Looking at the current state of the world, you might think it has gone a bit mad. It seems as if there are upheavals everywhere. It is as if the world is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. It doesn’t seem that long ago that life was, perhaps, more forgiving. We had less polarization in societies–or so it seemed. It seemed that there was less fighting and dog-eat-dog behavior. Perhaps, I am misguided but it looks decidedly that they world has gone “yang”. What has happened to the yin? Have we gotten more dysfunctional, more out of control. I just read this morning where two 12 year old girls lured their friend to an isolated area and stabbed her 19 times. She lives. The girls blame it on the internet. Really!
Yang energy is a harder energy and more expansive. Yin energy is considered the softer energy and is to balance out the hard, expansive yang. When we become too yang, we loose the safety of the yin energy. We become more ego driven, more control oriented and more expansive. If the natural safety of the yin is absent, we can succumb to collapse. When we are too yang, life can be chaotic, devoid of inner reality, focused on the physical, material success at all costs, unable to keep up with the pace and an emphasis on the latest and greatest distraction. Everything must be tempered with balance.
Looking at the world today, it is in chaos from an excessive amount of yang. Climate change, destruction of the land, misuse of our natural world, abrupt modernization at all costs, misuse of our bodies with poor food choices and lifestyles, including crazy body workouts that harm the body, punitive laws and regulations, extreme income disparities and high rates of cancer, a very yang disease, etc. It appears the yin energy has been pushed aside. Without balance, we will continue to act out of the yang until parts of society collapse.
In the the last 450 million years there have been 5 complete extinctions to the the planet. Each time it recovered, it took 10 million years to gain back the biodiversity it had lost. Perhaps we need to pull back and voluntarily contract to the inner yin energy. Perhaps, each of us needs to look at our own lives and see where we have allowed ourselves to become too yang, too aggressive, too busy and too crazy. We pass these qualities along to our children–who now have an excessive amount of “organized” play or too much time with video games, lots of ADHD diagnosis. Student debt is enormous and leads to a life of future servitude while struggling to keep up with the yang energy of the world.
In an easy example of yin and yang, showers are yang, baths are yin. Many of our new homes don’t even offer bathtubs. A telling sign of our shift away from the yin.
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