Yin, Yang, Mistakes, Metis

Where does energy flow, where must it be driven?

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of this formulation of yin and yang:

Yin is allowing energy to flow where it will, without interference.

Yang is driving energy where it otherwise wouldn’t go.

A few applications for this in healing and transformation have been useful for me to explore.

For example: a lot of our problems are the result of doing things that don’t need to be done. We clench ourselves, push down emotions, run away from problems, maintain inauthentic social masks… we create problems for ourselves by exerting yang to push our energy towards needless tasks. If we let go, drop into yin, some of these problems just disappear — because we stop creating them.

The complementary example: a lot of our problems come from knots and stickiness in our systems; blocks in our psychology, our energy, our habits of body, heart, mind, behavior. Whether from family baggage, trauma, cultural mixed messages, whatever — the way our energy naturally flows Just Doesn’t Work. And yet the grooves are so deep; if we simply let go and drop into yin, our energy keeps flowing into bad patterns. To fix them, we need to exert yang, we need to push energy where it doesn’t naturally go, to make new channels, new pathways where the energy can flow. Hopefully, after enough time, we can relax back into yin, and the energy will more naturally follow the new path. But if we stay in yin from the start, nothing will change.

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Life keeps serving me up examples, in myself, in the people and situations around me, of possible dynamics here, things to watch out for.

Ways that putting in more effort and planning can drain and wreck you, pull you into a habit of constantly pushing energy where it doesn’t naturally flow, eventually leaving you with nothing left to give.

Ways that dropping into flow and presence can lock you in a dreamy, pleasant trap of allowing your repetitive compulsive patterns to hurt you and the people around you over and over again, all while you relax and thing “yes, surely this is The Flow.”

Ways that you can feel a problem of too much yang, and think that it can be solved with more drive and energy — leaving you confused and broken as you keep feeling worse and worse as you try harder and harder.

Ways that you can feel a problem of too much yin, and think it can be solved with more surrender and letting go — leaving you confused in familiar-looking wreckage when the same old life patterns do the same thing to you they’ve done a hundred times before.

Yin is letting the river flow where it will.

Yang is an irrigation project.

Too much yin, and you start to find out why every culture on earth has a myth where their whole world was destroyed by floods.

Too much yang, and you start to find out how the Aral Sea disappeared.

It’s not even necessarily about balance — more about getting a feel for the proper application, for when to imbalance in one direction or the other.

I’m coming to think this might be at the very core of metis, the key piece of the place where flow and competence melt together. How to navigate the proper application of yin and yang.