Alt title: No, no more tea for me, thanks.

Today is a bit of a metaphysical dance.  It’s up to you, dear reader, to decide who leads.

I’ve heard this idea expressed in a variety of ways:  Yin and Yang, for example, dual energies, or Shiva and Shakti. The energy part I think is easy enough to understand.  This excerpt from the DailyOM says:

Intuition, feelings, openness, and unselfishness govern the feminine side of our natures. The masculine side is characterized by logic, facts, systems, and self-interest. If you are giving too much to others to the detriment of yourself, your feminine side may be overactive and your right side may need strengthening, to speak up on your behalf, protecting and conserving your energy. If your life is too rigidly structured, your masculine aspect may be overactive; developing your feminine aspect will bring a more open-ended and creative approach.*

So one can work towards improving or strengthening ones gender-specific traits or energies, but what about how an imbalance plays itself out in the physical realm?

For example, muscle tension or pain on the left side of ones body suggests the feminine energy needs work, and alternately, right-side weakness or trouble suggests your inner male needs attention. So, our inner struggles can manifest themselves as tension, malaise, weakness, pain.

But what about this? What about actually attracting trauma and injury to one side or part of your body?  And no, I don’t think I’m being paranoid here…

A few years ago, I had a Pyrex pan explode, sending shards of 400°F glass, cauliflower and hot sauce through space… and my big toe.  Now and forever referred to as “Frankentoe”. He (Frankentoe) is on my right foot, and while the stitches closed the wound, the glass effectively sheared the tendons from the bone, and Frankentoe is destined to live the rest of his life slightly flexed, somewhat crooked, and definitely not all there.

Fast forward to this past weekend when I was helping my friend in her restaurant,  hosting a charity tea.  Innocently adding berries to some cake squares, I was standing behind the server who was filling a Pyrex tea pot with boiling water (are we sensing a theme here?), when, yes, I have telegraphed the punch line– the vessel explodes and positively showers my right leg and foot in just-off-the-boil tea. I peeled off my shoe and sock as quickly as possible, and immersed it in ice water. I thought damage was minimal.  Some hours later, though, several nasty blisters rose, and while certainly it could have been much worse– at least the shards of glass didn’t make contact with any flesh, although the slightly humorous counterpoint to this story occurred when I looked down and saw “blood” splashed across my arm and chest, I said what one would normally say in a crisis: “Why the F*** am I bleeding!?” (the starred-out letters are for your gentle sensibilities, dear reader). Fortunately my friend the chef is very good in a crisis and knew it was no greater injury than a splash of berry juice when I dropped the spoon.

And so, you could consider this no more than a cautionary tale of Pyrex and foot protection in the kitchen.  But I have begun to wonder what I need to work on, from a male energy point of view, to strengthen that realm? Soon enough I’ll have enough material for a movie, entitled “My Right Foot”.

*sigh*

*http://dailyom.com/cgi-bin/display/articledisplay.cgi?aid=3938 by Madison Taylor