Hexagram 39, Obstruction

The figure

Mountain sits in the lower trigram, still and immovable, and Water lies above it. Water wants to run downhill and the mountain is in its way. The old picture is a steep slope in front of you and a deep flood behind. This is a hard place to be standing.

But look at the two trigrams on their own for a moment. Mountain is keeping still, and Water is the abyss, depth and danger. Put them together and the lesson is already in the figure. When you are in deep water in front of a mountain, the one thing that helps is to stop.

Obstruction is paired with Hexagram 40, Deliverance, which is the same figure turned upside down and is the storm that finally breaks and lets everything move. The block and the release, side by side.

When it comes up in a reading

When Obstruction answers your question, you are blocked, and pushing will not clear it. The first instinct in front of a wall is to push harder, and this is one of the few hexagrams where the book says, in effect, do not. The obstacle in front of you is the kind that yields to patience, to a change of route, or to help. Force only bruises you.

The first piece of guidance is to turn around and look at yourself. The book is quite specific that in a time of Obstruction the useful work is inward. Why are you here? What in your own approach has put you in front of this particular mountain? I have found that a block is often a mirror, and the people who get through fastest are the ones who look in the mirror first.

The second piece is to seek help. A friend, an elder, a person who has crossed this ground before. The water at your feet is too deep to wade alone and the mountain is too steep to climb alone, and there is no shame in that. In my experience the person who refuses help here is usually protecting their pride, and pride is a poor rope.

The third piece is to go around. The direct path is closed. There is almost always another one, longer and less dignified, and it is the one that opens. The water will find its way off the mountain eventually by flowing around it. You can too.

As a birth hexagram

If Obstruction is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you have met more than your share of walls. Your life has included serious barriers, and you have developed an unusual skill at working with them. You save your energy for what will move and find the way around, the way with, the gap that opens when the obvious road is shut.

You may have come up through hard circumstances, poverty, illness, a family that did not work, institutions that stood in your way. Those years built a resourcefulness that an easier life would never have produced. You can keep going under constraint that stops other people cold, and your persistence has a habit of producing results nobody predicted. Your gift is resilience and resourcefulness together, and it is a formidable pairing.

The shadow is making a home in the struggle. When you have spent so long getting around obstacles that it has become your identity, you can start finding walls where there were none. Your work across a life is to accept help as readily as you give it. Obstruction natives are often magnificent at helping and terrible at being helped, and the hexagram is clear that you cannot do all of this alone and were never meant to.

At maturity you have learned a great deal from a life of blocked roads and you spend it on other people who have just met theirs. The patience, the resourcefulness and the hard won willingness to be helped add up to something substantial.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Obstruction, read where it sits first. The lower lines are the start of the matter, the first sight of the wall and the choice between pushing on and waiting. The middle lines are its heart, the deep of the difficulty, the turning inward and the going for help. The upper lines are its end, the obstacle at its height and the arrival of the help or the change of route that finally lets you through, together with the warning against going on alone when you no longer need to. 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

Water and Mountain each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The Chinese Astrology section's Yin and Yang page is the place to read about stillness as a response to danger. In the tarot I set Obstruction beside the Eight of Swords, the figure bound among the blades who could step out if she looked down, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

What is the wall you keep pushing, and who have you not yet asked for help with it?

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