Like a mouth wide open, this hexagram stares around us. Fearful, insatiable. Or also: accepting, open and ready for anything….
It’s not so easy to make a decision and then trust it. To trust that things will fall into place. That I will be fed, nourished with everything I need.
This trust asks a lot of me: to trust in non-action. To accept and take in what is presented to me. Without judgment, without excitement, without emotional turmoil.
And then? Then maybe it’s time to let go again: Letting go of what I no longer need. What has become superfluous. Maybe also – once again! – to let go of control.
Case Study
So far, so good – but how do we deal with this hexagram in a very concrete way? Take, for example, the situation described by a user who is struggling to work with a self-absorbed and manipulative colleague who repeatedly interferes with her work. She writes: “So far, I’ve been able to set boundaries and stay focused on my actual tasks. But this colleague keeps inserting himself. I don’t want to get drawn into his games, nor do I want to fall back into my old (victim) pattern. How can I stay true to myself and accomplish something?”
The wide open mouth of hexagram 27 – Providing Nourishment – this gaping jaw – easily tempts us to just swallow everything. And that’’’s precisely what the user has done by focusing on her own work and remaining silent.
But even the act of putting something into our mouth is a decision (lower trigram Zhen, the thunder). If something doesn’t tastes right, we instinctively spit it out – because most of the time, it doesn’t agree with us. It’s no different in human relationships. We’re offered things – words, gestures, actions – and we have a choice: we can accept, or we can reject. Sometimes it takes a moment of stillness for our feelings to point us in the right direction. But if we pause and listen within (first and second core characters: Kun, the earth), those feelings quickly signal whether something is nourishing us – or not.
And then the mouth speaks again – with words that express what we’re feeling inside. Yet many people have trained themselves to be strong by remaiig silent. They swallow what hurts. Say nothing. Out of consideration. Out of habit. Sometimes out of fear.
But silence is often difficult to interpret. If we don’t react, others tend to assume everything is fine. That’s why it sometimes takes conscious self-discipline: to take our feelings seriously, to trace them inward – and to give them a voice. Not only for ourselves, but also as a signpost for those around us. For only when we speak up, only when we give form to our inner truth, can those who lack sensitivity begin to understand: something is Wrong. A line has been crossed.
This is also a way to read Gen, the mountain – the upper trigram: we let go of something that was momentarily inside us. We let it go because we feel, deeply, that it doesn’t belong to us. Like biting into a rotten piece of fruit – we cannot and should not swallow it. Instead, we give it back to the world, making it clear: This isn’t for me. This is not mine.
A brief excursion into the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan (see below) can be illuminating here. He argues that we need to “symbolize” what we experience – in other words, we must put it into language. It may sound abstract, but at its core, it’s simple: feelings only find their place when we give them words. Only then can we work with them. Keep them – or maybe just let them go.
Thus, the gaping mouth reveals itself not only as a place of ingestion – but also as a mouth that speaks. One that articulates clearly, loudly, and truthfully what is moving within us.
Further Questions on Hexagram 27
- A user asks: “What should I do regarding a man, who I would like to know better?”
- For more than a year, a user has been dealing with all kinds of challenges: selling her house, finding an apartment, a new job, a new relationship. She asks: “What else should and/or must I do?” She suffers from the uncertainty of the situation and constantly encounters blockages. And: slowly she feels very exhausted.
Excursus: I Ching and Psychoanalysis
Hexagram 27 – Providing Nourishment
Keywords: The Unconscious as Structuring Principle | The Symptom as Message | Symbolization and Oral Fixation
Is the open mouth of Hexagram 27 – Nutrition – a sign of insatiable greed, or an expression of willing openness? These are the kinds of questions this hexagram invites us to ask. Am I willing to receive? Do I dare to trust – in life, in the Other, in what is offered to me? Am I able to acknowledge my neediness – or do I want to devour everything that is offered?
Depending on how we answer, a crucial distinction emerges: between trust and lack. A posture of trust allows us to receive what is given – without demand, without control. A posture of lack, on the other hand, turns us into devouring subjects, desperately trying to silence the emptiness within.
What the subject takes in – words, images, meanings – shapes him. Everything we take in becomes part of us: either consciously, or as part of the unconscious. According to Jacques Lacan, the unconscious is not a dark reservoir of drives (as it is often read in Freud), but a structuring principle, comparable to language. It consists of signifiers – linguistic-like elements that shift, combine, and overlap. Sometimes, messages from the unconscious reach us – in dreams, slips of the tongue, fantasies – in those places where language and meaning are “out of sync.”
But some of what we take in is indigestible. If we cannot symbolize it – if language breaks down, if meaning becomes blocked or entangled – it appears as a symptom.
In our symptoms, we can trace the path of our desire. Each symptom speaks a particular truth – a coded message from the unconscious. Lacan describes the symptom as a condensed and disguised form of unconscious truth. Only those willing to listen will recognize: what disturbs me is also what speaks through me. A subject who remains fixated on what he think he “needs” can no longer hear this message. They miss what the unconscious is trying to say.
Everything we are able to absorb and symbolize can be transformed – into meaning, expression, insight. And only when we are able to “digest” in this symbolic way can we also let go of what no longer nourishes us – in order to make new space within ourselves.
For the maturity of the subject does not lie in having everything, but in having space – space even for the constitutive lack itself.
The overview page for this hexagram can be found here:
https://www.no2do.com/hexagramme_en/788887.htm
