I was having dinner last night with my beautiful friend Maura (who is a great blessing in my life) and complaining about how I felt like my mojo was off. I feel stalled. Stuck. I am a little burned out. Like I am just burning rubber with no traction. No juice. And a distinct lack of joy.
Where is the fun?
Where is the pleasure of life? (Hey, it’s early March in New England. It happens…) It’s all work, work, work.
I was on a bit of a roll- complaining wise.
I haven’t found a new relationship. (I can’t find a man! Wah! Sniff…) I don’t know where my business is going. I don’t know where my LIFE is going. I can’t figure my sh** out. I was feeling lonely and a little lost and perhaps a tad bit sorry for myself.
“I think I am pushing too hard,” I confessed. “I need a break.”
“Yeah, I get that about you,” she said. “You are so busy. You do the single mom thing. You have kids, too many jobs. You run your house and your business. But that is all YANG stuff. You are a creature of YIN. You need to yin out.”
I nearly dropped my chopsticks, she was so right.
It’s very true. As a single mom, entrepreneur and slightly type A chick, I have a lot of irons in the fire that require to me to drive hard in the masculine world of achievement. And although I can do it, and do it well, it’s only half the story.
“You are a Goddess babe,” Maura continued. She aught to know, being one herself. “You’ve done great this past year with all your achievements and successes. But you need honor your inner Goddess. Get all yinned up. It’s where you live.”
As she said that, I felt a jolt of energy run up my whole body and felt the tingly shivers that I always feel when someone speaks a deep truth. Bless her.
Ok let’s hit pause for just a second. Time for a very brief and hopefully enlightening lesson on polarity.
Here on this crazy planet, we live under the rule of polarity. We have up and down, night and day, the Patriots and the Jets, and male and female energy. That’s polarity.
In the eastern wisdom traditions this male energy is called yang and the female is yin. You all know the symbol of the yin-yang, right? That’s what I am talking about.
Yang energy, the masculine principal, corresponds to the right side of your body and is action oriented. It’s about doing, going, making, breaking, winning and achieving. It’s phallic and impregnating. It is the world of the solid, the manifest. In Chinese medicine and the Taoist traditions, yang is also fast, hard, solid, focused, hot, dry, and aggressive; and is associated with fire, sky, the sun and daytime.
Yin is the feminine quality and is the left side of the body. It is receptive, psychic, emotional, creative, generative, artistic, and loves beauty. It’s pregnant and womb like. It is the formless, the unmanifest. The Tao characterizes yin as slow, soft, yielding, diffuse, cold, wet, and passive; and is associated with water, earth, the moon and nighttime.
Our goal is to balance these two energies in us to find optimum health, well being and happiness. We slide through these imbalances all the time, like kids on a teeter-totter, but most people have an inner pull to one or the other. We have one where we live and we have to court and nurture the other side of us. And we attract mates of the opposite polarity. The more opposite you are, the greater chemistry you will have with someone.
Ok, lesson over… Going back to my dinner conversation, I could feel myself longing for more yin in my life. I think I sobbed a little into my sushi, mostly with relief.
Our culture is pretty hard on the yin. We are a very yang world and the soft arts of the yin are underappreciated and unacknowledged. And yet to come into balance we need both.
“The yin is the magnet,” Maura reminded me. “Get all yinned up, go all soft and receptive. Stop pushing, doing and trying and just let yourself be radiant. When you are receptive and radiant then things just come to you. Let your cup fill up.”
I just read a fabulous book called “Dear Lover” by one of my favorite authors, David Deida. He talks a lot about this. And so do the other tantrists that I know, hang with and study. When we drop into the feminine side of things, we relax. We surrender. We open. We receive. Our feminine core is the magnetic part of us, like the molten liquid core of the planet. When our yin is strong things come to us, almost effortlessly and with a divine plan.
Yin is very soulful. It receives the message from the soul, from the divine. And then yang executes the massages, makes it happen in real time. Talk about a divine partnership!
I believe this is the missing step in many people’s Law of Attraction activities. We need a combination of DO and BE. I don’t know about you guys, but often let fear build up in me and so I skip the BE and go straight to DO.
What if attracting things to us was just a matter of surrendering to the mystery rather than crossing everything off a big to-do list? I am going through a phase where I HATE my to-do list. I feel like ripping it up and stomping on it every time I see it. Seriously. I am throwing it out the window.
So I decided that as an experiment, I am going to dedicate the whole month of March to being as yin as I can be.
I am going to (temporarily) give up-
- Planning.
- Pushing.
- Striving.
- Analyzing and criticizing.
- The to-do list.
- Sucking it up and making myself do stuff that I hate.
- Wrestling the world into submission with my will. (Cuz that is sooo effective…snort.)
- Trying to figure stuff out, find the meaning in everything and see what is going to happen next.
- Trying to MAKE things happen.
- Forcing a new business project that I am not feeling but was making myself do because I SHOULD do it. Ugh.
Instead of all of THAT, I am going to live in the yin, at least in my free time. For a whole month. This requires BEING rather then DOING. It’s more of an art form then a to-do list. I am going to get all soft and squishy. I think I will-
- Take naps and sleep more.
- Read books that have no “value” or meaning. Like poetry and romance novels.
- Pamper myself with tubs, massages and energy work.
- Beautify myself and my home. Yin loves beauty!
- Enjoy dancing and yoga.
- Surround myself with beauty by going to museums and listening to music.
- Engage in some rituals.
- Indulge myself in reading erotica. And perhaps writing some.
- Cooking and eating some fabulous food.
- Meditation, prayer, chanting.
- Lounging with no purpose at all. Hopefully in my goddess loungewear. Unscheduled time is like gold to me.
- Rolling around in my feelings. Marinate in them. Maybe I’ll cry. Maybe I’ll laugh. Moping and complaining are just as valuable as joy and laughter. To the yin there are no unacceptable emotions.
- Walking my dog (preferably aimlessly) and being in nature.
- Surrendering, opening, receiving and giving it up to God. (Or in this case, perhaps the Goddess.) Lord knows I can’t figure out my life. It makes no sense. But I can surrender my will to God’s will and let go for a while.
I feel so much better having made that decision to take a yin-cation. I have no idea what will come of it, but it’s not about making things happen but more about enjoying the ride. It feels juicy, sweet and already my yin cup is filling up.
Wish me joy on my yin journey! As I also wish you joy on your journey too.
