Ancient wisdom counsels that the middle ground is best. You know, everything in moderation, don’t go to extremes, too much of something can take you out of balance, etc. etc. One of the places where people struggle to find middle ground is in how much they need to be in control of themselves and the world around them. There are those who relinquish all control even as healers and practitioners. They firmly avow that the universe is in control of everything, that it knows better than them, that they need to get out of the way of other beings who know better, that they are just a conduit, and that it’s all about trust. Instead of being a partner and interdependent with the universe lending their unique individual gifts, insights, and wisdom they constantly allow everything around them to happen, opportunities flowing through their fingers as easily as negative interactions.
Others seek to keep themselves safe and on the right path through rigid control. They can only be happy if things including themselves are strictly regulated and follow specific standards for behavior and output. Any variance is a cause for concern, like walking a knife’s edge over a chasm full of nightmares any wobble will have negative repercussions which might not be recoverable. These control issues can focus on weight, on advancement at work, on career trajectory, on externals such as home, social standing, clothing and vehicles, it can also be about family. People can look very successful personally and can present the happy family, but what they have it not actually family, but a very strictly controlled play which they direct. They don’t have relationships, they have roles to be filled in their lives and they have chosen people to be in those roles. It can be devastating for them to find that their spouse has been acting correctly in their role but secretly living a completely different life as a means of coping. Or that their children learn how to portray their parts but become completely different people when they stop off stage and may permanently refuse to return to it.
In between the control and the allowing there is a middle road, a place of stillness. It’s not the stillness of perfect peace, of relinquishing the world and removing the self from it. That’s an illusion. A mirage that has led people astray for centuries. This place of stillness stems from the constant change, movement and becomingness of the world around. The stillness is like the eye of a hurricane, it is the center of the movement, the focal point where everything becomes clear and we can breathe free. If you watch a hurricane, the center stillness isn’t unmoving, it’s constantly moving, perfectly contained within the swirling movement of the storm and moving forward in a direction towards something or away from something, changing the world, making it new and different, more and less than it was before. We are all like that. It takes both allowing and control in order to remain centered in the stillness. Like yoga or Taiji or Judo or Karate or any of the spiritual physical practices, the balance is in the movement, the movement is centered around the stillness, the stillness comes from the willingness to balance.