Halfway Up The Mountain

held by gravity and sunshine

Today’s Inquiry:

Guidance for meeting the challenge of our individual and collective realities this week, summoning courage for holding our vulnerability, overwhelm and heartbreak in the face of overt threats to survival on all levels.

Here we meet Hexagram 40 - Jiě - Deliverance/Loosening as our initial hexagram. Interestingly, we met Hexagram 40 previously in May in this post of the same name. Hexagram 40 suggests that we need to continue to open our hands, so to speak, to put things down, let them go as the week begins. And we received two changing lines to this hexagram, lines three and four yielding our becoming or relating hexagram to be Hexagram 46 - Shēng - Ascending/Pushing Upward.

Hexagram 46 is about the moment when you find yourself in the middle of things and simultaneously left to your own devices. You are, on your way up. You have the intention of fulfilling the mandate, making it up the mountain, but then, you are stalled out, held up by ropes you yourself may have put in place. Now, you are exposed, vulnerable, overwhelmed by the heights you have already attained and you still have a long way to go to reach your goals. How can you remain open to these circumstances, frustrating as it may seem.

It is a good moment to reacquaint yourself with your initial intentions, with your active commitments and with the sources of your own resilience and flexibility. You may have to be quite flexible and yet remain firm, connected to the mountain beneath you. Things around you may have changed, not by your design, but by the hand of the collective, the larger forces of your world, but it is a time to meet them with alacrity and care. You cannot afford to throw yourself down the mountain to escape such forces. This will do you nor anyone else any good.

Instead, you can apply yourself to the tasks at hand, to your own honesty and integrity, to what is right in front of you. You can share what needs to be shared, but ultimately, keep your own counsel, finding yourself effective in small ways, being content with a step by step approach. This type of approach looks small from the outside but can feel big on the inside. It can take great faith or confidence in oneself to actually stay in these small but important tasks of aligning yourself with your own resources. On a practical level this may mean you choose to stay home when you would rather go out, choose forego an opportunity to socialize in favor of sitting alone on the porch. Reckoning with your own resources in this way is what will bring you success in the end.

This week, it will also be fruitful to consider what you might wish to put down, to lighten your load, and how simply you could do such a thing. Things are complex, layered and subtle and yet, in this moment they could be simple, as simple as putting the dishes in a box to go to Goodwill, as singing a song to celebrate the passing of a friend, as laying down on the couch for a nap or a good cry.

Then there is always the question of what is yours to carry? What is yours to put down? These are always relevant questions, but this week they are especially important to consider and even better to address in your own life. As you continue up the mountain, feeling the weight of all that is yours, consider what is asking to be let go, where might you loosen your grip, release the bags that hang off your person, how might you be committed to some progress and yet flexible to what that means in a given day. It can seem as though you are dealing with opposite players, one keeping you safe and the other egging you upward. This is our constant and ever-present challenge to hold our desire for progress with the reality of the body.

Inhaling the fragrance of Honeysuckle essential oil will lighten your load! An intoxicating fragrance made from the honeysuckle flowers powerful enough to enlarge your breath yet softening you to your own desires, invoking the possibility of being comfortable with vulnerability and openness. And Honeysuckle is a great climbers, adhering easily to whatever is nearby and blossoming out brightly for all to see. Flowers are such great teachers in this way, fully open, fully alive and vibrant with no resistance whatsoever to being seen in their fullness. And their lives are short and sweet, a reminder to heed the truth of our own mortality, even as we enjoy their narcotic wisdom.

This oil can be hard to find but you can purchase it here.

This week, let gravity keep you on the mountain, while you let sunshine and sky buoy you upwards. Let loosening your grip mean you feel even more stable, gravity there to catch you. Let opening your heart mean you feel ever more strong and gentle, your openness the key to knowing what is needed. Who knows what mountain we are halfway up or what the vista will be when we get to the top? Glad we are here together!