by Donna Eden
Action Is Needed for Him to Cultivate Romance, but Attitude Is the Key for Her
Initiating romantic activities raises a woman’s testosterone levels but not the oxytocin levels that would satisfy her romantic longings. So when she takes on the responsibility of trying to light the spark, she often winds up feeling disappointed and frustrated. Assuming both partners are in alignment with the desire to have a happier relationship, the most powerful actions available to her are sometimes simply to reinforce what he does right. Where a woman needs to receive ongoing messages that she is loved (and little things do count), a man needs to hear that he is being successful in his efforts to make her happy. Scanning for what he does that she appreciates and expressing that appreciation raises her oxytocin levels as well as his testosterone levels.39 This also makes him more likely to do more of what she likes. Rather than focusing on what she is not getting, she can focus on the smallest things he does for her. Simplistic as it might sound—that he needs messages that he is being successful in the same way she needs messages that she is loved—this is a very practical insight: “A woman doesn’t have to offer a standing ovation. She must simply appreciate the things he does.”40
Combining Appreciations with Requests That Are Direct, Brief, and Positive
Expressing appreciation creates an atmosphere in which she can take steps to further ensure his success with her by making it clear what she wants. Men often have no idea. In this atmosphere, it is much more efficient to be transparent about what she is asking him to do than to leave him to guess. The strategy of using complaints or bringing up past hurts to justify asking for what she needs can be replaced with simple requests that are “direct, brief, and positive.”41 Combining appreciations with direct requests puts Mama back on the path to happiness.
The Energy of Male/Female Differences
The differences between men and women are not just in their brains, hormones, and sex organs. Each gender has its own energy. In traditional Chinese philosophy, the terms yin and yang are used to describe the qualities of feminine and masculine energy. Women are considered to be more yin; men more yang. But unlike fixed differences in the brain, yin and yang are dynamic energies that both flow within each of us in an active interplay that defines how we experience and relate to the world. Every relationship, straight or gay, is a dance not just between two people but between the yin and yang energies within one and the yin and yang energies within the other. Yin has been characterized by adjectives such as slow, soft, yielding, cold, damp, contracting, sinking, internal, and passive. It is associated with earth, moon, nighttime, and femininity. Yang, by contrast, is characterized by words such as quick, hard, solid, hot, dry, dispersed, rising, external, and aggressive. It is associated with sky, sun, daytime, and masculinity.
These two primal forces operate within all of us, and they explain some of the conflicts in our inner natures and in our partnerships. While yin (receptive, deep, mysterious) and yang (active, surface, evident) are seemingly contrary forces, they are interconnected and interdependent. Like night and day, they give rise to one another. Rather than mere opposites, they are complementary forces that compose a dynamic whole.
While aspects of one of these forces will be more developed in you, and the corresponding aspects less so, knowing that both are latent within you is a mind-expanding way of understanding your potential and your partner’s potential. We are attracted to people who manifest qualities that are not as well developed in ourselves.42 Not only does this expand our range of experience and provide balance in our lives, but the less-developed parts of ourselves resonate with our partner in ways that evoke the evolution of those parts.
For instance, David finds Donna to be wonderfully feminine. She is a girlie-girl who loves sentimental stories, romance, and fun clothes. Highly maternal, her caring and compassion can be disarming. She puts other people first, to a fault actually, and feels very deeply about them and about virtually everything that commands her attention. She loves receiving—people’s stories, their pain, their gifts. When she is with a client, she goes inward and deep. Her yin energy is very strong.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Yin in Action
When a person is in a yin state, the aura becomes soft, movement slows, and energy spirals easily into the body in a counterclockwise motion. Yin energies get you to “smell the roses.” You are taking in the life around you. You are sitting on your porch, drinking tea, enjoying and appreciating the trees and view in front of you. You are relaxed, in deep reverie. In a relationship, you follow your partner’s lead. You are a warm hearth for your partner to come to. You are open, inviting, and alluring.
Yang in Action
Yang energy moves out from the body, rather than into the body, spiraling out in a clockwise direction. Where yin energy is slow, yang energy is fast. If the person is particularly active, the energy shoots out rather than spirals out. Yang energy is animated, busy, making things happen. In a relationship, it makes the plans, provides the leadership, and runs the show. Sometimes it is so powerful a force that the partner retreats, becoming more inward and yin. When this occurs, the partners can become fixated and polarized in their respective yang-dominant and yin-receptive temperaments. As a relationship matures and becomes more vital, we usually see the yin and yang forces in each partner coming into better balance and the yin and yang forces between them finding greater harmony.
Yin Goes Yang; Yang Goes Yin
With age and the natural hormonal changes programmed into the human body, the energy in men becomes more yin and the energy in women becomes more yang.
When she is teaching or in front of a group or in a social situation, however, you might not realize that she can readily access such depths. The quality she is known for in these contexts is her effervescence—an exuding, sociable energy that reaches out and touches people. This expansive, emphatic energy is yang. Both her yin expressions and her yang expressions are completely authentic. People who first know Donna by being her client are often baffled by her exuberance when they see her teach; people who first know her from one of her classes wonder if it is the same person when she is working on them.
Poor David has to put up with all of this, not really knowing who he married or who will be there tonight. Fortunately—although he is emphatically yang in his intellect and professional risk taking—he is highly receptive to Donna’s shifting energetic states, very yin in that regard. This works for both of us. Donna’s flights into excitement and journeys into the depths expand David, whose customary range is more limited. All couples have areas where they balance and expand one another in these ways as well as areas where the yin-yang chemistry presents challenges. If you assess yourself, your partner, and your relationship through this yin-yang lens, it will become clear to you that no one is purely yang and no one is purely yin.
To muddle things further, the influence of testosterone on yin or yang energies is very different from the influence of estrogen or oxytocin. So Donna’s yang qualities express themselves in a manner that is markedly different from the expression of yang qualities in David. David’s yang onstage is focused and intent, in contrast to the force of Donna’s yang exuberance. Their yin characteristics are similarly colored by their hormones. Testosterone is a yang hormone, so it “masculinizes” a man’s yin energies. Estrogen and oxytocin are yin hormones, so they “feminize” a woman’s yang energies. Thus as it is with all things human, even this yin-yang dichotomy does not play out in simple categories.
The Five Flavors of Yin and Yang
Yin and yang energies are the complementary aspects of your life force. Their polarities find expression in your feelings, thoughts, and actions, as well as in your health. Though they are polarities, they are related to one another as fundamentally as the front and back of your hand. One hand, two aspects (front and back); one life force, two aspects (yin and yang).
Carefully observ
ing how illness and health manifest in different individuals, physicians in ancient China divided a person’s life force first into yin and yang and then further divided each into five categories or types of vibration. Yin energies have five types of vibration and yang energies have five corresponding types (of course, within each type are infinite variations—just as no two voices are identical even though they can be put into categories such as bass, tenor, alto, and soprano). In brief, your yin energies are not identical to your partner’s yin energies; nor are your yang energies just like your partner’s. And these are not gender-related differences. Your life force, with its yin and yang aspects and the five unique vibrations of each, is different from the life force of anyone else.
The distinct vibration of your life force is reflected in the way you walk, talk, feel, think, and act. It is particularly evident in health and illness. For a person of one vibrational type, for instance, stomach is the organ that is most vulnerable to illness, while it may be liver for a person of another vibrational type.
Because a person’s life force and its unique vibration are not generally visible to the human eye, metaphors are used to describe the types. The most well known of these are the Five Elements—water, wood, fire, earth, and metal—and the Five Seasons—winter, spring, summer, and fall, as well as the solstice/equinox (transition periods between seasons). The Chinese sometimes called these elements or seasons the Five Walks of Life.
Each Element has its own vibration or rhythm. Observable traits and behaviors are generated by a person’s essential rhythm. You will find that the description of one of the Five Elements, or a combination of two or three of them, is instructive for understanding primal forces within yourself and your partner.
Exploring Your Element
While your Energetic Stress Style (visual, kinesthetic, tonal, digital) is activated in response to threat or distress, your Element is always active. To gain a more visceral understanding of the Five Elements:
As you read the following descriptions of each of the Five Elements, look for what resonates with what you know about yourself and with what you know about your partner.
Make a list for yourself and another for your partner.
Have your partner do the same.
Compare lists only after you have each read the following and completed your own list.
Discuss where you agreed and where you disagreed.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Your Element and Your Personality
You may think the following descriptions are personality types, but personality is just an outward manifestation. The traits described are, rather, expressions of your core energies. Your Element and its rhythm underlie your personality, but many other factors also form it. Your Element simply expresses itself according to one of five basic themes or a combination of themes.
The Seasons of Our Lives
The seasons were also used to illustrate the Five Elements, and your life moves through phases that correspond with the seasons. Your Element may, for instance, be metal, which corresponds with autumn. But you move through periods that are typified by the energies of winter, spring, summer, and autumn, in that order, as well as the transition periods of the solstice and the equinox. So even if your core energies correspond with autumn, you might be going through a season of your life that corresponds with summer. The interacting qualities of the rhythm of summer and the rhythm of autumn will be prominent in your thoughts, feelings, and actions during this phase of your life. This may seem complicated, but it brings order to your world when you understand it.
Since two or more Elements may combine in a particular individual, it is likely that neither of you will fit neatly into any of the categories, but that you will find clusters of traits that describe the fundamental “rhythm” by which you each move through your world.
WATER ELEMENT: EMBRYONIC POSSIBILITY43
Water Element carries the rhythm of winter. It embodies the seed, the embryo, potential. The time of long nights and little light, winter holds the promise of the future. While life appears to have ceased, it is growing decisively under the ground, waiting to burst forth. Waters, when in their strength, embody a fresh spirit that is infused with childlike enthusiasm because their season is about beginnings. Rooted in nature’s embryonic time, this Element has a babylike quality.
When Waters feel safe, they utterly trust their surroundings, and they laugh and play with an infant’s spontaneity. They know how to envision a project and joyfully get it under way. Their energies may be limited since their season has little sun, but like a hibernating polar bear, they are able to retreat into themselves and regenerate. Winter marks not only the beginning of the solar cycle but also its end. For this reason, it is symbolized by both the baby and the wise old philosopher. Waters are not only spontaneous in their play but also deeply reflective about the meaning of life.
As with each of the rhythms, the Water’s potential weaknesses are the polarity of these strengths. The playful energy of the infant or the all-consuming reflections of the philosopher are not so well suited for going the full distance of completion. Waters may have little motivation for the long haul. Just as special care and protection are required to survive in winter, people who move to winter’s rhythm often need and demand special attention, so they are particularly vulnerable to narcissism. Waters may be unable to recognize how they are affecting others, focusing only on what others are doing to them. They can have difficulty feeling loved unless love is showered on them. Needing the mother’s succor like the seed needs the unfailing sustenance of the earth, Waters who feel unloved tend to retreat within, becoming cold, isolated, fearful, or depressed. Your first cycle of winter’s rhythm extends from conception through about eighteen months. But if stress or trauma or circumstances prevented you from sufficiently meeting the requirements of this phase or garnering its lessons, its issues can become fixated into a lifelong pattern where you behave out of the need to feel as if you are the center of the world. Your development can become arrested while moving through any of the rhythms.
The talk of a Water is a slow, flowing kind of groan from deep within. The walk is unhurried and paced, like a rolling wave, almost a swagger, knees slightly bent with the body lowered toward the ground. The characteristic mental state is the longing to feel safe. Under stress, this longing may become fear, which is the stress emotion of a Water. Because the future is hard to see from winter’s embryonic shadows, Waters are often afraid to move forth, afraid to make a commitment. They reflect deeply, sometimes motivated by their fear of what is to come. In the wild, a newborn animal is utterly vulnerable and must quickly learn to distinguish between what is dangerous and what is safe. During your first eighteen months, your first cycle of winter’s rhythm, fear alerted you to that which was dangerous. Through fear you learned to establish boundaries. You defined a zone of safety. Dangers, both real and imagined, can tend to paralyze a Water’s rhythm, making it more immobile, more hidden, more pulled toward hibernation. With maturity, however, a Water’s fear becomes a wise and discerning caution.
If You Have a Water Partner
By understanding these traits and tendencies in your partner, you are able to set your expectations more realistically, meet your partner’s imperfect behaviors with grace and compassion, and be a force for evolution and positive change that comes from understanding rather than judgment and irritation. For example, your partner may draw into his or her own world, paralyzed in fear or hopelessness, and shutting you out. Understanding this helps you to not take it personally, to leave space that it may occur, and will also help you be more skillful when the timing makes it possible to beckon your partner to come out of mental hibernation and meet you again. Because your Water partner loves to produce ideas and generate a shared excitement about them, but is weak on implementation, you may find that helping your partner with follow-through adds a needed balance. Your partn
er will want to be mothered when in the infant end of the infant/wise-philosopher spectrum, and your understanding of this dynamic can help you stay centered and able to provide valuable guidance instead of mothering that reinforces infantile behaviors.
WOOD ELEMENT: NEW GROWTH
Wood Element carries the rhythm of spring. Spring embodies the power and insistence of new life and change. The earth becomes warm, and the hours of light begin to outnumber the hours of darkness. Life bursts forth as the landscape explodes with color and exuberance. The energy of a Wood is reminiscent of a seedling you might see bursting forth through hard ground after a March rainstorm. The rhythm is staccato and unstoppable, like a marching soldier, an awesome power that vanquishes resistance. Spring yearns for expression as life pushes forward.
Woods take a strong stand. They unabashedly claim their space, as if proudly announcing, like a budding rose, “I am here. Deal with me, thorns and all!” Their strength is in the power of their vision. They see inequities and gather forces of justice. They see the truth. They see the way. Their vision inspires others and can marshal them into action. They are sure of themselves and shine in a crisis. Their sense of timing cuts to the quick. Their ability to assert themselves and organize efforts is characterized by sound goals, good judgment, and carefully formulated decisions.