Laurie’s Positive Points: Dissecting yin and yang

Laurie’s Positive Points

Dissecting yin and yang: the a’dvantage of yin and yang as a device to help us understand what of our choices will be finest for our fitness.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine it is essential to live in harmony.   

We want yin and yang to be in balance as much as possible.  The summer season is the element of fire, and the summer is hot so it is yang in nature.  

All foods and drinks are considered either yang or yin, and all correlate to their respective type of more yang or more yin. 

When we are in the summer season, we want to eat what is most helpful to balance our yin and yang.  

We can do this by carefully selecting types of foods at least partly because of their medicinal quality, expressed as their unique yin or yang nature.  

We want to, for instance, eat foods that are yin in the summer season because the summer is a mostly yang time of year. 

The yang time of year also means that it is hottest and therefore meaning it is mostly yang. 

The summer also corresponds with being more active, because action is inherently yang. 

Thus, it is generally easier for people to be more active in the summer because it is a yang time of year, and this correlates with activity. 

Other yang qualities are things such as male, light, black, and hot, while yin is female, dark, white, and cold.  Yin is also negative, passive, wet, and earthy.  Yang is positive, heavenly, active, and dry.  

Yin is passive, absorbing, observing, yielding, empty, while yang is active, expressing and doing, standing firm, and full.

Yang force is considered to be solid and yin is broken.

I think it helps to have a glance of what yin and yang are like, so that as we learn a bit more about yin and yang, then the picture will be more candid.

We just want to appreciate that in terms of yin and yang there is no judgement when we think about the qualities of either yin or yang. 

Both are necessary and essential for the other, because they are just opposite sides of the spectrum when we describe something. 

This is why we can relax, and not make any of this good or bad.  It is simply information that we can use to help to clarify and direct what our next step will be.

Since all foods are broken down into categories of either yang or yin foods, then we are able to use this information to our advantage.   Then, we eat different foods at different times so that we can be as optimally healthy. 

The ancient Chinese doctors of medicine gained the awareness that if we eat certain types of foods at certain times, we will be quite robust. 

They discovered that if we eat in the summer, when the weather is most yang, then to balance this we want to eat foods that are generally most yin.  This then allows us to be the most balanced.  

What we select for our individual diet is also dependent on our own constitution. 

The food we consume also gets altered some energetically from the way it is cooked and prepared.  

All love,

Laurie Prezbindowski

Licensed acupuncture