Yin-Yang Symbol of Equilibrium

This is an ancient Chinese symbol from Taoism that represents universal balance, polarity and complimentary opposites like health/disease, light/darkness, male/female, good/bad and so on. At one time this symbol was not as well known as it is now. It is seen as bullets and thumbnails et cetera on websites, on shirts and many other places. I guess that most of such users do not know the origin of this symbol and what it depicts. They use it just because it looks nice. Yin-Yang symbol gained popularity after Mrs. Hawayo Takata wore it on her shirt. There is one such picture floating around on Internet showing Mrs. Hawayo Takata wearing a shirt with this symbol printed on front side. I guess she knew what she was wearing and did not use it because of just the appearance.

Yin-Yang symbol does not belong to Reiki taught by Dr. Mikao Usui but many Reiki teachers talk about it during their teaching lectures. The purpose of this article is to highlight main features of the symbol and leave it to the users to decide how to use or not to use this symbol.

Describing the symbol in one word, it represents “equilibrium” or “balance”. White and dark portions of the symbol are exactly symmetrical and represent the two primal cosmic forces in the universe. According to Taoism, where there is health there is diseases as well, where there is good there is bad as well and so on. Following are few examples of dual but naturally opposite items:

Similarly the food items, various types of energies and diseases also belong to either yin or yang sides. If you can understand this concept and apply it to practical situations, you can get much better results but you must understand what you are doing and where and why you are using the Yin-Yang symbol. I do not think using any symbol anywhere is a bright idea.