Coaching Through Yijing

How does a Yijing session work
as a coaching process?

How Coaching Works
I first discussed the shared purpose of divination and coaching in the previous post, and I realized that I needed more space and words to explore how coaching exactly works in every Yijing session. Since coaching is complex and diverse as a discipline, I intended to explain it in the simplest manner possible. And I found an exact material to work on this explanation.

I believe the most accessible and engaging in discussing coaching is Ajit Nawalkha’s Evercoach. Nawalkha co-founded Mindvalley with Vishen Lakhiani, and both are well-known names in the industry of educational self-improvement and spirituality. After a few searches on YouTube, I found this video that aptly discusses what I need:

5 Stages
Here’s a summary of all these 5 stages that makes coaching work:

• Stage 1: Awareness
• Stage 2: Vision
• Stage 3: The Plan
• Stage 4: The Journey
• Stage 5: Success

My Yijing divination process and the coaching process Nawalkha described here have crucial parallels, almost like a mirror image. I will discuss them in each segment, so you can appreciate how the coaching process practically applies in my Yijing reading sessions.

Stage 1: Awareness
In the video, Nawalkha explains client awareness as a beginning point of a coaching session:

It’s crucial to understand where your client is coming from, their current state and challenges, and why they reached out to you in the first place.

For me to fully empathize with my client’s dilemma and confusion is to work on a technique I refer to as the inquiry process. This is how I apply Stage 1. My imperative is to listen to the client’s concerns and ask and take note of his/her stories, reflections, and other contexts from which his/her question arises. It also helps me to clarify and rephrase the question, for better anchoring of insights during the reading.

Stage 2: Vision
Nawalkha says that without a vision, coaching “is like driving without a direction”. He continues:

No map, GPS or Waze can help you if you don’t have the destination. You just end up going around in circles. This stage is about bringing clarity to where your client wants to go.

I presume that coaching in general, as described here, is bent on finding the exact intention, target, wish, goal, or dream. They are all good in the context of deeper work that a coaching process requires.

However, in the context of Yijing divination, “vision” is not about just doing (accomplishing) or having (achieving) something alone. The experience is about being, about the client’s state of mind and thinking process, and also the natural way of seeing and sensing. It is primarily a psychospiritual objective. It is finding first the clearest light of understanding one’s situation before making any move or achieving any goal.

Thus, the vision of intuitive clarity echoes this coaching stage. Intuitive, since intuition is the act of trusting one’s inner knowledge and wisdom; and clarity, because that is the necessary state and quality to discerning them. (I will write more about intuitive clarity in a future post) .

Stage 3: The Plan
To Nawalkha, this coaching stage is about creating a roadmap to help the client reach the vision from his/her current state. He says:

As a coach, provide tools for your client to come up with a solution on how to get to their vision.

As a decision-making coach, my reliable divination tool to help the client get into a state of intuitive clarity is the Yijing method itself. It has surpassed more than 3 millennia of effective use.

The roadmap here, therefore, is the simplest steps of randomly generating and interpreting specific Yijing symbols and text, so the client resolves his/her current state of confusion, doubts, and dilemmas after discerning clear and exact insights revealed by the reading.

Stage 4: The Journey
Nawalkha says that this stage is “where the magic happens.” He explored this stage in detail, but I mainly highlighted this one:

For coaches, it’s the stage where you support your client’s experience through that road. And it’s the stage where your clients need you most because this will set apart the successes.

In a Yijing session, this exactly is where the magic happens, as I begin to support the client through a comprehensive interpretation of their reading. This is also the stage where we actually work together, giving the client the space to process the synchronistic realization of insights s/he is seeing between the details of inquiry and the details of Yijing reading.

Stage 5: Success
Nawalkha says this final coaching stage is where the client has finally “overcome the challenges” and “reached the vision”. But he also reminded us that this is not “the end of the road”. He continues:

Their life will continue and there will encounter new ambitions and new challenges along the way. How they decide to continue taking action in their lives will now be completely up to them.

In the Yijing session, this success part is when the client is experiencing intuitive clarity through a series of realizations and aha moments. It is also when the client gives their own feedback to the reading, confirming how insights from the Yijing accurately reveal the precise connections to one’s inquiry.

This part, therefore, is not just the end of the process, but the continuity of the client’s contemplation of received insights. Becoming clear enough on the newfound answers, it is now up to the client to finally act on one’s intuitive clarity.

Side by side
These 5 stages of how coaching works are exactly parallel with my 5 step Yijing divination process:

5 STAGES of COACHING	5 STEPS of YIJING SESSION
Stage 1: Awareness Know the client’s current situation	Step 1: Inquiry Help the client clarify the question
Stage 2: Vision Help the client identify the goal	Step 2: Casting Guide the client’s state of surrender
Stage 3: The Plan Give the client the necessary tools	Step 3: Reading Show the client the reading method
Stage 4: The Journey Support the client’s journey	Step 4: Interpretation Interpret the reading for the client
Stage 5: Success Client overcomes the challenge	Step 5: Feedback Client confirms revealed insights

Coaching and Yijing
So that’s the basic bridge between the contemporary discipline of coaching and the ancient discipline of Yijing divination. You can somehow picture how my divination steps happens as a coaching process. But if you want to walk through the 5-step process, please check out this detailed post.

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