Hello, beautiful beings! Today, we have the Full Moon in Pisces AND a lunar eclipse 🌕
As we step into this eclipse portal (the 2 week window between eclipses) it seems like a perfect time to ponder the interplay of Yin and Yang, dark and light. How do we embrace our shadows and depths within a culture that rewards the dynamic, bright, shiny, active and productive?
How do we make space for Yin in a world that reveres the Yang?
It's not all love and light
While I’ll be the first to encourage cultivating love-joy-gratitude and basking in those feelings, life brings us the full spectrum of experiences - and the emotions that come with them. If we suppress, ignore or deny our “darker” or “heavier” emotions, we are denying a vital part of ourselves.
In holistic medicines like Chinese Medicine, we embrace the wholeness of our beings - the dark and the light. Health is coherent and integrated wholeness, on every level of our being. We understand that emotions are “energy in motion”, and that tending to our energetic health includes the acknowledgment of our emotional state.
All emotions are welcome if they are allowed to move freely and metabolise through our body-mind-soul. In Chinese Medicine, we support this flow of feelings, as we consider that denied, ignored or suppressed emotions are a major contributor towards dis-ease. For example, unexpressed grief can show up in the Lungs as chest infections, cough or wheeze. Stagnated frustration or anger can bind the Liver, and manifest as headaches, ringing ears or mood swings.
How do we support this emotional flow? Making space.
A powerful way to embrace our hidden depths is to allow space for the whole spectrum of our emotional experience. We become wholly alive when we face and embrace our own shadows - those emotions, beliefs and parts of ourselves that might be painful, or that we might prefer not to look at.
Because balance will always be maintained, as long as those rejected parts within are not woven into our whole selves, we will project what we judge onto the world without. Much of the division and rejection we see in the world is a result of this - of needing to make something outside us “wrong” so that we can be, by comparison, “ok”. But once we witness and integrate the light and dark within, not only do we become more completely ourselves - more potent and vital - but the world we experience necessarily recalibrates in response. Less resistance, more ease and flow.
This witnessing can be as simple as taking 1-2 minutes to be present with the emotion that is arising - cultivating curiosity over judgment. What is the sensation of the emotion in the body? Where is it located? How does the body want to move in response to it? What does the breath do? When we don't resist or struggle against them, most emotions will pass through within 1-2 minutes.
Have you observed this for yourself? Sometimes, there can be layers of other emotions beneath, but again, when we take a few minutes to witness them, they can be metabolised and released from our being, which liberates our energy and our vitality.
I share a bit more about this process here, as well as a brief review of the beautiful book "Letting Go" by Dr. David Hawkins, which greatly supported me in deepening into this process.
We cannot have light without darkness - Yin does not exist without Yang. But when the two are integrated, we have health and life!
Slowing down to listen within
Slowing down creates the Yin qualities of stillness, space and quiet so that we can hear the whispers of body and soul.
Walking meditation is a simple way to slow down and make space to be present with what is. We also have many acupuncture points in the feet, so this practice can be also be a treatment for the whole being.
This practice has been a saviour for me at times of extreme stress, when my mind was too busy and full to sit for meditation. The focus on the body - and the feet specifically - helped to draw "busy" energy down from the head, taking me out of my mind and back into my body.. The anchoring of the feet onto the earth also provided support and containment to be present with big emotions.
I shared more about how to do this in a short video here:
I will wrap these musings up with one of my favourite quotes, below. While some of these emotions we are witnessing may appear overwhelming or scary, the liberation and space that comes from letting go is truly to be treasured.
“The cave you fear to enter
holds the treasure you seek”
Joseph Campbell
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How else can we apply the wisdom of Yin and Yang to our modern lives?
Stay tuned for more simple ways to weave ancient wisdom into our every day, in the upcoming newsletters 😀
There is so much more on all aspects of health in the podcast
