When nine at the beginning is drawn as a changing line in Small Taming, the reading concerns a return already available rather than a struggle still ahead. The querent is shown a course that is truly theirs to resume, and the line promises no error and good fortune specifically because nothing yet stands in the way of that return. It is the mildest line in a hexagram whose entire theme is mild, gentle restraint holding back a much greater force, and at this first position the restraining influence, the single yielding fourth line, has not yet reached down this far.
Flipping this line changes the lower trigram from Qian to Xun, so both trigrams of the hexagram become Xun, Wind over Wind, the hexagram called The Gentle. Where Small Taming showed one yielding line quietly checking five firm ones, The Gentle doubles the gentle, penetrating force throughout the whole figure. The movement from this line is a movement further into gentleness itself: what began as a single, incidental restraint becomes the hexagram's entire character, wind moving upon wind, influence that spreads by penetrating rather than by force.
In the arc of Small Taming's six lines, position one is the point of least resistance, before the taming influence has organized itself at all. A reading that lands here suggests the moment to return to one's own course is now, before the small holds back the great in earnest, and that the deeper lesson, an entire hexagram given over to gentle penetration, is already latent in this first quiet step.