You may notice small things you missed before.

Life often changes our plans and reshapes them. You need to learn to be flexible and to adapt to new circumstances. Then you will understand the old truth: whatever happens, happens for the best. You will stop worrying over an ordinary event and treating it as a disaster.

This sign is called Retreat for a reason. Before you start on your plans, you need to step back from activity for a while and think everything over without hurry.

People around you

How should you behave with your friends and your family? Cutting off contact completely would be unwise. But for now, stop anything on a large scale. Keep contact with the people around you to ordinary, everyday talk, and do not draw them into your own affairs.

Work and rest

In work and rest too, this is a poor time for anything large-scale. Effort in that direction rarely pays. This does not mean you should give up and drift with fate. You can do much good for yourself and for others if you stay inside the daily routine. Routine work will also take your mind off unpleasant thoughts and feelings.

Your wish

Ask yourself honestly. Is your wish something big and serious, or is it an ordinary everyday thing? A small gift from fate can come to you now, but bigger hopes look further off.

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 33 is Heaven over Mountain. Its two inner, or nuclear, trigrams are Heaven over Wind/Wood. What the eight trigrams mean.

Upper trigram (lines 4–6): Qián · Heaven Creative and strong
Lower trigram (lines 1–3): Gèn · Mountain Still and stopping
Upper nuclear (lines 3–5): Qián · Heaven Creative and strong
Lower nuclear (lines 2–4): Xùn · Wind/Wood Gentle and penetrating