I have been thinking a lot lately about polarity. If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve said that at Silver Branch we work more with relationship than polarity. That’s true. I’ve had the opportunity lately, to see polarity in a different light and I am intrigued.

I have always held within me that polarities are opposites, and therefor in opposition to one another. It is dark or it is light and dark is the opposite of light. Somehow this felt incomplete to me.  And more, it felt locked in conflict. I held within me the idea that polarities are always moving farther from one another, going on being more and more opposite. I was never comfortable with that. Nor was I comfortable then trying to work magically with polarity when, at best there was tension between the poles, at worst, opposition.

In studying acupuncture I’ve come to look at polarity differently. We are taught that at its greatest extreme, yin turns to seek yang and vice verse. They are not opposites moving ever farther apart. They don’t live on a line, but instead in circle. You can only go so far toward one pole before it leads you back toward the other.

This is, obviously, not a new idea. And I have no idea how it was that polarity, to me lived on a never ending straight line when nature doesn’t work that way. But suddenly, I have started to see polarity more like all the old tales of lovers who change shape so that one is human by day and the other by night. They are always together, but only at the moments of dawn and dusk do they touch in their true forms. What happens when we look at polarities as lovers seeking to connect to one another instead of polarities as enemies, seeking to either destroy one another or to move as far apart as possible? What a different perspective: polarities in relationship instead of polarities in denial. This is a model I can work with – a model that feels both true and helpful.