Lesson 1: Remember to Embrace the Yin and the Yang of it in harmony.
Yin Yang is the perfect harmony of all things, not that oppose one another, but in complement to one another. Nothing exists without its balanced and alternate identity. In the Yin Yang images in this post, note that the different sides, though opposites are not good or bad in and of themselves. They are just different sides of the same coin, such as male/female. Neither is right or wrong, good or bad, they are just different, and no one person is all male or all female, despite what some would like us to think. We all have a balance of each within us.
I think about perfection. People think that perfection is “without flaws.” Well that might be a technical way to think about it, but have you ever known anything without flaws? I suppose it does matter what you consider a flaw to be, and there is the exact reason there is no perfect anything. Humans cannot agree on what is a flaw and what is not a flaw. We cannot reach or attain perfection in terms of no flaws because perception of the words flaw and perfect are subjective and therefore never attainable by anyone or anything consistently.
So we agree that being perfect isn’t the goal then right? Because that is all a perception and not measurable. What is the goal then? Could it be Harmony, the Yin Yang? While that is subjective too, it’s also more attainable.
Seek to be at peace with who you are, knowing that who you are is a perfect harmony of dark and light. This is not good and evil, right and wrong. All of these are subjective terms no one can seem to agree upon. Focus on that you are both dark and light, meaning you are both everything that you in your 
subjective opinion believe to be lightness and everything you believe to be darkness. No two people are the same combination of light and dark, because, again, it is subjective as to what that means. In addition, what we perceive as our lightness and darkness will change over time as we learn and grow and have experiences. The one objective constant is that we will not be able to rid ourselves of either side. We cannot remove any part of our lightness without removing darkness along with it, and vice versa, so they will remain with us forever. We might as well be at peace with it.
This gives us permission to love and accept our darkness, whatever we define that as. It is also permission to love and accept our lightness, again, as whatever we define that as. I don’t know which is harder for most people, embracing that they are lightness or that they are darkness. I think that varies from person to person and situation to situation within each person.
What it does not give us permission to do is to hurt people on purpose. I am not saying that if you do that, you are wrong or bad, or out of balance. You may or may not be out of balance. You are the only one who knows that. What I am saying is, it does not give us permission to stop paying attention to who we are and who we want to be in the world. It does not give us permission to give up trying to be what we believe is good, honest, kind, etc. It gives us permission to be human, meaning no matter how hard we try, there will be times when we fail to meet our own expectations, in addition to the expectations of others. Knowing that who you are will always be a mixture of what you want and don’t want, see as good and see as evil, light and darkness, etc. means you can focus on the person you want to be, and still love who you are when you believe you have fallen short.
Our higher selves knew what we would struggle with in this life. We set our path in order to create the struggles we wanted to experience. We set the path so that we could become who we wanted to become. If we ever really see who that intended person is, we will know it was not an unflawed human, but a perfectly flawed human, with humility and grace. Yin Yang is the grace to be exactly who you are, try as hard as you can, and know you will still fail from time to time, and you can still be okay with that. It is the actual design of being human.
I know that light and dark are perceptions. They are my own perceptions, and the perceptions of others. There is no absolute lightness or darkness. In a room of people who are witnessing me teach on a topic, whether I am passionate and knowledgeable or somewhat faking it to get through it, people will not all see me the same. Some will think I am an arrogant ass who thinks he is perfect and knows everything. Others will think that I am brilliant, humble, and passionate about my work and the people that I love. There will also be variations in between. Same room, same speech, material and audience, and the resulting opinions will be all variations of who I could be seen as being.
This is how I know that Yin Yang is real. When I am at peace. When I feel harmonious inside of my heart and soul and believe in my absolute lightness and love, and that I am absolutely acting out of that lightness and love, there are still people who call me arrogant and asshole, and I know, they are not wrong. There is an arrogant asshole in here too. They are not entirely right either, for that is not all of who I am. What this tells me is that I am both light and dark from my own and the perception of others. That this is how it is meant to be, and I am to embrace, love, and cherish all of who I am, as I continue to work and grow to be the best at being me as I am capable of being.
That is all any of us can do, be the best at being ourselves. No one can be you, and you cannot be anyone else except you. So, be you. Love yourself, all of yourself, light and dark. Be at peace with where you are in every moment, knowing that even if it doesn’t feel great to be there, it is where you are meant to be in that moment. As that moment passes and a new one arrives, allow the past to become the past, and move into the new future you, which will always be light and dark.
Namaste