Why the I-Ching is not fortune-telling
The objection I hear most often is that consulting an oracle means surrendering your judgement. It is a fair objection, and the practice answers it — but not in the way people expect.
The first thing almost everyone says, when they hear that I teach the I-Ching, is some version of: so you believe the future is written somewhere?
No. And neither did Jung, who spent decades with this book.
A casting does not tell you what will happen. It hands you a situation — sixty-four of them exist, and they are archetypal rather than specific — and asks you to find where you are standing inside it. The work is entirely yours. The oracle supplies the frame; you supply the honesty.
What actually happens in a casting
You hold a question. You throw the coins six times. You get a hexagram, and possibly a second one if some of the lines are moving. Then you read, and the reading does something peculiar: it refuses to be about anything except what you were already avoiding.
This is not mysticism. It is closer to what happens when a good friend asks the one question you had carefully arranged the conversation to avoid.
The discipline that makes it work
Journal every casting. Date it, write the question exactly as you asked it, write the hexagram, and write what you took it to mean that day.
Six months later, read it back. That record — not any single casting — is where the practice proves itself or fails. Mine proved itself. Yours may not. The only yardstick is practice and acute self-observation, and I would distrust anyone who offered you a different one.