Understanding Love and Attraction from a Daoist (Taoist) Perspective

Love and sexual attraction transcend the boundaries of race, class and even gender/sexual preference.

Most people are familiar with the Daoist (Taoist) concept of Yin and Yang. It is used in Chinese philosophy to describe and understand how seemingly opposing forces are in fact deeply interconnected and interdependent in the natural world. While they oppose each other, they co-exist in a dynamic equilibrium. If one disappears, so does the other.

In the realm of love and sexual attraction, Yin and Yang’s opposing energies create sexual polarity. A healthy relationship is often rooted in this harmony and balance of opposites. When this polarity is neutralized, oftentimes so is the attraction. Maintaining this polarity is important for lasting and fulfilling relationships.

Understanding Your Essence
While Yin is associated with the feminine essence and Yang with the masculine essence (Yang), our sexual essence and our physical gender as men or women do not necessarily have to be the same. There exist men with strong feminine essence and women with strong masculine essence. This applies whether your sexual preference is gay or straight.

Whatever your sexual essence, it is important to be aware of what it is and how you are projecting it. You tend to attract your opposite so if you are in your masculine, you’ll attract someone who is feminine and vice versa. If you are not attracting the type you want to be romantically involved with or if you feel like your current relationship is losing its spark, examine what you are projecting.

Love with Sexual Attraction
Love and sexual attraction aren’t necessarily one and the same. There are plenty of couples out there who are still together long after the sexual attraction is gone. They can still love each other very much. But then it becomes a relationship between best friends rather than lovers. If you want to experience the spark, excitement and magnetic attraction of a relationship that is emotionally, spiritually and sexually satisfying, you have to create and maintain sexual polarity.

I’m writing this on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. Reflecting upon this day, love is a beautiful thing that should be celebrated and embraced without the judgments, restrictions and expectations imposed by culture, religion and fear. Help work towards moving our society beyond existing boundaries such as race, class and gender/sexual preference.

Congruence: The art of style for people of substance

Age-old sages and fashion-forward aficionados agree: how we present ourselves speaks volumes about who we are. But while fashionistas focus on the latest thrends and on designer clothing and accessories, the total package goes much deeper. This includes posture, facial expressions, eye contact, voice tone, personal hygiene, how we dress, and, more importantly, our personality. All of this is energy and human beings recognize positive and negative energy on a subtle level. We may not be able to explain it but we know when we meet someone we can trust and someone we can’t. It’s not in the words they say but in how it is delivered. It is about congruence. When everything about us is aligned – physically, mentally, and energetically — we create trust, openness, and possibility.

Bringing congruence into our lives involves combining substance with style. If you want to get your great ideas across, you need to make it accessible. If you have an innovative product that you know will change the world, package it properly or else people may not even notice it. Don’t be naïve in thinking that substance alone is enough. Even spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama know the importance of PR and marketing. Consider your style to be your own personal ad agency.

If I paid $900 for this designer t-shirt I too would hide my face in shame.

To be clear, style is nothing without substance. It becomes just an empty shell. If your life is f-cked up, no amount of makeup or bling is going to fool people. Well, at least not other people of substance. At the end of the day substance will triumph over style. So make sure you continue to work on building your substance. But if you don’t want to wait until the end of the day, substance combined with style readily triumphs over both individually.

The Roots of Style
Style comes in many different forms but, in my perspective, all of it is rooted in helping to bring out the uniqueness and inner beauty of who you are as a person so that you are more effective in your interactions with others.

Most forms of style occur on a nonverbal level. How you connect with others, such as adding a simple smile, eye contact or a basic greeting, can mean the difference between someone being helpful or not giving you the time of day. Dressing well and dressing appropriately communicates respect for others and taking pride in how you look. Adding intonation, stress and rhythm into your speaking voice indicates presence, power and confidence. All of these can open doors and create opportunities. Human beings respond much more readily to these nonverbal cues than the actual words we use in conversation. As much as 93% of effective communication is nonverbal. Only 7% is through the words themselves. Humans have been communicating with each other long before any of our complex language systems were invented. Your words are important but they have to be congruent with your nonverbal cues.

When your style is congruent with your character, it will help accentuate your strengths. It will bring out your already interesting personality. But don’t use style as a crutch to hide aspects of yourself you need to work on. Yes it may appear to cover your weaknesses but only superficially. If you are an asshole, people will still know you are an asshole, albeit a second or two later. Continue working on yourself for your own emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is the difference between someone who is just physically attractive and someone who is beautiful and radiant. It is the difference between someone who is well dressed and someone who makes a strong presence when they enter a room. For a light to shine brightly, you need a good internal source of power. No amount of style can create true inner strength and inner beauty.

Dressing Well
Dressing well is one aspect of style. But it isn’t about wearing fancy clothes. It isn’t about price tags or designer labels. It is about congruence. This means dressing appropriately, according to the situation, season, mood and, more importantly, your personality, physical attributes and energy.

Daoist Inspired Clothing

For thousands of years of recorded history, humans have recognized the importance of clothing. Beyond mere function or eye candy, clothes are storytellers. They provide insights into the culture and outlook not just of the individual but of a given society or era. For the Daoists (Taoists) in ancient China, clothes help create a harmonious relationship between you, your environment and the people you interact with. The materials, colors, motifs, shapes, silhouettes and patterns all have meaning. Woven together, fabrics can alter or enhance your energy. There is a lot of ancient wisdom passed on through clothing but I will leave that topic for another time.

For now, it is important to begin by knowing what the existing rules are for dress. You can’t break the rules if you don’t know them first. And you don’t want to follow the rules religiously because, then, it isn’t really you. Ultimately you want to follow your intuition and experiment with what works for you to make your own rules. This is what will make your style truly reflect who you are.

In the next several articles on fashion and style, I will be covering some of the basics of what I think is important to dress well. Please comment below if you have any requests, questions or opinions.