Hexagram 9, Small Taming

The figure

Five strong lines and one soft one. Heaven sits below, the father, the creative force, all push. Above it sits Wind, the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating. The whole figure is a sky full of power with a breeze moving across the top of it.

That one broken line in the fourth place is the point of the picture. One small yielding line holding back five strong ones. It cannot stop them. It can slow them, turn them a little, keep them from rushing off before the moment is ready. The old picture is clouds gathering in the west with no rain falling yet. Everything is building and nothing has broken.

Small Taming is paired with Hexagram 10, Treading, which turns the figure upside down and puts the one soft line in the third place with Heaven above.

When it comes up in a reading

When I cast this one I take it as a message about scale. You have real force available to you and this is a moment for using very little of it. The big move can wait. What this moment offers is the small adjustment, the quiet word, the thing you can do today that nobody will notice until much later.

I think of it as the breeze and the sail. You cannot shove a boat across the water with your hands. You trim the sail a few centimetres and let the wind do the shoving. Small Taming says the wind is up and the trimming is your job.

It also says be patient with the gap between effort and result. The clouds are heavy and the rain has not come. People hate this stage. They want to see something for their work. The hexagram asks you to keep making the small corrections while the sky does whatever it is doing, and to trust that the rain comes when it is ready and never a minute before.

If your question was about a person, it usually means you win them with example and with gentle return to the point, over and over, without heat. If the question was about a project, the answer is refine what you have. Do not launch the big thing. Fix the small thing that is slightly wrong and then the next one.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are someone who improves things by being near them. You work with the grain. You notice the small thing that is off, you nudge it, and six months later the whole room runs better and nobody can say exactly why.

You persuade without pushing. You outlast arguments. You shape by suggestion, by doing it well yourself, by coming back to the point with the same mild voice until it lands. Editors, coaches, mentors, the person in an office who quietly fixes the process everyone else complains about. That is your shape.

Your gift is influence without domination. Things get better under your hand and the people involved still feel it was their idea. That is rare and it is worth a great deal.

The shadow is frustration. The method that works for you is slow and some days you want to see movement, and the temptation is to copy the louder people and shove. In my experience that is exactly when the small method was about to pay off. The other shadow is that your work goes uncredited because it never had a dramatic moment anyone could point to. Learning to say "I did that" without apology is part of growing into this hexagram.

At maturity you look back across decades of small corrections and the sum is enormous. Whole professions, families and communities are better because you were in them. Nobody will give you a medal for it. You will know.

If a line moves

When one of the six lines is moving, I read where it sits before I read anything else. The two lower lines are the beginning of the matter, the first attempts at restraint and the urge to return to where you started. The two middle lines are the heart of it, the point where the one soft line is doing the holding and where the strongest pull toward rushing lives. The two upper lines are the end of it, where the rain is finally close, and where the warning is about going too far and pushing past the moment the restraint was for. The moving line then changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, which is where the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page walks through it with a worked example.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives you Wind and Heaven on their own. The Chinese Astrology section has the yin and yang this whole book is built on. In the tarot I put Small Taming beside the Strength card, the woman closing the lion's mouth with her hand and no whip in sight. That pairing is my own and I would not press it harder than that.

Where in your life are you pushing when a nudge would do?

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