The Bingo Theory: A revolutionary guide to love, life, and relationships - Mimi Ikonn (2016)

Part VI. Balance Existing Relationships

Chapter 21. CONCLUSION: THE BIGGER BINGO

ON A DECEMBER morning in 1996, a Harvard trained brain-scientist woke up with a pounding pain behind her left eye. It was the kind of headache you get after eating too much ice cream. Not sure what was going on, Jill Bolte Taylor tried to go about her day as she normally would. She stepped on to her exercise machine and started to work out but the headache was getting worse. She looked down at her hands on the bars and they looked liked “claws”. She felt odd.

She got off the machine and started to walk across her living room floor when she realized that everything was slowing down. She could almost hear her mind telling her muscles to contract and relax, but they were not obeying instructions.

She lost her balance and leaned against the wall. As she did that, she had the strange sensation that she could not define where she ended and where the wall began. “The atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall,” she later said. “All I could detect was this energy… energy.”

Her mind was desperately trying to make sense of what was happening - but then it stopped completely. There was silence. Suddenly she felt “enormous and expansive… at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”

She felt a state of euphoria.

At that moment her right arm became totally paralyzed, and her brain chatter started again - it told her “I am having a stroke!”

Some of you may have seen Dr Bolte Taylor’s fascinating TED talk, in which she describes with amazing detail what it felt like as the left side of her brain slowly closed down, leaving her reliant on just the right side of her brain.

As I explained in the opening chapter, it’s believed that the left side of our brain specializes in logic, rationality, language, rules and strategy. The right side of our brain is where we get our creativity, imagination, curiosity and intuition.

Of course, nothing is as simple and clean-cut as that. There is always a complex interaction between the two sides of the brain—which is why the idea that you are either “left brained” or “right brained” has been disputed. However, the basic principle that each hemisphere assimilates the world in a different way holds true.

Eastern philosophies have always argued that our left brain is our masculine energy, and the right is our feminine.

Quite suddenly, Dr Bolte Taylor was living almost entirely in her feminine energy. She says it was Nirvana.

“When we see life through the right hemisphere,” Dr Bolte Taylor continued saying, “we see that we are energy beings connected to one another…We are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.”

This feeling of connectedness and of beauty was so heavenly that she found it hard to leave it. But she knew that if she wanted to survive, she needed to get help— and for that, she would need her left hemisphere, her masculine side. She needed to use what was left of her linear, logical numerical thinking in order to pick up the phone and get help. And fortunately she managed to make that call and help arrived before the clot in her brain totally stopped the left hemisphere from functioning.

I cannot think of a stronger story to demonstrate the importance of having both the masculine intellect and the feminine intuition. Without the masculine energy to pick up that phone, Dr. Bolte Taylor would have died, and yet, by getting in touch with her pure feminine energy, she experienced the “life-force power of the universe.”

In this book we’ve seen how important it is to balance our masculine and feminine energies for the sake of our own fulfillment and contentment. We’ve seen how, once you start to achieve that balance, you can have beautiful relationships with others. Relationships in which you share your love without always wanting something in return. Relationships that help you grow and evolve as a human being.

"The repression of the feminine has led to a planet on the edge of collapse. The re-emergence is going to be a dance to behold"

- CLARE DAKIN

Beyond You

Now I want to share the bigger picture with you. Yes, The Bingo Theory will bring you more happiness and love, but it can also change the world. Does that sound over the top? It’s not.

I believe that everything that’s wrong with the world—everything that’s imbalanced and every conflict—comes from an inability to balance our masculine and feminine energies.

Balancing our energy is therefore not just a personal matter. It’s vital for the survival of our species and the survival of our planet. Not just you, not just me, but collectively we need to balance our masculine and feminine energies.

Why? Well, look at what is happening in the world at the moment.

We live in a world that’s run by the masculine energy.

Status, competition, money, ambition, capitalism and power are the masculine values in the world today. We are told that growth matters above all else. We go to war, we invade, we expand, we dominate.

But at what cost?

We’re disconnected from nature. We are running out of space. We are running out of trees. The number of endangered species is through the roof. We are disconnected not just from the land we live on but from other people. Man is killing fellow man.

We’re told that the masculine ideal of financial success will make us happy, but what is success? Being successful is about being fulfilled in yourself and in your relationships with your loved ones— as well as being accomplished in your business or career.

From day to day, does all of our economic growth bring us happiness or health? And if it doesn’t, then what’s the point? It’s great to have a business - I have several myself - but you have to keep asking yourself the bigger questions: Am I happy? Am I connected? Am I loving?

We can’t blame just the masculine energy, though. We also see extremes of the feminine energy which can be superficial and irresponsible. It is our extreme feminine energy that is irresponsible enough to keep consuming. We want more, more, more with no thought to where it’s coming from or who has been hurt to provide it. We think that happiness lies in the next shopping trip, but it doesn’t. You only need to looks at rates of depression in the United States to see that.

The reality is that you have to decide for yourself what makes you happy. At the end of the day, true happiness comes first from having a good relationship with yourself, a better relationship with other people, and then an even better relationship with the world.

I believe that any human being can be balanced, it’s in our nature. It’s actually our conditioning that makes us unbalanced.

Right now we need more feminine energy in the world. We need more love, connection, and empathy. We need to love ourselves, love our fellow man and love this beautiful planet we live on and all of its inhabitants, whose survival depends on us.

But we can’t lose the masculine energy. The masculine is needed to get things done. The feminine energy cries for what’s happening to the planet but does nothing about it. We need the masculine energy to take action and make change.

When we combine the feminine heart with masculine action, we can change the world. I not only believe that. I know that. We can live in peaceful co-existence, man, woman and nature. We can live in a way that is sustainable yet progressive.

And we already have that within us. We have both the masculine and the feminine. The left brain and the right brain. We have the power to choose which energy to use and when to use it. From moment to moment we choose.

Now is the time to do this. You’re ready. We need this balance in order to survive.