I’m involved in setting up a new organisation within the SEEDS ecosystem. Initiating a new organisation – with its own unique culture – raises a lot of really interesting questions, including something I am really passionate about: the need for yin/yang balance.
This is something I have thought about a lot, and wrote about in my doctoral dissertation. When an organisation is setting out to generate social change, it is important that it should be the change it wants to see in the world. (Same goes for individuals setting out to generate change.) There has to be integrity between what it is saying and what it is doing, or it just doesn’t work. (See what I wrote about As Within, So Without, and my all-time favourite leadership story, about Christiana Figueres.)
So, because SEEDS is all about regenerating our ailing ecosystems and communities, reducing economic inequality, and building the brave new regenerative civilisation, it feels absolutely crucial that it develops a healthy balance between yin and yang. If you believe, as I do, that our current problems of environmental degradation, oppression, and inequality, spring from a mindset of domination rather than equality, in which men dominate women, rich dominate poor, the Global North dominates the Global South, and humans dominate nature (or attempt to – we never really win, because the laws of nature always win) then we need to grow out of the unhealthy yang pattern of domination, and evolve into healthy yin cooperation. (Note that there are also healthy yang patterns, and unhealthy yin patterns – I’m certainly not demonizing or denigrating the yang, as you will see below.)
I’d like to emphasise that, even though in Chinese philosophy yin is the feminine principle and yang is the masculine principle, yin does not equate to female, and yang to male. We are all a blend of yin and yang, and the yin/yang concept encompasses far more than simply gender traits. Yet again, I am going to reference the wisdom of the late, great Bernard Lietaer, from whose work this graphic is derived.
Everything is Relative
One thing to note is that yin and yang are not absolutes – as with so many things in Eastern philosophy, everything is relative. So something might be more yin than another (water is more yin than fire or earth) but something is not intrinsically yin. It’s all about the relationship between the two polarities.
Balance is Crucial
Also important to note is that balance is crucial. Too much yin would be as bad as too much yang. The sweet spot lies in the interaction and complementarity between the two. We don’t expect never-ending summer, nonstop daylight, to be perpetually awake, or to be always breathing in. Each element needs its complement. Humans and the rest of nature have rhythms and cycles, and we ignore them at the peril of our health and wellbeing.
Creative Interplay of Two Poles
And finally, I’d like to emphasise that this is not about attempting to sit forever at the Golden Mean, Aristotle’s sweet spot on the spectrum of a virtue – neither too much of a good thing, nor too little of it. Yin/yang is about the dynamic, creative interplay of the two poles. For more details on this graphic see my full article.
It seems clear to me that the last few thousand years have been dominated by the yang principle, and that a shift is now starting to happen. Shifts like this are rarely smooth. Those who have thrived in the yang culture will not be happy to lose power and authority as the old structures give way to greater equality of wealth and influence, and some will fight fiercely to preserve their privilege.
But if this world is going to work for the many, and not just the few, including all sentient beings and not just humans, then the shift is necessary and, indeed inevitable.
I used to ask myself how change happened – top-down, or bottom-up? Now I realise that I was still caught in the old yang mindset, and a yang system of change cannot produce balanced yin/yang outcomes. If change is going to happen everywhere, as it needs to, then the change has to come from everywhere, at all levels of the system. So it naturally follows that, as we at SEEDS are creating a Decentralised Holonic Organisation, I have to maintain my own yin/yang balance – for example, by stepping back from the time-sucking vortex of Discord messages (used by the SEEDS community to discuss ideas and tensions) to spend time out walking in nature, or writing in my journal, to pause and reflect. I also have to support and nurture balance in any interactions that I have – on every call, in every Discord message, in every document. And we have to weave this concept into every aspect of the work we do, because our organisation is in turn a microcosm of the world, and if we can’t get the balance right within ourselves, what hope do we have of creating greater balance in the world at large?
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