Increasing Your Yin

While every organisation needs aggression for growth, it also needs the gentility of a stable and relaxed pace for compassion and kindness. Here’s how you can get the right balance between yin and yang.

March is International Women’s Day month. And while everyone is pampering their women employees, celebrating the feminine energy and incorporating it in each one of us makes our health, work and organisational output more efficient and profitable. So what really do we mean when we say that yin and yang work in balance to give this output?

Whether we are human beings, an organisation or the earth, everything is governed by masculine and feminine energies. And any human being who has the right balance of these surely becomes the wise person with leadership qualities. For example, along with visible ambition, if a leader has team spirit, compassion, high emotional quotient, their Yin is balanced along with their Yang.

Whenever there is an imbalance of these, the output is compromised. Hence, for any healthy working professional, working towards channelising your yin and yang balance will bring about a healthier output as an organisational leader. So how do you do that?

Understand. Why do you need this balance? It’s not just for your professional growth, it is also for your personal health. For those whose yin side is weaker, which means the feminine energy is suppressed, please remember that yin organs in the body are the heart, lungs, spleen, and kidneys. More men come to me with heart and kidney issues (very often both issues in the same person), and the common personality trait amongst all of them has been that their yang is dominant – which means their aggressive male force is more powerful. Major yang organs are the small intestine, triple heater (empty space in the trunk and diaphragm of your body), large intestine, gallbladder, and urinary bladder. More women have issues of heartburn, bloating, acidity, UTIs, urinary incontinence as their yang energy is suppressed. These issues can be resolved when the yin and yang balance is restored.

Balance. Assess which side of you is weaker. Irrespective of your gender, you can channelise your yin energy by getting into meditation, yogic breathing like anulom vilom and sheetali to stay calmer, get more in touch with your inner self so that you acknowledge and understand your feelings. This way, you would be able to enhance your feminine energy and ensure that your organs are healthier. For those whose Yang is weaker, doing rapid yogic breathing like kapaalbhati along with short bursts of aggressive exercise like 20 minutes jogging, twice a week, two kilo deadweight lifts with repetitions balances their yang energy.

Find the right mentor. Look around you, within your vicinity, there are leaders who have this balance. Seek them out and have conversations with them to explore and take advice on how you can balance yourself out. You will be surprised that good leaders who have balanced yin and yang will always take out time to help others.

Women’s Day celebrates the feminine energy in us. Let us channelise this feminine energy to get healthier and make the world a kinder place. As the Dalai Lama says, "I call myself a feminist. Isn’t that what you call someone who fights for women’s rights?"