The Seba library treats Shake in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, Levine, Peter A., Bosnak, Robert).
Shake: Thunder rises from below, shaking and stirring things up. Shake begins the yang hemicycle by germinating new action… Shake stirs things up to issue-forth.
This passage defines Shake as the fundamental I Ching trigram representing initiatory yang energy — a germinating, upward-thrusting force that disrupts quiescence and inaugurates new cycles of action.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
Shake: Thunder rises from below, shaking and stirring things up. Shake begins the yang hemicycle by germinating new action… Shake stirs things up to issue-forth. The outer trigram completes a cycle, the inner begins a new one.
Positioned as the inner trigram within Hexagram Sprouting, Shake is identified as the principle of inner stirring that initiates new growth by thrusting through the leveling stream of the completed cycle.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
one experiences waves of involuntary shaking and trembling, followed by spontaneous changes in breathing — from tight and shallow to deep and relaxed. These involuntary reactions function, essentially, to discharge the vast energy that… was not fully executed.
Levine establishes involuntary shaking as the body’s primary physiological mechanism for discharging undischarged survival energy, marking the exit from traumatic immobility and the restoration of homeostasis.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis
Feel it. Stay with it, that shaking. What is it like inside the shaking?… Please, please don’t go out of it. Don’t lose consciousness or pass out. Go entirely inside the shaking.
Bosnak presents the therapeutic imperative to inhabit shaking as autonomous somatic intelligence rather than suppress it, treating conscious immersion in the trembling as the curative act itself.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
I started to shake…. I was shaking violently…. I literally started to shake…. The acorn appears not only as a guiding angel who warns, protects, counsels, urges, and calls. It also uses deadly force.
Hillman deploys the repeated confession ‘I started to shake’ as evidence that the daimonic acorn-force can manifest as violent, uncontrollable bodily trembling when it seizes the personality through overwhelming compulsion.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
FORCE/FIELD SHAKE/GROUND GORGE/RADIANCE BOUND/OPEN… SHAKE… YOUNGEST… GROUND RADIANCE
This structural passage situates Shake within the I Ching’s cosmological arrangement of trigrams as one of the six variegated offspring trigrams, paired with Ground in the conceptual order and assigned to the eldest son in the family order.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
As I continue to gently tremble, I sense a warm tingling wave along with an inner strength building up from deep within my body.
Levine’s autobiographical account of trembling following a car accident illustrates the progression from violent shock through gentle involuntary shaking toward the restorative sensations of warmth and inner strength.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
My global activation was ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go.’ If, rather than fulfilling its motoric mission in effective action, the preparation for action was interfered with or had lain dormant, it would have posed a great potential to trigger a later expression as the debilitating symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.
Though not invoking shaking directly, this passage furnishes the theoretical framework explaining why shaking is necessary: undischarged activation that cannot complete its motoric mission becomes the substrate of traumatic symptoms.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside