Dear Friends,
I wanted to share a few words today about Yin and Yang that came up in discussion this morning. The daily life experiences that feed the metaphors are those of my girlfriend from yesterday and last night. The meanings I attribute to them are my own, and I feel they reflect a clear picture of Yin and Yang attributes manifesting in life in a balanced way.
Wendy related to me yesterday evening that she’d had a good day, and she clarified that it had been somewhat productive but more uniquely, it was continuously so. What I took from the conversation was that she felt that she had undertaken many things, brought them comfortably and efficiently to a conclusion, and then had been able to shift to other activities with relatively little transition time, and needing little restorative time. This morning, in the shower, I was thinking about levels of Yin and Yang in daily experience, and when Wendy and I started discussing last night’s sleep, she related that it had been a very deep sleep with numerous dreams of which she could recall many details.
It struck me that she had exemplified a balanced Yin and Yang cycle, or more accurately, a Yang and Yin cycle. Her day had been Yang: productive, active, continuously moving. The nighttime following this productive day had proved to be Yin: deep sleep, restorative, heavy on the dreams. Even more unusual was the balance that was exhibited in the Yang and Ying experiences: her daytime activity had been continuous with little rest and she wasn’t burnt out at the end of the day, while her sleep had been deep and seemingly uninterrupted, with plenty of dreamtime.
REM state sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep in which dreams occur, can be observed to be relative to the level of rest and restoration the body is receiving in its sleep. When we first fall asleep, we pass through various levels of consciousness and body activity, undergoing great healing cycles as the body tries to restore the capacity to take on another day. If the body is doing well restoring itself, then the consciousness progresses into REM-state and dreams. Chinese medical philosophy holds that it is in this state that the Hun, an aspect of the mind/spirit that normally operates out of the liver, leaves the body and “collects” dreams, in that it has experiences with other dimensions and brings its memory of these experiences back to the body before waking. So Wendy’s deep sleep and numerous dreams indicate that she sunk as readily into the activity of restoring her health as she did the previous day into her activity. Neither her continuous productivity by day nor her restorative rest last night was out of balance.
To discover what might be an out-of-balance version of those experiences would have been to have a day in which she undertook so much activity that she was completely exhausted and “burnt out” at the end of her day, or worse at several points during the day such that she had to devote time in her day to rest and restoration. By contrast, imbalance in her nighttime activity might have been observed to be sleep so deep that it seemed upon reflection to be “dead to the world,” with little or no dreams and the inability the next day to every fully wake up. Alternately, her sleep could have sunk her into dreams with experiences so extreme that she kept waking herself up, or nightmares so terrifying that when she woke the next morning she was traumatized. These are extreme examples, but I have found personally and in the lives of friends, family and colleagues that they are entirely too common to what one may experience from day to day.
Sometimes, in the practice of qigong, or any of the Taoist arts meant to enhance health, vitality and life, we focus so much on creating a balance of Yin and Yang in the moment that we emphasize emptiness and inactivity. This is a very important aspect of learning and growth, because it is from this calm place that we are better able to observe and interact with life without resorting to extremes that are at least inefficient and at worst harmful. But life isn’t a sitting meditation, it’s a moving experience. When the practice time is over, the real challenge of applying ourselves to the business of our lives begins. In the living business of life, daytime is considered Yang time: time for activity, productivity, and outward focus. Contrarily, nighttime is for Yin: resting, restoring and experiencing the world of the self more intimately. Balance in a healthy life tips toward the side, either Yin or Yang, which is most appropriate to that time of day.
Consider how you schedule your activities and to what degree you submit yourself to them at different times of day. How much do your day’s activities require rest stops to get through the day? How restless or interrupted is your sleep? Before you try to do more in your life, see if you can find a balance with what’s already in your life that allows you the kind of day and night that Wendy had. In the end, regardless of how much she got done, her life seemed full of interest all day and all night. She was happy, she was vital, she was more alive.
Your friend in the Tao,
Lihai
(c) I Qi You, 2006. All rights reserved.
Further research:
Gender Dimorphism in the Role of cycle (BMAL1) in Rest, Rest Regulation, and Longevity in Drosophila melanogaster, Journal of Biological Rhythms, Vol. 18, No. 1, 12-25 (2003)- Joan C. Hendricks, Sumei Lu, Kazuhiko Kume, Jerry C.-P. Yin, Zhaohai Yang and Amita Sehgal.
Yin-Yang in Tai-Chi Chuan and Daily Life by Simmone Kuo, North Atlantic Books, 2004
Bow to Life by Joseph Cardillo, Marlowe & Company, 2006