Insight Delay

What do you do if your reading
doesn’t resonate yet?

A Hundred Thousand Lost Coins
Aside from doing Yijing and poetry, I am also a professional translator, and I have been doing translations from English to Filipino (or reversed). So when a friend outsourced me to do a translation project, it was a good opportunity and the pay was bigger than I expected. But I still wondered if the project was ideal, so I did a reading, and I got this cryptic line from Hexagram 51:

‘Shock comes, danger.
A hundred thousand lost coins.
Climb up the nine hills, don’t give chase.
On the seventh day, gain

Hexagram 51, Line 2 (translation by Hilary Barrett)

I got baffled. Right before the reading, I already assessed the document I was about to translate, and I thought it was doable in no time. With a big pay ahead, losing a hundred thousand coins sounded weirdly opposite. I still pursued the project while still figuring out what my Yijing reading meant.

But within the following week, the translation project went too complicated, and I even foresaw that I would spend another 2 weeks just to finish it. By then I forgot about the reading until suddenly I recalled a philosophical joke I received via text 8 years prior:

Once a man asked God: “What’s a million years to you?”
God said: “A second.”
The man asked God again: “What’s a million dollars to you?”
God said: “A cent.”
So the man said to God: “Would you give me a cent?”
God stopped and said: “OK, wait a second.”

Modified from this Reddit version

The moment I recalled it, I saw in my mind’s eye the image of little gold coins turned suddenly into “seconds”. After a week, the Yijing reading made sense: I didn’t lose a hundred thousand coins (because I earned big from that project); instead, I lost a hundred thousand seconds. (2 weeks is equal to 604,800 seconds).

It was time and not money that I lost. Still, I was happier after, since I earned more than enough money to enroll in a Yijing workshop.

Insight Delay
I would confidently say that 90% of my clients receive their clear insights immediately during the session. (Or even in short written readings). But there are rare times that 10% of them end up unsure and clueless about what their reading is all about. Insight delay happens, even for me. Getting the Yijing insight after a few days is the fastest for me. Some of my readings got delayed days or weeks after.

I am completely aware that the same thing happens to my clients. In the early years of my practice, I failed to assure them, since I was yet to figure out how to deal with this insight delay. However, after several weeks, months, even after a year, they would come back to me, telling me that their reading happened exactly as it was revealed. So in hindsight, the reading was so accurate for them, it just didn’t come to them during the session.

Cause of Delay
Deep down, I always trust Yijing’s uncanny capacity to reveal, yet in very few cases of insight delay, I tried to contemplate its most plausible cause. I slowly discovered a common pattern: an unspoken yet intense expectation of the desired answer.

What goes into this expectation? Usually, it happens before the reading, when our mind thinks the Yijing will reveal the answers we want to hear. Or if the mind tries to analyze certain meanings to appropriate for the desired answer.

I experienced this in my readings where I had insight delay, and my mind struggled to make sense of the text and symbols in those readings. And me being sensitive to energy and nonverbals, I also clearly sensed the same struggle from my clients.

Grasping the Moon
To confirm my insight, I did a confirmatory reading, and I got Hexagram 14, Great Possession. Funny because this reading is a classic example of insight delay itself – it took me 2 days before the answer dawned on me, right after reading this explanation by Master Alfred Huang on the ideograph or the ancient Chinese script of Da You. While da 大 means big or great, you 有 is insightfully revelatory:

The second ideograph consists of two parts. The upper part suggests the image of a hand with three fingers open as in the act of grasping something. Underneath the hand is the ideograph of a moon.
The whole image presents a picture of a hand in the act of grasping a
moon.

It is interesting that early on, you meant “not appropriate to possess.” The ancient Chinese knew that during a lunar eclipse the moon was taken away and the world fell into darkness. In this context they created the ideograph of you, reflecting the transitory nature of possession, and taught people that it was not right to appropriate other’s possessions. Later on, people forgot about the instruction of the inappropriateness of possession and you came to simply mean “possess.”

Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching

That was a lightbulb moment. This image of a hand trying to grasp the moon is surreal and impossible if done literally (though forced perspective photography and holding a scale model do the trick). It echoes exactly the expectation that my clients and I often had on our readings. The moon – the insight – is already there, but it’s not for grasping at all. Since the moon takes its precise waxing time to get full, I suppose the answer/insight we expect from a Yijing reading does the same.

Dealing with the Delay
It’s important not to perceive insight delay as a wrong turnout. In fact, in the same reading, Line 1 in Hexagram 14 says:

Hexagram 14, Line 1
No interaction with what is harmful,
In no way at fault,
So that hardship is not a mistake.

(translation by Hilary Barrett)

Hardship is not a mistake means there is nothing wrong if your mind wrestles with insight delay. This important attitude is also a way to trust Yijing’s synchronistic timing – how the insight reveals in the right place at the right time.

Not Grasping = Surrendering
It is impossible to grasp the moon, so the opposite of grasping is to open one’s palm. In the blog post Surrender to Insights, I discussed the act of opening one’s palms as a way to open one’s heart. This is a crucial attitude of surrender. It is surrendering to the exact timing the insight arrives, the amount of time it may take to arrive, and the form the insight takes to reveal itself. This opening is done right before the reading, but it can also be adapted in times when insight delay happens.

If you already received a reading from me, and you have experienced an insight delay, my communication channel is always open to help you process your insight. Your reading is always a timeless piece of insight that we can always explore and unearth anytime. It doesn’t remain stuck and trapped in the reading session or our chat exchange; instead, it opens new doors of revelation, richer than what you have intended it to give. I am always ready to help you out.

Message me on my messenger or on my page.

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