It is the question I get asked more often than any other: do I have too much yin?
They can rarely say what they mean by it. Cold hands, usually. Or a bad run of months. Or a flat where the sun never reaches the living room.
I don’t answer straight off. Cold hands are a question for a doctor, and I say so before anything else. The rest of it needs the two words pulled apart, because in the vocabulary the question borrows from, that sentence doesn’t parse.
The words start on a hillside
Yin and yang begin as the two faces of a hill. The side the sun reaches is yang, the side in shadow is yin. Both characters still carry the mound radical down the left, which is the hill itself, sitting in the writing where nobody looks for it.
The rule extends to water: south of a hill and north of a river counts as yang, north of a hill and south of a river as yin. Chinese place names are stuffed with it. Luoyang sits north of the Luo. Jiangyin sits south of the Yangtze. Give me the name and I can usually tell you which side of the ridge or the water the town is on, allowing for rivers that changed course since. Why the water half runs opposite to the hill half I’ve heard several explanations for, none convincing. I use the rule anyway.
Change what you compare it to, and it changes sides
The hillside already contains the part people skip, which is that it only works as a comparison. The sunlit face is yang relative to the shaded face; set the whole hill in a plain and the hill entire becomes the raised part, yang relative to flat ground. The object hasn’t moved; what it’s being measured against has. Hands are the easiest demonstration in a classroom. Hold a hand out palm down: the back is yang and the palm is yin, one facing the sky and one the ground. Now stop comparing the hand to itself and compare the whole arm to the trunk of the body. Limbs are the extremities, the trunk is the root, and extremities are yin. The arm has changed sides without moving. Push it into time instead of space. Day is yang and night is yin, but inside the day you can split again, the morning rising and yang, the afternoon settling and yin. Then take the most yang hour of a winter’s day, set it against the year, and the whole thing sits in the yin stretch. Which is why “this is a yang object” is not yet a sentence. It needs the second half, relative to what. This is the step students get stuck on, every year, without fail. They want a permanent identity card issued to each thing, filed once and never revisited. No such card exists, and they go on asking for one anyway.
Neither end exists on its own
The old formula: yin alone does not give birth, yang alone does not grow. Chapter 42 of the Dao De Jing has 萬物負陰而抱陽，沖氣以為和, the ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and hold yang in their arms, and the breath between them makes the harmony. Everything carries both loads, and nothing in the world runs pure.
It moves in quantities, not switches
Heat and cold across a year, light and dark across a day: the two ends slide against each other continuously and there is no switch that flips. The winter solstice is the deepest point of yin, and the old line says one yang is born at the winter solstice, because the other end has already started to stir underneath.
Which raises the local question: what month is that down here? My answer is that the solar terms keep their names and swap in application, so the longest days of a Sydney December get read against the summer solstice and the shortest days of June against the winter one, and one yang is born here in June. Why, I set out in the piece on the twenty-four solar terms below the equator: the stars don’t move, the earthly trigrams do, and heat and cold sit on the earthly side. Other practitioners keep the northern months and can argue for it.
Sydney’s winter is about a fortnight of real cold wrapped in three months of mild weather. Every June someone newly arrived from northern China tells me this doesn’t count.
And at the far end it turns over
Run one end to its limit and it flips into the other. The summer solstice carries the longest daylight of the year, and yin starts from that day. Boxing has a bodily version. Xingyi works in rising and falling, rising as yang and falling as yin, and by the time a strike has finished falling the next rising is already inside it.
What I can’t teach well is the scale. Everyone can recite that things reverse at the extreme. Where is the extreme? The old books give no gradations and I can’t supply any. In practice I recognise a turning point afterwards, and while I’m inside one I don’t see it at all. People use this layer as a forecasting instrument: this year it must reverse, that month it bottoms out. I can’t do that, and I’m not persuaded anyone else can.
“Yang day master” doesn’t mean extroverted
In bazi, calling someone a yang day master says something narrow. The heavenly stem of the day pillar is one of 甲丙戊庚壬. The other five, 乙丁己辛癸, are yin day masters. The ten stems alternate yang, yin, yang, yin down the sequence, and that is the whole basis of the split.
It’s a charting device. The Ten Gods depend on it: five relations to the self, each cut in two by whether the stem matches the day master in yin or yang. There’s a separate piece on the Ten Gods, so I’ll leave that layer alone here.
It says nothing about temperament. But I meet people constantly who read yang as outgoing, talkative, ambitious and yin as reserved and easily hurt, which is two vocabularies colliding. English does the same thing with a sunny disposition and a gloomy one, and those adjectives landed on top of a pair of terms that were only ever marking positions.
A “yin dwelling” is not a haunted house
In this trade a house for the living is a yang dwelling and a burial site chosen for the ancestors is a yin dwelling. The pair means living and dead, and that is the whole of it. What each branch examines, and why many practitioners won’t take yin dwelling work at all, sits with the Feng Shui FAQ rather than here.
English makes it worse. “Yin house” lands somewhere between a horror film and a nightclub, so half the time I just say “the burial side of the work” and skip the explanation.
Why English readers have the harder job
The two words came into English more or less as dark and light. The fish on the T-shirt arrives with a caption about the balance of darkness and light, and once a language has the dark side as a fixed phrase carrying that weight, yin reads as the bad half before anyone opens a book.
Negative and positive is the rendering that irritates me most. It smuggles the value judgement straight back in, and it collides with electrical charge, which I suspect is where much of the instinct that positive means good comes from. Shady and sunny is closer to the etymology and unusable in a sentence. I leave both words untranslated now, which means explaining them every time.
Back to the question
So when someone asks whether they have too much yin, I say the sentence isn’t from this vocabulary. To put it in, you have to finish it: relative to what. If it’s about a phase running strong or thin across a chart, bring the chart. If it’s about a room with no sun and no air moving through it, I can measure that on site and say what can be changed. Hanging the word on a person as a fixed quality I won’t do, and I don’t make that sort of call about anyone.
They sometimes push. Yes, but do I have it or not. There’s no it there to have. That doesn’t satisfy most people. Nothing I can do about it.