Hexagram 33, Retreat

The figure

Picture a mountain with the whole sky above it. The sky can lift away from the peak whenever it likes, and in this figure it does. Two broken lines at the bottom are the small and the yielding pushing up from below, and the four solid lines above them are the strong moving out of their way with no fuss at all.

That is the picture of a wise withdrawal. The strong thing declines to argue with the rising tide. It steps back to higher ground, keeps its shape, and waits. The mountain stays where it is, still and solid, so the retreat has something firm to stand on.

Retreat is paired with Hexagram 34, Great Power, which is the same six lines turned upside down, and I like that the book puts the stepping back right beside the full strength.

When it comes up in a reading

When Retreat answers your question, the book is telling you that this is not your moment to push. The conditions have turned. Something small and persistent is gaining ground, and meeting it head on would cost you more than it is worth.

I want to be clear about what kind of retreat this is. It is a step back with your head up and your eyes open, the way a good general pulls troops off ground that cannot be held. It is timed. It is orderly. It keeps everything that matters and leaves behind only what was never going to be held anyway. You are choosing where the next conversation happens.

In practice this often looks very ordinary. Leave the argument before it becomes a fight. Decline the meeting. Let the email sit a day. Stop explaining yourself to someone who has decided not to understand. In my experience the hardest part is the ego, because a step back feels like losing, and it takes a certain amount of growing up to see that it is often the only move that wins.

The question to ask yourself is what you are protecting by stepping away. If the answer is your energy, your peace or your capacity to act well later, the retreat is sound. If the answer is that you simply cannot bear the discomfort, that is a different thing, and we will come to it.

As a birth hexagram

If Retreat is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are someone who knows when to disengage. You do not take the bait. You can watch a provocation go past like a bus you had no intention of catching.

You have good timing. You can feel when a room has turned, when a situation has stopped being useful, when your presence has started to make things worse. That feeling is part of your native kit, and the gift that comes with it is strategic sense. Your withdrawals tend to free you for better things.

The shadow is avoidance dressed as wisdom. Both look the same from the outside. Both involve you walking out the door. The difference is why. Principled retreat leaves because the ground cannot be held. Avoidance leaves because the ground is uncomfortable, and some ground has to be stood on whatever it costs. Your work across a life is learning to tell those two apart in the moment, and I will say that this does not get easier, you just get more practised at it.

At maturity you have preserved a great deal of yourself through a lifetime of wise exits, and you have spent that preserved strength in the few engagements that mattered. The battles you did not fight are what gave you the strength for the ones that counted.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Retreat, read where it sits before anything else. The lower lines are the start of the matter, the retreat barely begun, often when it is already a bit late to be gracious about it. The middle lines are its heart, the withdrawal itself, and how cleanly you manage to let go. The upper lines are its end, the retreat completed and the question of whether you have gone too far and left something behind that should have come with you. The moving line then changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to do that step by step.

Across the traditions

The two trigrams here, Heaven and Mountain, each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The push and pull of the yielding against the strong is the subject of the Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section. In the tarot I find myself putting Retreat beside The Hermit, who also steps back from the crowd and takes his lamp with him, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

What are you still standing in that you could simply walk away from?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.