Everyone knows this symbol:
it doesn't really matter if one calls yin the white and yang the black or the other way around. What is significant is the little circles, what do these represent? Lets say yin is the white for convenience, it has a black (thus yang) core. This means it does not live only next to its yang counterpart but in it's deepest core it needs to be yang to exist. Like female has a male property inside, and male has a female side in the core.
For tao-ism it means they cannot be opposites the full way, but exist inside each other.
It rids of any full on contradiction between the two.
For example say yin is calm and yang is movement.
Yin cannot become calm unless it
moves toward that state, or
works to maintain so. So yin needs to have itself a yang factor to become and stay yin at last.
Adversary for yang: if it was only movement, it would eventually move outside it own properties. So yang needs a brake (a yin factor) to maintain being yang as it is. Yang needs to
stall itself in its state to exist. It needs a
calming factor inside itself to remain itself.
Who thinks of yin/yang as opposites-only, is done for in deep tao meaning, as I understood it.
Another example: say a static painting is yin because it just is. But for it to be, the textile had to be
produced, cotton has
grown, the painter had to
move pencils and had
dynamic thoughts to make it. So yin consists purely by yang, no way around it.
Adversary the buzzy painter (yang) had to
contain the pencil movements decisively,
calm down his focus toward the end point product. He had to
stall his hand movements in the right amount to make the painting to what it is. The resulting painting lived inside himself as a
calm very
static core idea where he worked to gradually. Even when the painting is an expressionistic blow, the idea of an expressionistic painting itself had lived inside himself as a very
parked concept. He could not produce anything without a strong centered calm
still enough concept in his core. If he would change concept all the time he would not ever come to produce an end result. Yang means nothing without yin giving it a meaning. That meaning must be
still long enough for the yang movements to work toward it. Yang cannot even exist without yin giving it a meaning in time and space.
Therefore there is a black core dot in the white, and a white core dot in the black. They 'make' each other into existence. They absolutely not live 'next' to each other, but inside each other profoundly and only.
If you want to drive
very fast a car trough a corner , the faster you go (more yang), the more
contained (yin) your movements on the pedal must be, any erratic (yang) movement on the pedal or steering wheel will compromise the fastness of your lap time. If you want to swim
fast in water, you'll have to put a
diet, a stop, a moderation (= ying) to anything that works counter productive. The yang lives due ying, only.
Adversary, the more Zen you want to become (more yin), the more
actively you have to work toward it, like stopping doing things in itself is an
action of change what you where doing. You get more zen (ying) by
producing it more. The ying lives due yang.
For tao-this-style, ying and yang cannot actually be labelled, as the one represents the other ultimately.
Applied to this:
...But how to define health and disease in those terms is what's messing with me...
Health could be seen as the [sickness of unhealthy-ness]. A lethal virus (or deadly bacteria colony) inside you has to be dead sick for you to be healthy.
Sickness could be seen as having/maintaining a healthy set of thriving life-compromising activities inside yourself.
True tao rids of the good-vs-bad labels. For it, anything is just a form of energy, coming to that state by a story. Like sickness being a battery of wrong voltage in your radio. But still a battery! Since it is 'energy' at last (yeah an unfortunate form of it) the tao-ist is interested to transform it if possible. This is the base of tao-ism, making use of transformation properties of energy, and (the) base of Chinese traditional Medicine. Using highways over the body (meridians) attempting to displace/relocate/re-distribute out of balance fields of energy by accupunture, siatsu,... Needless to say weird interpretations and charlatanism is part, as always.
.
I'm sure there are other meanings out there to all of that above, just sharing one of the many, one that resonates with me because it strikes me as a good news show a bit