Take a deep breath in and just hold it in a relaxed manner for a while. What makes you want to exhale? Now try the opposite, exhale all the way and just hold that state at rest for a bit. What makes you want to inhale? I don’t find any thinking involved, just a strong driving desire to proceed with my breath. In this relaxed example there was no active suppression of breathing. If I were underwater, there would have been active suppression as I would be afraid of inhaling water. Fear is a good motivator for suppression. But in normal circumstances breathing is driven by desire without thought.
So what am I talking about here anyway? I am using breathing as a simple example of a primary drive within us, the constant shift between yin and yang. From a scientific perspective this is the movement of brain processing from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere. In western lingo, yin is the feminine encompassing “big picture” side of the brain while Yang is the masculine goal oriented action side. Yin is like inhaling while yang is like exhaling. When we are yin our desire is to take in what is. We tune in to our senses and receive. We open our experience to allow in support from life. We prefer that support to be pleasant, but often support is in the form of feedback that shows us what we are doing that does not work. It provides us with the opportunity to adapt and course correct to produce better outcome for ourselves. But mostly yin is just taking in what is in the present moment so that we can tailor our creative output to best advantage.
Yang is our outflow. It is designed to be a creative process, as our outflow is where we add our input and energy to life. We take what is and do something with it that expresses our creative adaptions and participation with life. We mix in our participation in such a way as to help us meet our needs, hopefully while also supporting life/others in their process of getting their own needs met. This generates more mutually supportive connection. But sometimes our need is to be alone. Sometimes we need to get creative to be able to arrange alone time.
The point is, yin and yang are designed to be as automatic and desire based as breathing. Each needs the other. There is no point to creating from yang energy if you are unable to yin/ receive the product of your creative efforts. Likewise there is often no point to taking in random whatever, as that does not support us. Instead we need to actively (yang) reach out for what it is that we want and will serve us. Active receiving is very much a yin/yang breathing process. Imagine preparing to sit down to a meal, and just randomly putting things into your mouth without concern for what is food and what is not. I works better to select what you want to consume.
All this seems pretty obvious, but oddly this cyclic flow of life often gets stuck. Many people get stuck in living out only their yin side or their yang side. What is that about? In a word, fear. Fear can lock the normal processing of our brain into just one side. Some people will react to fear with a total focus on resistance and reaction (a yang response) while others will go into freeze mode passive helpless victim state (a yin response). Neither of these states effectively resolves the situation, but this seems to be where folks go when they don’t know what else to do. From my viewpoint this almost defines the essence of fear – the Failure to Embrace and Act Responsively. When in fear we don’t embrace what is. We try to deny what is and insist that it should be something else. We feel entitled to have things be “our way” rather than how they actually are. Since we refuse to welcome in what is as it is, it become impossible for us to act in a manner that responds appropriately to what is.
Appropriate response is an interesting concept. On the most fundamental level, it means what response maximizes us getting our needs met. That generally means employing skills specific to the situation of the moment that support the outcome we want. Just what outcome we want will depend on our situation. In a “do or die” situation those skills will probably look like survival skills. In a social situation those skills might look like generating positive connection to enroll social support. In most any situation, appropriate response will involve the use of specific skills. This is often the trigger for our fear state. If we don’t have the skills needed to succeed we default to not embracing what is in either a yang stuck manner or a yin stuck manner.
Truth be told, these stuck responses, passive helpless and active resistance, are actually childhood patterns that resulted from not successfully resolving some challenge by developing the skills necessary to become successful. If they happen early enough in life, they recede from conscious awareness and live on in the subconscious mind. From there they control our life by triggering us into these automatic responses whenever we are challenged instead of us embracing what is and trying to solve the challenge by developing the skills that would work. It is very hard to try anything new from a state of fear; probably impossible. That is because for any action to be effective it has to be based on clearly seeing and accepting what is. Life does not change itself to fit our limitations. Life just is what it is. It is purely up to us to adapt to what is in order to become successful at getting our needs met.
Sometimes these stuck patterns are sad to watch. Someone stuck in yang work, work, work mode can work themselves to death and never feel safe or satisfied because they simple have never learned to relax and take in what they have worked so hard to create for themselves. Another person stuck in the yin receiving mode all the time can experience the same type of failure by being forever the student and never actually applying their learning. You can be so accepting of what is, that it never occurs to you that you have the creative capacity to improve your life. You can live in the gutter waiting for your big break instead of doing the work to create what you want in life. These are stuck patterns that I see in all aspects of life. I can find myself doing well in one area of my life, yet failing miserably in another area due to some subconscious fear running my choices.
This is the reality of everyone’s life in this world. We are filled with a mixture of successes and failures. None of us had perfect parents that helped us learn the skills we needed to be successes in every aspect of life. Sometimes it seems that the purpose of childhood was to fill us with screwed up failure programming that we get to spend the rest of our life digging out and resolving. It is literally re-solving. We have to re-experience the challenges we failed in as children and solve them again a different way. We recreate the relationships that didn’t work so we can meet the recreated failures with new and more effective responses. We recreate the life challenges so we can learn how to do it better this time. Sometimes I find myself recreating and redoing the same challenges over and over again every few years. It seems that I learn slowly and improve tiny bits at a time. I might get wondrous ah-ha’s that show me clearly just what I need to do, but actually learning the skills to do them is a much slower process. I sum that one up for myself with the statement “Awareness changes nothing.”
The point of this article is to hopefully unhook us from the belief that we are by nature either yin or yang. We are both. When we are not being both, it likely means that we are stuck in a frozen child pattern of reaction and fear. This does not mean we need years of therapy. It means we need to revisit the challenges that we failed to get our needs met with and solve them a different way by building new skills. There are very few situations that everyone fails in. There are always some people that figure it out the first time through. If they can do it then so can we.
Embrace what is. Accept all life as perfect just as it is even when we don’t like it. We are here to get our needs and wants met through our application of skills. Get it that if our life is not the way we want, it is because we have not figured out how to create our desired outcome and have not built the skills necessary to generate success. What we want is possible if it participates fairly with life.
Take care,
David