Even though there are some who understand the Divine Feminine & Masculine Energy (or more commonly known as the Yin & Yang energy), many people are not aware of how the two seemingly different energies intermingle to create balance in our lives.
It’s important to be aware of these two energies and their effects, because you’ll be able to recognize when you’re off-balanced and know what to do to be balanced again.
For example, you’ll know that you need more Yang (Masculine) energy when you’re feeling listless and unproductive, and more Yin (Feminine) energy when you’re feeling wired and anxious.
So to illustrate, let me tell you about a show I love watching on Netflix.
The show is called “Hyori’s Bed and Breakfast,” which is a reality show of a Korean celebrity couple, Hyori and her husband Sang. They gave up the fast life in the city and moved to Jeju island, the countryside.
It’s interesting to see how different Hyori and Sang are from each other.
Hyori is the CEO type and extremely action oriented. She possesses and exerts a lot of Masculine energy, which is more structured and performance-oriented than Feminine energy. For example, as soon as she wakes up in the morning, she immediately jumps into action and goes right to work on her to-do list. She’s on the go all day long, since she likes to get things done and get them done quick. In the show, you can see her power-walking from one room to the next with determination in her step.
Her husband Sang is the stark contrast. Sang is extremely mellow, the type whom you could picture drifting from town to town playing a fiddle and singing, if it were the olden days. He takes long slow strides as he moves aimlessly from room to room. He likes to sit, sip on a cup of tea, and simply enjoy the breeze. You could say he exerts a lot of Feminine energy, which is the creative, intuitive energy.
It's apparent that Sang balances out Hyori’s high-strung, bustling energy, which is one of the reasons why they make a good couple. Often in the show, Sang would remind his wife to chill a little and enjoy the moment.
Because Hyori is always so hyped to go, she seems to have trouble sleeping, always thinking of chores that need to get done. She knows this about herself, so she takes yoga to get in touch with her body and her inner being. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to work.
However, if there is a project to get done, Hyori’s the reliable one and the one that has the ‘oomph’ to see it through. If anything, this girl knows how to execute.
It seems to me that Sang married Hyori precisely because of her decisive nature and her ability to execute and accomplish, since he is the exact opposite.
Sang is too mellow to get things done. He needs numerous breaks and down-time while carrying out a single job. He has to fight his mild, slow molasses-like nature to do the exact thing that his whole being does not want to do.
However, if you want to talk about meaning of life, letting things be, and true love, this is the man to go to.
Of course, all this is just my interpretation of the show. How they’re really like, I’m not sure since I don’t know them personally.
Comparing myself to each of them, I would have to say that I’m more Hyori than Sang, although not as fast paced as Hyori.
I actually like to schedule in a day of relaxation and a day where I’m doing nothing but taking naps, thinking, and watching Netflix. And even though I could be decisive and as action oriented as Hyori, I hated being that way, which is one of the reasons I left the corporate world. I felt my heart drying up and becoming extremely unhappy.
But if I were to do what Sang does and approach life with an attitude of going where my heart takes me, I know I wouldn’t feel completely happy either.
In the recent years, I’ve figured out that I’m someone who likes having focus in my life. I like to build and create with the sole purpose of bettering the world in a practical way. If I were to dabble in this and that purely for my own creative enjoyment without focusing all my effort on building just one substantial thing, I would probably feel restless, purposeless and a bit lost.
Which comes to this point…
In the past, I had thought living purely in the Feminine energy was the “right thing” to do or the way to be more spiritual.
Now, of course, I’ve heard there is no “right” or “wrong,” but I actually beg to differ. There might not be such a thing as “right” or “wrong” for everyone out there in the world, but there is such a thing as right and wrong for me. To word it more clearly, there are things that align or don’t align with who I am.
But I digress.
A lot of spiritual teachers emphasize living in the Feminine energy.
They say, “Relax. Live in the now. Disregard psychological time, and let the inner self guide you. Have faith that all will be ok.”
By the way, all this sounds absolutely like heaven and so mesmerizing. After all, isn’t that what we’re striving for in life? Don’t we all go to work that we hate and put up with asshole bosses, so that one day, we can finally retire and “relax,” and “live in the now” doing our hobbies?
So some of us who are thirsty for the truth and are deep in search for answers to our suffering make drastic decisions. We leave our jobs and spend all day blissed out, doing nothing but breathing and staring at trees.
Which is cool to do, just not all the time.
When we hear spiritual teachers emphasize the importance of the Feminine energy (or the Yin), it almost feels like we’re doing it all wrong when we organize, execute and live our life checking off items on our to-do list. In this perspective, we might think that Hyori is approaching life the wrong way while Sang is doing a bang-up job.
But I think we shouldn’t see it so drastically one way.
I think spiritual teachers emphasize living in the Feminine energy because our society as a whole is quite imbalanced and the Masculine has been overly stressed and abused.
The symptoms of a society dominant in Masculine energy
We’ve been living primarily in the Masculine energy, forcing things to happen by sheer sweat and will, even when we know we’re causing a lot of damage.
And like all things that are overly stressed, the Masculine energy is showing up in our society in crazed and abnormal ways. Relentless ambition runs rampant and wild, singularly focused on “getting things done.”
For example, we force ourselves to sit at the office for eight hours and accept it as “how things are,” even when our whole body along with our inner voice is shouting for us to go out and be around trees and hear the sound of nature. And in this way, we sacrifice our physical and mental health, all in the name of progress.
We fill our hours and days with tasks that are deemed productive, even though we feel our health deteriorating, our mentality becoming strained and contorted. At work, we pressure our teammates with deadlines and use threats of reprimand in order to get stuff done, placing progress more important than our teammates’ mental and emotional well-being.
We don’t know how to relax anymore, because we use our relax time to go to the gym or do something more productive.
We don’t know how to honor our inner selves. We see ourselves and each other almost as commodities rather than as human beings.
Being mentally or emotionally drained has become normal and almost as a badge of honor. “Everyone’s tired,” people say if we complain. “Life is hard,” they say.
Work has become a priority in life, and we schedule life around work. We don’t attend a friend’s wedding or a family member’s birthday because of work. What’s more is, when we give work as our excuse, everyone nods and accepts.
These are all symptoms of living in a society with an imbalanced Masculine energy.
If we lived in the Feminine energy, we would be letting things emerge naturally rather than using sheer physical will. We would honor our inner beings first and foremost, and our overall health. We’d approach work and life in a much more intuitive way. Progress would be defined differently, since it won’t be a linear concept anymore but a more holistic concept. Creativity would emerge, and people would have the patience to wait for its birth no matter how long it takes.
Because the distorted form of Masculine energy is dominant in our society while Feminine energy has been dismissed and slighted, spiritual teachers all over advocate the importance of dwelling in the Feminine and integrating the Feminine energy back into our lives.
I wanted to get it right.
I wanted to be a good student and follow what the spiritual teachers said.
So for a while, I was convinced that I needed to relax more and let things come together, and I just needed to be in the bliss. I needed to hear my inner voice and follow it from day to day, moment to moment. I should live primarily in the Feminine, I thought.
So I would get up each morning and ask my inner self what I should be doing that day. ‘Inner self, Feminine energy, intuition, gut feeling… c’mon, let me know what I should do today,’ I meditated.
But turns out, a lot of time, my inner self wouldn’t really give me concrete directions. Like a girl blissfully in love and not caring about anything anymore, my inner self didn’t seem to care what I did with my day. So I ended up doing frivolous things, which was fun to do for a while but not so fun if you want to do something with your life, be part of creating something.
So I would just live each day, not knowing what to do, and believing that direction will come to me from the ethers.
This is how I found out that the Feminine energy is not great at giving concrete, day-to-day directions. Sure, it’s pretty great at giving life directions, questions like, should I quit the job I hate (yes), and should I sell the house that I no longer want (yes), and what should be my next career in life (whatever you love).
Only in the Feminine energy can I get in touch with my own personal truth. It’s pretty bold that way, since it doesn’t worry about egoic stuff, like being anxious about what might happen if I were to quit my day job. It’s pretty great at steering me in the right direction.
But as to walking the walk, well, it’s actually the Masculine energy that gets me there. Once the Feminine energy directs, it’s the Masculine energy that gives me concrete, detailed steps. Like, wash the dishes because it’s too dirty. If you want to quit your job, then check to see how much you saved up before putting in your resignation, since you know you will feel anxious if you don’t have money in the bank. And etc.
We can’t live with the Feminine energy alone. If we do, then honestly, no one would want to do anything practical, like running the world. They would want to just sit around and look at the trees and the birds, and live as our pets do, waiting for someone to feed them.
No, even animals in their natural environment don’t just wait around for someone to feed them. They go hunting and find their own food. That’s Masculine energy at work. Of course, most of the time, they just lounge around and enjoy the sun, which is the Feminine energy at work.
That is our natural state as well.
A girl perpetually in love can’t get married, create a family, and rear children. No, the girl in love has to now use her Masculine energy to save enough money for a wedding, buy a house that her family could build memories in, and hit head-on the millions of issues that come with raising healthy children. That’s Masculine energy at work.
So how should we integrate Feminine and Masculine energy in our lives?
I went to a Bashar Channeling convention once. There, Bashar mentioned that the heart beat reflects how we should live: start from the heart, then take it to the brain, then to the body, and then back into the heart.
That is the exactly how we should integrate Feminine and Masculine energy in our lives.
- Start from the heart. Use Feminine energy to know what you want to do, the general direction you want to go. You can do this in several ways. Right after you wake up in the morning and you're relaxed, ask your heart a question about your life. And then see what kind of emotion comes up from your body. The emotions can be subtle, so don't try to feel it with your analytical mind. Try not to judge the feelings that come up, no matter what it is.
- Take it to the head. Use Masculine energy to think of how you want to get there, and to plan the route. Masculine energy is about both physical and mental action, that is, movement. Use your mind to organize, and then think of the easiest and the most pleasant way to carry out the task.
- Take it to the body. With your body, carry out the plan while being in the flow. After you’ve planned and organized, and when it’s time to carry the plan out, bring the Feminine energy to get in the creative flow and to enjoy the task at hand. Rather than focusing on getting the task done, focus on being in the creative flow. This way, you won’t run out of energy and feel content overall.
- Finish at the heart. Once you're done, re-evaluate with your heart. See if your heart delights in what you accomplished. See if what you did feels like you. Ask yourself, did you accomplish the task for the sake of 'getting it done,' or does the end product reflect the essence of who you are?
