I had a vision of this thing above in Feb 2018, but this post has been sitting in my drafts. Below is what I wrote then, perhaps slightly edited.  The illustration above says “problem worth solving,” and I see now that it’s more like, a “discord worth attending to,” but it’s an important idea, people, so please stay with me.

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I’ve always called this thing the yin yang, but it’s actually called the taijitu, or symbol of Taiji.

But the image from my vision is not a “yin yang,” it is something different. It’s so full of white, so little black. I notice it. That white is the yang section, yeah? And that’s masculine, right? I think so… the black is the yin, the feminine… oh.

It’s out of balance.

There’s so much yang, so little yin, and the ways in which they’re interacting aren’t equal and harmonious.

The next day I sit down to draw the image above as I see it, and I think about “opposites.” I try to guess which notions are yin, and which are yang, and intuitively, and based on what my female body does and what a male’s does, I can understand where most things fit:

Yin: receptive, dark, slow, soft, yielding, cold, wet, diffuse, passive: winter, water, earth, moon, nighttime, feminine.

Yang: active, light, fast, hard, solid, hot, dry, focused, active: summer, fire, sky, sun, daytime, masculine.

(I cribbed the above from wikipedia for the sake of clarity)

This is what the image that comes to me means: We’re out of balance.

For a long time I’ve been living in a culture where masculine qualities are more highly valued than feminine qualities. This value that we place on masculine qualities is fine to a point, but when we belittle, ignore, or shame the more feminine qualities for the sake of the more “exciting” masculine qualities, we find ourselves in discord. And when this pattern of making masculine “better than” feminine continues for, as I see it, thousands of years, then we experience some intense reverberations of this imbalance.

I think a lot of our societal (and global, perhaps) problems stem from this imbalance. Maybe it’s an oversimplification, but maybe not: To achieve “success” we tell each other to “Aim high!” “Work hard!” We strive for a constant state of happiness, elation, joy. If we’re sad, something is “wrong.” We’ve reached incredible intellectual and technological heights (be it sexist or not, I’m going to call those things “yang”), but as a culture, we largely ignore or “don’t believe in” our intuition, our felt senses, our inherent connectedness (yin.)

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Hi, it’s Sept 2019 me again 🙂

I’ve been training in Taiji pretty much every day all summer, so past-me’s newness to the taijitu is simply darling. ❤

It seems that my culture has shifted into a better understanding of yin in the last year, which I think is pretty awesome. I mean, Lizzo has come into her power, and I know a mountain of chocolatey yin energy when I see one. I would like to build a little home for myself in the shade of her mountain…. ahhhh…. Lizzzooooooooooohhhhhhh…..

Back to biz! Vulnerability, self-care, speaking your truth, gender fluidity, awareness of neural diversity, the beginning of scientific understanding of mystical experience (thank you, Michael Pollan)  — all of this stuff, I believe, is guiding us on a more harmonious path.

Of course, a lot of things are still really out of whack.

What can I do in the face of that whack?

I can realize that me thinking that things are out of whack is simply my own perception of things…

Perception is key.

If I can shift my perspective, my perception, then my world and my reality shifts…

“Concrete example, Michelle!” I can hear my college English professors saying in my head…

Uhhh, eh, no thanks, not now, I don’t feel like it. (See what I can do now that I’m a grown up! I can break the rules because I know the rules.)

What I will share is this:

When things are unharmonious in my life, while it may not be my fault, it is MY responsibility to attend to the discord. Not to blame someone else for it (though if I need to do that for a while I can and I can see where it gets me…) not to blame society for it (though I could spend a lifetime being someone who shouts at other people to “CHANGE!”) and not to wallow so deeply in self-pity that I become stagnant and depressed (though I’ve certainly done that too 🙂

I just attend to the discord within myself.

So how do I do that? Long answer short, it’s a combination therapy that all boils down to letting myself be me.