Counterbalancing Energy
Within ourselves we have the ability to embody the Dragon as well as the Tiger. Yet at any given time, we tend to embody one energy more than the other. I call this embodiment our Dominant Energy. We are either a Dominant Tiger, balanced by a little Dragon…
…or we are a Dominant Dragon, balanced by a little Tiger:
We need counterbalance in our energy to function and succeed. If we were all Dragon, we would be overly aggressive and cutthroat, whereas if we were all Tiger, we would be uncontrollably wild and unhinged. It’s the balance of both energies that ensures we can remain in harmony with the world and each other. According to Taoism, that balance follows a 70:30 ratio: 70% of our energy is embodied by either the Tiger or the Dragon.
Whatever our Dominant Energy is at any given time, it attracts our energetic opposite. Together with a polar opposite partner, we feel complete, whole, “one.” Whether you believe in the Garden of Eden or evolution, whether you ascribe to Plato, Islam, Taoism, or Hinduism, virtually every creation story you’ll find points to a time when everything was “one” and then became broken into “two.” We are generally familiar with the concept of being “incomplete” on our own, and we seem to be born with that knowledge.
When Peter and I met for the first time, I finally felt whole, like my final puzzle piece was fitting into place. It was so natural when we were together—it felt balanced and beautiful. Being with him made me feel calm and happy and deeply loved.
Our Wedding Day, Dec 9, 2006.
Then somewhere in our late twenties, Peter changed. After years of floating through life, he started to buckle down. He enrolled to get his master’s in international taxation, and he studied hard and worked even harder. He became focused on his goals and eventually built a thriving international practice with offices in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Singapore, Sydney, and London. At the same time, I was also an entrepreneur and COO running a successful franchise system that had over 200 locations across the United States and Canada. By our early thirties, Peter and I were both working eighty hours a week and traveling more than 150 days a year. We often chuckled with friends about how we had now merged into one person: I was a little more fun, and he was a lot more serious. Our personalities were now strangely similar.
Peter and I looked like this:
In hindsight, I regret making light of our merger, because there was really nothing funny about it. At home, Peter had lost his sparkle. He was no longer my wild Tiger, he was a fire-breathing Dragon, and our energy together wasn’t balanced, it was abrasive. We didn’t complete each other anymore; rather we now competed with each other. We were both focused, determined, and in a constant state of conflict, battling for control.
My driven Dragon Energy was no longer sassy and sexy to Peter; instead it felt cold and detached. Rather than being inspired by my sense of direction and purpose, he was repulsed by it and instead craved a deep devotion and warm nurturing that I wasn’t yet able to provide. He still loved me, but he felt that I was incapable of loving him the way that he now wanted to be loved.
While Peter’s energetic evolution—from a dominant Tiger to a dominant Dragon —occurred slowly over a decade, my personal experience with the opposite shift in energy—from Dragon to Tiger—was far more abrupt. Following the birth of our first daughter, Ophelia, I felt a sudden and seismic shift. And for two years, I fought it tooth and nail.
The old, familiar Dragon voice in my head tried to tell me that nothing needed to change; I could remain an executive working at the same pace; keep my start-up side hustle; and utilize nannies, housekeepers, cleaners, and night nurses to carry on as before. After all, I had managed over 100 employees via effective delegation—what was delegating a few more tasks at home? And yet this new feeling was emanating from my heart and creating conflict: I really didn’t want to delegate motherhood.
From the second I held Ophelia in my arms, that all-doing Dragon impulse started to be drowned out by a newfound desire to love, nourish, and nurture that caught me completely off guard. I knew this “love” was something many people felt after having children, and I felt ashamed, because I had judged those people harshly. I had thought I was going to be different. Yet motherhood had pierced my thick Dragon skin, and those work-related issues that had motivated me yesterday now felt trivial and empty.
So eventually I stopped fighting my Tiger. I finally let go.
Many people experience these seismic shifts of their Dominant Energy after major life events or times of great stress or pleasure, like a birth, death, marriage, or trauma. Sometimes it’s temporary, and sometimes it's permanent; either way, just knowing that it's natural and normal can help ease the confusion and internal conflict between what was and what now is.
After I let go and embraced my inner Tiger, I became more intuitive, flexible, nurturing, and compassionate. I took more time to relax, nourish, and heal my body. I let myself feel again. And when I did, I started to feel a new sensation. I felt . . . happy.
The easiest way to understand Polarity in practice is to imagine the sexual tension in your relationship as an elastic band, with you and your partner holding opposite ends of that band. When you stand right next to each other, the elastic is limp and lifeless, just like your desire. But as you start to walk away from each other, you begin to create tension in the elastic band.
The first step to create Polarity is to deeply understand the Dragon and the Tiger. Because to create Polarity, someone needs to be predominantly in their Dragon and someone needs to be in their Tiger.
The sad reality of relationships today is that most of us are coasting through life in a dull numbness of coexistence. We are spending so much uninterrupted time with our partner that it has created a crisis of energetic and sexual neutrality. Like magnets, we have rubbed up against each other for so long, with such consistency, that we have completely dulled the powerful attraction we once had. In order to get it back we need to intentionally create space. That is what this site and my book (Feed the Tiger, Free the Dragon) is all about.