Xie — Thunder and Rain Arise, the Hundred Fruits, Grasses, and Trees All Burst Their Shells. The Rain That Trapped You for Three Years Has Stopped. You Push Open the Door — the Air Outside Has a Freshness Whose Smell You'd Forgotten.
Last year you split with your former business partner. You didn't initiate it — he did. The day he brought it up you sat in your car for forty minutes without starting it. You told yourself you'd turn the page — you'd be faster than you imagined. A year has passed and you're still turning — your turning isn't forward, your turning is grinding back and forth on the same page. Last week you heard through a friend of a friend that his new project raised a second round — your hand clenched without you noticing. The clench of your hand is a sign your inner war hasn't stopped — on the outside battlefield the ceasefire was signed, inside your own heart the street fighting continues. What you're wounded by isn't your money — your trust was emptied by your boldest investment. You don't dare invest in another partner — your courage got gambled away with all your ammunition in your last battle. Your courage didn't truly vanish — your courage got detained at the last checkpoint — you couldn't bring it out with you. Xie — Thunder over Water. Zhen thunder above, Kan water below. Thunder strikes above, rain falls below. After thunder and rain collide — the clouds scatter. The clouds scattered not because the problem was solved — the clouds scattered because lightning and thunder released the water and charge that had been pressing down in the air. Xie doesn't help you win your battle — Xie lets you leave your battlefield.
Xie — Thunder over Water. Zhen thunder above, Kan water below. Zhen is movement, thunder, the first quake of spring. Kan is water, danger, the pit that trapped you for so long. Thunder over water — this is the power of thunder piercing through the water's encasement. Thunder strikes above water — the water is shaken open. Your difficulty is your water — water traps you. Thunder comes — thunder doesn't drain the water. Thunder uses its vibration to scatter the water — after the water in your container gets shaken into mist you realize you weren't surrounded by water, you've been standing on dry ground all along. The Judgment: Xie, favorable to go southwest. No place to go — returning to your original place brings good fortune. If there is a place to go — going early brings good fortune. Favorable to go southwest — the same direction as Jian. You and the Jian you are the same person — in the Jian period you changed direction. In the Xie period your direction has already begun to have roads you can walk. Six characters are the core — no place to go, returning to your original place brings good fortune. Not going far away — just return to your original position, auspicious. You no longer need to keep running. Your release is not somewhere farther away — it's in the very place you stand. If there is a place to go — going early brings good fortune. If you have somewhere you should go — go early, early goes well. The thing you've been delaying — do it today. Xie is telling you your waiting is not your buffer — your waiting is your rust. Your blade rusts when left in the sheath too long. Draw it today — your blade is still bright. The Tuan Commentary: Xie, danger leads to movement, movement then avoids the danger. You moved because you fell into danger — once you move you escape your danger. Your movement is your thunder. Your thunder is not outside — it's inside your body.
Xie is not about you winning — it's about you no longer needing to win. You untie the rope you tied around yourself. You let go not because the other person deserves forgiveness — you deserve to be released by yourself.
Is Your Letting Go a True Release — Or Have You Found a More Hidden Way to Keep Punishing Yourself
- Is your inability to let go because you're still waiting for an apology from them — or you're using the apology you'll never receive as an excuse to stay in place. Your former boss did something to you when you left — in the company-wide email he reduced your three years of contributions to just the result of your final project. Your contribution was erased. You waited eight months for his apology — none came. He doesn't apologize not because he doesn't know — he doesn't apologize because his apology within your old company's system equals him publicly admitting his management had problems. Your apology will never come. What you're waiting for isn't an apology — you're waiting for him to become someone you don't recognize before your eyes — you think he'll change. He won't change. In the second week of your eighth month you wrote four words in your journal — I don't want to wait anymore. Your four words are a release certificate you issued to yourself. From that day on you stopped checking your WeChat to see if he might, by some coincidence, send you a sorry. Your not waiting is not your weakness — it's your bandwidth reclaimed so you can finally cache something else. Your new thing during the eight months of waiting was pushed to the last page you'd never have time to look at — your new thing got opened the day after you stopped waiting.
- You can't let go of a relationship — do you still love him, or can't you accept that you invested your entire youth's trial-and-error cost into one person. Seven years — from freshman year to now. You gave him the cleanest trust from the first third of your life. His final year he became colder toward you — not an affair, he slowly downgraded himself in your life to someone you only saw each weekend. You initiated the breakup — you initiated it because if you didn't you'd suffocate in the gray he gave you. After the breakup you found yourself still looking at your old photos — you scrolled to your first photo together from freshman year. What you cried about wasn't missing him — you cried seeing yourself in that photo. Your eyes back then were full of light — now when you look in the mirror your light is at half brightness. Your light didn't dim because of him — your light dimmed because you tied your own value to his attitude toward you. Once he no longer had an attitude toward you, your self-valuation fell from your own hands into his silence. In his silence you can't pick up your value. Your not letting go is not your deep love — it's that you haven't pulled yourself back from your attachment to him. You pull yourself back not by cursing him — you pull yourself back by recreating something in your life that has nothing to do with him. You signed up for that pottery class you wanted to take in college but he said was useless to learn. Your first bowl came out crooked — your crooked bowl is something you made yourself, with not a dime's relation to him. Your crooked bowl is the first tick mark of your self-valuation beginning to climb back up in your own hands.
- Is your obsession with something because you think just one more push will bring a turnaround — are you really almost there, or are you self-deceiving at a fake finish line you've been drawing for yourself for twenty years. When you were seven your dad told you you'd never match your older brother. That sentence of yours looped in your brain for thirty years. At thirty-five you are already the youngest director in your company — you are still proving. The person you're proving to is not your boss — the person you're proving to is the man sitting across from you when you were seven. Sixty percent of your career investment is healthy — forty percent is you using your full strength to fill the hole your dad dug when you were seven. Your forty percent is a bottomless pit — your dad won't delete that sentence from his memory because of your title today. When he said it he himself didn't know that sentence would grow on you for thirty years. Your Xie moment — you discover the hole you've been filling for thirty years can never be filled because your shovel of dirt shouldn't have been dug from your career achievements. Your hole needs you to put down your shovel — look straight at your seven-year-old self, tell them it's not your fault. Your seven-year-old self, in your words, stopped crying for the first time. Your release is not in next quarter's performance metrics — it's in the day you dare to stand in front of your dad without worrying what he thinks of you. That day arrives when you no longer need his approval — your not needing is a system you spent thirty years building for yourself. Your system can run without your dad's external power supply. You are free — your freedom wasn't given by your company.
- Is your inability to relax because your environment is too tight — or has your self-punishment become a background process you can't shut down. Every time you're happy for more than half a day you feel a faint unease — you feel you don't deserve it. Your not-deserving is a program your family left in your memory from childhood. Your program has run in the background for thirty years — whenever you're happy your program auto-pops up to remind you to check what you haven't done right. Your program keeps you from seeing how excellent you already are — in your program's eyes your excellence is just what you should be doing. Your should in your logic is the basis for why you don't deserve any extra reward. Your Xie is not your boss praising you one more time — your Xie is your program being manually shut down by you for the first time. The day you manually shut it down you did nothing — you simply allowed yourself a whole weekend of doing nothing productive. Your weekend was yours — your program popped up once Friday night, you clicked ignore. After ignoring it your program popped up twice more — you ignored both. Sunday night you lay in bed — you felt no unease, you just felt you hadn't been this light in a very long time. Your lightness isn't from what you did on the weekend — it's that you finally canceled an auto-renewal that had been deducting from you for thirty years.
Common Breakers
- Thinking forgiveness means you must reconcile with them — you equate your forgiveness with having to return to the original relationship. In your understanding your boundaries mean if you forgive you have no right to build walls anymore. Your former best friend borrowed a large sum of money from you — two years and hasn't paid it back. Every time they post new purchases on social media your blood rushes to your head. You tell yourself they didn't mean it — they probably forgot. Your excusing them is you layering another coat of guilt over your own anger — you feel you shouldn't be angry at them. The consequence of you shouldn't be angry is your anger, smothered under your guilt, can't ferment. By the third year of fermenting your anger, one day you settled your account — you blocked your friend. Your blocking is not your forgiveness — your blocking is your release. Your release doesn't require you to first forgive them — you just need to stop spending your energy on matters with someone you no longer want any relationship with. Xie — pardon faults and forgive wrongs. What's pardoned is not the other's wrong — it's your own inertia of continuing to spend time on something that no longer has anything to do with you. Your time is your most expensive thing — don't keep spending it in a warehouse you don't plan to restock anymore.
- Thinking turning the page means pretending nothing happened — you covered your trauma with a layer of selective amnesia, and in the second year after covering it you discovered the ground beneath had rotted. Your previous boss replaced your position with someone you didn't know when you were four months pregnant. During your maternity leave your company offered you a position two levels below your original to return. You went back — you told yourself let the past be past. Your past didn't pass — your grievance stayed pressed down in your body. You pressed for two years — in the third year, during a meeting completely unrelated to this matter, you suddenly lost emotional control. Your loss of control wasn't triggered by the meeting — your past, after two years of being pressed, spontaneously exploded through your most careless crack. Your turning the page is not avoiding looking at where you were wounded — it's looking at where you were wounded, and admitting it's a wound. After admitting, your wound started having space to scab the day you admitted it. Your pretend-forgetting kept your wound soaking in the wetness of your self-deception — your wound in that hydration could never scab. Your scab only started growing on your wound after you admitted you were wronged — your scab is your body telling you your healing has begun.
- Feeling that not letting go is deep love — your deep love in your self-perception is a virtue, you're locked inside your virtue and can't get out. A year after the breakup you're still scrolling your ex's social media — every time you see photos of them with someone new you feel awful but you can't stop. Your viewing is an addiction — your addiction makes you feel that still caring about them means your feelings are still alive. Your feelings are not feelings — your feelings are your habit. Your habit is pulling the same thorn out of your finger every day to look at it again — when you pull it out it hurts for a moment, the pain makes you feel you still love them. Your love ended the day you broke up — you just didn't let them leave. They moved on long ago — it's you who glued the soles of your shoes to the last station you shared. Your not letting go is not your love — it's you being afraid to face the empty spot in your life when you're alone. That spot when you were together was filled by them — after they left your spot is a hole. Your hole scares you — you're afraid the hole will swallow you from within yourself. You started filling your hole — you stopped finding out about them, you no longer know where they spent their birthday this year. After you stopped knowing their recent life you discovered your own life had quietly moved forward three stops without your noticing. Your hole is still there — but your hole got smaller in your new life. Your Xie is your habit breaking — your breaking is not your heart hardening, it's your heart beginning to leave room for the next person who hasn't arrived yet rather than the one who's already gone.
- Thinking release requires a big event — you're waiting for a decisive moment that will let you drop everything. Don't wait — your wait won't come. If you wait two years you'll discover those two years were wasted waiting — your release is not in the day you punch through the wall in front of you with one blow. Your release is in your daily, everyday small decisions. Today you decided not to open the social media of the person who makes you feel bad — you released for ten minutes today. Today you decided when thinking about that thing you'd only let yourself think for three minutes instead of your usual three hours — you released for two hours and fifty-seven minutes today. Your release is built from stacking small wins — not your grand flip. Xie — no place to go, returning to your original place brings good fortune. You don't need to go far to find your release — your release is in you returning to your own position every day. Your daily return to yourself — today you sat in your own position five minutes longer than yesterday. Your five minutes expand across your year — you discover you've already walked quite far within yourself. Your faraway is not outside — it's in the accumulation of the few extra steps you walk each day.
How Xie Plays Out in Career, Love, Personality, and Health — Signals of Release and the Way of Turning the Page
Career & Wealth
You got laid off last year. Not because you weren't good enough — your entire department was cut. When you saw your name in the layoff email your first reaction wasn't sadness — you went blank. In your second month you started looking — you looked for four months. You got to the final round three times and got cut — each time you got cut pushed your self-doubt deeper into your blood vessels. You started lowering your expectations — you lowered to the point where you'd take positions you used to look down on. Your lowering is not your pragmatism — your panic lowered your standards for you. After your fourth cut you sat on your sofa at home — you suddenly realized you'd been interviewing in the posture of someone who got laid off. Your posture wasn't confident — your posture carried a mark from your past failures, a mark your interviewer could see in your body language even when you weren't speaking. Your Xie is not immediately getting an offer better than your previous one — your Xie is first pulling yourself out of the psychological state of someone who got laid off. You spent a week not looking at job sites — you reorganized what in your past seven years you can truly bring to the table but never presented. In your second-week interview you no longer explained why you got laid off — you directly talked about what you can do for the next company. Your tone in your heart shifted from please give me a chance to here's what I can bring you. Your shift is not your resume changing — it's you lifting yourself out of victim mode. In the second month after you lifted yourself out you got a position similar to your original — not because your luck turned, but because you were no longer the person who got laid off. Xie wealth signal — your fortune started turning in your direction the moment you stopped believing you weren't worth anything.
Love & Relationship
You burned five years in your last relationship — he was your first love. Two months before proposing to you when you were twenty-five he disappeared — not vanished, told you he wasn't ready yet. For five years you kept thinking it was your fault — were you not good enough, did the part of you that most wanted security scare him away. Your self-analysis spun in your head for two years — you couldn't reach a conclusion that let you turn the page. You're not unable to move on — you're maintaining the last invisible thread connecting you to him by continuing to analyze him. Your thread is your rope — after he tied you he already let go on his side, you kept tying on your own. Your technique for tying yourself is more practiced than when he tied you back then — you tied your life into a version filled with his shadow. Your Xie is not meeting the next person — your Xie is you showing your rope to yourself. When you saw yourself pulling you smiled — your smile was the first signal of your release. Your release isn't that he was wrong — it's that your hand, after seeing it, let go. After you let go of your rope an empty spot opened in your life, one you previously used entirely for remembering him. Your empty spot is your first berth rented out to your new possibilities. The next person appeared when you stopped comparing them to your ex — you didn't compare because you forgot, it's because you no longer need quantification to judge whether your present is worth it. Your present's worth, after you started being good to yourself, no longer needs your comparison.
Personality
Xie personality — you are the person in your office who says out loud what everyone else is holding in. Your colleagues hold back in meetings — they're not holding back because they have no ideas, they don't dare be the first to speak in front of the boss. You spoke — what you said wasn't the most complete, but after you spoke the conference room's atmosphere got a switch loosened by your candor. After your switch got loosened, others started opening their mouths. Your gift is your courage — your courage early in your career was seen as you lacking steadiness. Your lack of steadiness five years later became the scarcest trait on your team — your boss discovered you're the only person he never has to work to guess what you're thinking. Xie personality's cost — you release pressure for others but you're not great at doing the same for yourself. In front of your friends you are your friends' emotional recycling bin — once your recycling bin's capacity gets full you have no recycling bin of your own to empty into. You're used to being needed — your habit leaves you no space of your own when your own emotions need processing. Your Xie is not stopping helping others — it's your being needed dropping one rank in your value ordering. Your new ordering puts yourself first — not selfishness, you realized last time after you let your emotions rot inside you you got angry at your best friend's birthday party over something extremely small. Your anger wasn't your friend's fault — the ash in your own furnace was nearly overflowing. From then on you reserved one evening a week for yourself — your evening you don't respond to anyone's messages. Your evening is your ash-clearing time — after clearing, your furnace burns brighter than when you were burning for others.
Health
After being suppressed by your former boss for two years, your body started showing a series of small problems you never expected, right when you thought you'd already adapted. Your sleep went from rock-solid to waking up automatically at 3 AM every two or three days. Your 3 AM is your subconscious still clocking in for work during your deepest sleep — your subconscious doesn't know you're no longer at that company. Your insomnia isn't your room being too bright — your body moved your daytime fear into your nighttime dreams. For the first three months after you left, your dreams were always you still at that company — in your dreams your former boss was still yelling at you. Your body's stress response system didn't update along with your resignation letter after your real-world danger was already removed. Xie health — your recovery needs not just that you stop going to work, but also that you give your body a clear signal that you are safe. Your signal is not you telling yourself in your head you can relax — your body doesn't believe your head. Your body's trusted source is your breath. At a fixed time each day — 3 PM — during what used to be your most tense time window, you did one thing. You sat in your room — you put your hand on your belly. You inhale for four counts — hold for four — exhale for six. Your breath tells your nervous system you are not on the battlefield. Your nervous system, on some day in your third week, for the first time at 3 PM did not activate your fight mode. Your breath is your Xie — when your body, exhaling, finally believed you, a tear you don't know why rolled down your face. Your tear is your body saying two words to you — thank you.
Classic Xie Verses and Their Real-World Reading
The Way of Release — A Xie Practical Guide
- Xie Pardon Self-Release Ritual — Write on a piece of paper the name of the person you can't let go of and everything you owe them or they owe you. Read it, burn it. Use this action to draw a line between you that neither of you needs to cross again.: You wrote down everything between you and your former business partner — what you feel he owes you, what you feel you owe him, what you think you should have done better — all on one piece of paper. Your paper filled a full page — your handwriting driven by emotion was one size larger than usual. You read it aloud — in your own voice you heard the words you've never said to anyone. While your voice echoed in your room you realized the person you've never forgiven — it wasn't him, it was yourself. Your paper in your ashtray got lit by your lighter — while your paper burned the firelight flickered in your eyes. After the firelight flashed twice in your eyes you watched your paper turn into a piece of black ash — your hatred and your self-punishment burned together with your paper. When you stood up you felt the weight that had been stuck in the spot slightly left of center in your chest had lightened — it didn't disappear, but it no longer blocks your breath. Your breath returned from seventy percent of your normal capacity to ninety-five percent. Your ritual is not your superstition — your body needed a man-made marker to tell your brain your old chapter has been turned to the last page. Your next page, without you even turning it, has already spread itself open before you — its opening doesn't need your eyes to find.
- Xie Movement-Release Method — Don't turn the page in your head, let your body move first. Each day do one thing completely unrelated to your predicament, something you've always wanted to do but kept putting off. Let your body tell your brain you're no longer in prison.: You picked one thing you've been saying for three years you'd do when you had time but never did — you went to the music school near your home and signed up for a term of lessons on the instrument you always wanted to learn. Your fingers plucking a string — the owner of your fingers is you, not the version of you still losing sleep over your last relationship. For that one hour you don't allow yourself to look at your phone — your hour is every minute occupied by your ten fingers and your two ears. In your sixth lesson you played a passage you yourself didn't find unpleasant — your melody is the first frequency released from the bandwidth your obsessive remembering occupied for the past month. You do this not because you love music — you do this using the movement of your hands to tell your trapped brain a command your brain needs: you're no longer there. When you practice you're in another space — your old memories won't follow you into your practice room. Your practice room is your new psychological anchor — your anchor is not waiting for an answer, your anchor is while you weren't waiting, your answer quietly assembled itself in your head. On the way home from your eighth lesson you suddenly realized you hadn't thought about her for three days. Your three days is your first patch of free land — your patch doesn't look big to you, but it's the first patch of all your future parcels.
- Xie Morning-Night Daily Clear — Before sleep each night, write in your phone notes one thing you should let go of today. Every morning when you wake, write one thing you no longer need to carry today. Your clearing starts from two words a day and becomes your annual uninstall.: You put your phone beside your pillow — your new habit is opening your notes before you turn off the light. Today you wrote — I won't blame myself today. These seven words are not your slogan — today during a meeting you discovered you misremembered one data point while presenting your proposal. The old you would have used the whole evening cursing yourself for misremembering — your previous-version self has already been fired by you tonight in advance. You continue writing — today I won't take that colleague I can't stand's ill intent to heart anymore. They are them — you are you, you're not responsible for burying their negative energy in your stomach. Your word count each day isn't much — two lines. The accumulation of your two lines when you scroll back after one month — you discover among your twelve months' volume you threw away seventy-three things you used to store on dedicated shelves in your heart. Your Xie daily practice is not you deceiving yourself — it's you watching yourself every day take one item out of your backpack and return it to the place where it wasn't yours to carry. Your backpack by the third month was much looser — your walking stride is lighter than three months ago by more than the weight of one self. Your lightness is not that you have less — it's that you have more of yourself.
Xie in Action — Common Questions
Q:My ex hurt me deeply — two years have passed, I thought I was fine, but last month I saw him on the street with his new girlfriend and I couldn't sleep for a whole week afterward. Is this normal? Will I never fully recover?
A:
It's normal. Your wound didn't fail to heal in two years — your wound already scabbed over, and your scab got one layer torn off by your own memory in the instant you saw him. The part under your skin that hasn't fully healed met the air — it hurt. Your pain is not your regression — your nerves, when you thought you were fine, told you it's still growing. Your whole week of insomnia is your body processing your information in the most primitive way — the image you saw on the street was too large, your brain needs a week to digest it. During this week don't judge your insomnia — your insomnia is not your failure, it's your brain processing your data. Your data finished processing on the evening of your seventh day — you fell asleep an hour earlier than the previous two days. The standard for your being fine is not that you never have any emotional reaction to him again — the standard for your being fine is the amplitude of your reaction dropping from last year's level nine to this year's level three. Your level three next year when you encounter something similar might drop to level one — your level one is you no longer needing to blame yourself for your reaction. You are not someone who can never recover — you have already recovered far more than you realize without noticing.
Q:My relationship with my mom has always been bad — she raised me with suppression-style parenting. I'm over thirty now and she still calls me out in front of everyone at family gatherings. Every time I go home for the New Year it feels like walking into torture. Should I cut ties with her completely?
A:
The key to your question isn't whether you should cut her off — the key is whether you can cut her off inside your heart. Your physical distance started the year you left home for work — your psychological distance never existed. Every time you go back you're still the teenage girl in your heart waiting for mom to praise you. Your little girl is still inside you — your little girl is not your weakness, she is the part of you that you haven't protected yet. Your Xie is not cutting off the legal mother-daughter relationship — your Xie is that when you stand before your mom your heart is no longer your teenage self. You are your current self — the person you built in another city who can stand without needing your mom's validation. At this year's family gathering, when she started her first line about you, you didn't lower your head like before. You looked into her eyes — you didn't talk back, and you didn't smile. You not talking back is not fear of her — it's you choosing not to participate in the game of eternal comparison passed down from her previous generation. Your silence is your shield — your shield is not a weapon to counter-attack her, it's your boundary being erected for the first time in the space between you. She froze for a moment — her freeze wasn't anger, it's that the you in front of her is not the same person as the you in her memory. Your Xie is not cutting ties — it's your relationship being redefined by you into weights you can choose to accept and choose not to accept. From now on the right to decide those weights is in your hand — not in her mouth.