Friction, baby: the Yang and Yin of creation

Feed the Muse

Dear erotic earthlings,

A gift for you all this week! In the spirit of giving, I’ve made this week’s Feed the Muse available to all readers for free. ICYMI, Feed the Muse is a (most) weekly series designed to help you free your erotic (creative) energy, feel yourself more deeply, and expand your capacity for full bodied, full spirited expression.

We’re talking about something fundamental this week - the energies of yang and yin - the primordial forces of creation. You can listen to the transmission below, or read the transcript.

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Today I want to talk about our relationship with the muse through the lens of yang and yin energies.

I'm sure you've heard these words, but if you haven't, often we talk about them in relation to masculine and feminine energies - masculine is associated with the yang, feminine with the yin.

We also talk about this in terms of light and dark, so if you've ever seen the yin yang symbol, it's a circle that's composed of what look like two interlocking commas, or like two fish chasing each other. One side is colored in white, the other is colored in black, and each of them has a smaller circle of the opposite color within them; the underlying principle is: within one lies the seed of the other.

The white is associated with yang, with the masculine, and the black is associated with yin, the feminine, the mystery, and these two forces are always at work in the creative process.

If you start to think about the creative process and just kind of lay it out on the table, notice what is happening, you'll see that these two forces at play.

There is this part of you that is aware of what's happening, you could call it consciousness, awareness. It's this kind of stillness within that can just look around and observe and see and that's the yang. That's the masculine.

And then there's this part that is the movement, the stuff, so to speak, this force that is always changing. And that's the yin.

So we have the creative and the receptive.

The creative is the yang, the receptive is the yin, but always remember that within one lies the seed of the other, and when you start to think about the muse, often when we see images of the muse, it's a feminine being. We often see these images of flowy majestic creatures, and yes, that is one aspect of the muse, that very feminine receptive aspect.

And the way the muse works within us is that the muse penetrates us with inspiration. And in order for that to happen, we have to open to it.

We have to allow that force to incarnate within us, erect within us, penetrate through our personal beliefs, our ideas about the way things should happen. The ideas we have that we might try to force to happen. There's nothing fundamentally wrong making something happen. Yet there is another way of being and of connecting with creative force that allows for a deeper connection. It allows us to let go of some of the stress and worry and anxiety of, oh, is it going to happen? Is it right? Am I doing the right thing?

Of course, those are very human experiences and thoughts to have, you know, our experience of anxiety that's so human. Everybody experiences that.

And if they say they don't, well, they're probably just scratching the surface of what's possible for them.

So when we start to open up to this idea that the creative force isn't something we can make happen — we have to let it come through us — our relationship with our own creative process can start to shift dramatically.

I want to bring it back again to this idea of stillness and movement. You could call it consciousness and love.

In the I Ching, they talk about it as heaven, consciousness, awareness, this vast sky of possibility, this this thing that is aware of all that is, this thing that is never changing, has never changed is always there, is the background upon which everything appears, the masculine… and then the feminine love, movement, the spark of light, the thing that we feel the things that move us.

The Creative - Hexagram 1 (left) // The Receptive - Hexagram 2 (right)

Noticing these two aspects always playing with each other through our creative process can be an extremely satisfying way to open up to new possibilities within your creative realm.

I know from personal experience, and from knowing a lot of other creative people that it's really easy to get in this habitual state, this state of, oh, well, this thing has been working for me for so long so I'll just stick with it. And again there's nothing wrong with doing what works.

AND, if you're a sensitive person, if you're a creative person, you know this experience of feeling that longing to connect with something deeper, to allow something to make its way through your body, to open up to a new realm of emotion, to open up to the surprise, to allow yourself to actually be curious about that.

A big part of this experience of opening up and connecting with the muse is that there's fear around what's new. There's fear around peering over the edge or taking the leap that's so often talked about, right? We're like, oh, what's going to happen? This is mysterious, right?

That's the yin, the darkness, the mystery. It's always going to be there. There's always going to be a little bit of fear going into the mystery. There's always going to be a little bit of resistance.

The point isn't to eliminate fear and resistance. It's not to call ourselves bad for not being totally open to everything all the time. It's a process, and we learn through the friction of rubbing up against these edges.

What happens when you do start to lean into those edges is you notice, little by little, they're dissolving.

These two fish chasing each other, black and white, going around in this circle, they're constantly rubbing up against each other. They're touching. They're within each other.

They're trying to get to know each other better, and that's what this dance is, the dance of creativity is both sides — awareness becoming this background for love, for the feminine, for earth, for movement.

It's like any relationship, really, any romantic relationship, any friendship.

Why do we want to connect with people?

So we can get to know them, and thereby ourselves, better.

But within those relationships, we often come to edges.

Oh, this is uncomfortable.
I don't know if I can say this.
I don't know if I can ask this.
I don't know if it would be okay to reveal this part of myself.

That's a parallel to our own creative process, which often we're doing privately. It's the same thing.

Danse du temple de l'âme de Fidus 3 || Oil on Canvas by Fidus (Hugo Höppener, 1910

What we are afraid to reveal to other people is what we're afraid to reveal to ourselves first.

I'm not allowed to feel that.
I'm not allowed to create that way or say this thing.

And what I want you to know is that's just conditioning.

Those are just things you've learned over the years, often through close relationships or through culture.

It's not you.
It's not Eros.
It's not the muse.

That's all these other voices you've imbibed over time. And you've absorbed and started to believe. And it's not true.

It's not true.

One of the most beautiful things about being a deeply sensitive person, a creative person, is that you are so receptive. And what can help us here, what can help us to stop absorbing everything, is to notice how the yang, the masculine, this structural part of us can help us to create boundaries, to create a sense of discernment.

And the way this can happen is when you are, for example, around other people, you can start to notice how you feel in your body.

Am I contracting?
Am I feeling open?
How do I feel around this energy?
How do I respond to it?

This is an open inquiry. It doesn't mean anything in particular.

Often you'll find you have a sense about when someone or something's energy doesn't resonate with you.

The key here is noticing, when I'm around these people that don't resonate with me, when I'm hearing these things that don't resonate with me, do I collapse in on myself and allow my fear or anxiety to take over?

Do I just agree?

Do I let their thoughts and ideas change how I be in the world?

Or do I remain open and curious and continue to be present in my own experience, my own body connected with my own understandings and beliefs and viewpoints . Or do I simply want to leave?

Because that's an option too.

You don't always have to stay.

I don't want to veer too far off here, but because creativity often goes along with sharing that creativity with the world, we create art and we have this desire also to share it, I wanted to mention that because, you know, even online, we're feeling all these different energies, all the time.

And it's really easy to let that energy impact what we are or are not willing to not just share, but also create because those beliefs can hit us so deep, those ideas that come from other people or institutions, right?

The censorship online can hit us so deep that we start to believe, oh, I shouldn't be this way.

So coming back, wrapping this up with just a final connection with this yang and yin.

The yin is this flow of creative energy.

The yang is the structure that holds it . Your body is a structure, is a vessel.

It's already yang and all the stuff that's happening within it, all the movement that you're holding and creating is the yin.

The process of creativity is the process of strengthening both parts of the system. In tandem. Though, it doesn't always happen like that. Often we’re way, way, way more developed in one aspect than the other. From personal experience, I started out in life, and I think for a lot of feminine beings, we learned to overdevelop a masculine aspect of ourselves to kind of protect ourselves from the world.

So then you end up going to the other end of the spectrum.

Maybe you overcorrect.

You're like I'm just going to be so free and open and flowing, and what happens is that the nervous system needs to be able to calibrate, the nervous system needs to be able to hold all of this energy, channel all of this energy.

It's like a river, the yin, with its river banks, the yang.

If the river banks aren't wide enough, or if they're not strong enough, if the earth they're composed of is crumbly and there's a lot of ways for it to disintegrate easily when this big rushing river is flowing through it, we're going to lose that ground. It's going to get washed away. Then our flow is going to feel kind of uncontained, which can feel very uncomfortable and unsettling.

Again, it's not wrong. It's just something to learn from.

Image by Brian Oldham

I invite you to notice: what is your system like right now?

• How do you do with boundaries, creating structures for yourself? How do you do with scheduling your time?

• If you do have time, but you don't create with it, notice why. Notice how open and receptive you let yourself be to what's happening right now. This can be a confronting thing to notice - because when we have desires and aren’t realizing, it’s usually on us. On if we’re willing to sit down and be with what is right here in front of us, even if it’s not what we personally want to be working with.

• Do you distract yourself with busy work or are you comfortable just being in that space of open awareness and allowing something to come through?

• Are you comfortable creating a focus for yourself, creating a goal or a boundary or whatever it is that's serving you in your work right now. And are you able to stay in it?

I invite you to let those two forces work together. Give yourself space and time. Let something come through. Know when to pause and feel, know when to kind of ramp the energy up and let that force flow through you.

If you have a goal, if you have a mission, if you have a thing you're working on in particular, can you create a strong enough structure that allows you to just be in that?

There are multiple kinds of structures that we need for this to all be working, right?

We have, you know, our schedules and our to-do lists and all these things that kind of lay out the structure of what we want to happen.

But the ultimate structure, what actually allows any of it to happen, is our nervous systems, our bodies.

In the coming weeks, we're going to start doing some more work on the nervous system. Because without a nervous system that can handle the flow of creative energy, we end up collapsing or getting washed out by the river, so to speak.

So again, take an inventory of where you're at right now, what you want to be creating, if that's actually happening.

And then what might need to change in order for you to get closer to where you want to be.

All right. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening reading. Thank you for being here.

And I will talk to you again soon.

xx Faye