Returning to Oneself

or finding and mining your own knowing

Today’s meeting was tender and profound as we explored the question; what would nourish you to say? This was not an invitation to get things off your chest, but was rather more an opportunity to think larger about how you want to be in the world and how to be yourself completely. From the point of view of the ancients, developing your connection to your own knowing, your wisdom, was a central activity of life, fed by the flow of activity and being that is life itself.

We asked:

Guidance for deepening our own knowing of ourselves this week, speaking from our own truth with love and compassion in difficult situations as needed.

We received:

Hexagram 55 - Fēng - Abundance, Fullness, Abounding

Changing Lines 3 & 4

Becoming Hexagram 24 - Fù - Returning, Return, The Turning Point

In the moment depicted by Hexagram 55, there is some kind of abundance, most likely in the case of this week, an abundance of feeling, and more specifically an abundance of emotion. Emotion is a feeling with a story. When it is just a feeling, a sense of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, it can move easily without much input or thought. When, however, the feeling has the added layer of story, when it becomes an emotion, it tends to have a much bigger impact, a deeper root, a longer wave.

This week is bringing us the opportunity to experience the fullness, the ripeness and the fruit of emotional story. Can you let such fullness return you to yourself? Can you allow the story to run like a river, completing itself through an offering to the sea of being instead of damning the river and flooding the plain, covering all around with mud?

With the components of thunder and inner light found in this hexagram, you do have what it takes to shine through change, to contain and hold the enormity of thunder without losing touch with the ground, the inner radiance of your heart even as you are challenged with the surging waters all around. More than ever, this week, there is a lot to contend with inside and out, so much opportunity to get to know ourselves, and so much opportunity to engage with others.

In our changing lines, Lines 3 & 4, we are reminded that both change and our capacity for impact are momentary. You may miss the moment when good influence is possible if you resist what lies before you. In Line 3, you may find yourself shocked, stopped, stilled, by the enormity of circumstances and you may need to trust that such a shock will, in the end, produce benefit by releasing the past, and opening you to what is possible in the future.

In Line 4, similarly, you will want to hold to your own knowing, keeping your own counsel even, as things around you dissolve in darkness. You may feel cut off from the outside, but again, you are always able to find the inner light, to re-calibrate via the inner compass in times of strife or darkness. You have a greater purpose here in this body and on this earth. Finding and staying connected with that greater purpose is the subject of our becoming hexagram, Hexagram 24.

In hexagram 24 you return to yourself, find your way back to what is true. In returning you find your way into your own heart, your true connection to yourself. You might be testing that connection by moving away or by showing yourself to the world, coming and going and acknowledging what is beginning to grow in you, what you want to relinquish, what you regret, or what you might wish to carry no longer. In order to return to yourself, you might have to be willing to keep still, to accept this moment when you can do nothing more than return to yourself.

Strangely, it is also a moment when you may realize that you lost your way with yourself as you simultaneously realize you are back. You may be considering whether you should go on in the old way, defending yourself or picking up familiar strategies to deal with your obstacles. You are at once willing to move forward and able to see the ways you may have blocked your own progress. This is exactly the wisdom you have been seeking. More on Hexagram 24 in this post from December 2025.

In service of consolidating your own wisdom, you can use the essential oil of Fir. Fir will bring you more into your body, strengthen your capacity to ground energy, open the chest, and expand your capacity to receive. As you inhale Fir, you will know the experience of opening to space, to heaven, breathing it in deeply. As you exhale, you will feel more deeply the heat of your heart returning to you depths, bringing the light of heaven and the fire of earth together in every cell. Just like a lightening rod attracts the lightening that follows thunder, the light of heaven is magnetized by the iron in your blood. Such light opens the heart bringing your capacity for radiance alive.

Fir is sweet and cooling, balancing the intense light of heaven with the sweet smell of earth. As a middle note, you can use it every 4-6 hours to deepen and expand the breath and the sensation of being a body on the earth. As a needle oil, it sharpens our awareness of breath instantly and connects us deeply with the earth just as the sitting under a tree might do. When the breath deepens and the roots of your awareness penetrate the earth beneath you, you become completely full and empty simultaneously. This is the true meaning of abundance.