As on the right, so on the left

where to rest and love when the world seems full of fight.

Polarities are tough. I’m learning this to the n^th degree these days. I’m talking the opposites of the conscious mind v the subconscious, right wing fundamentalism v left wing progressiveness, depression v mania, and even east v west. These dichotomies sometimes feel like battles, and I’ve been finding if I invest myself in one side, I often wind up feeling the other one real hard in equal measure.

And that’s like bouncing between emotional heaven and hell. An exciting, but taxing experience of life…

Living in a mindset that allows for opposite ideas to be as true as the ones we’ve adopted is not easy. For an INFJ¹ like me, not continually categorizing right from wrong is tough – I love to sort ideas² into boxes, then feel like I’ve won some prize for doing so. Sorting behaviors into this v that is really natural to some of us, like second nature. And often helpful in navigating life.

Yet, no matter how strongly I feel about one side of anything¹ being better than another, I still know to have real peace, I must find a deeper place that encompasses both sides cohesively, otherwise I just feel divided. And in my world, divided usually equals tired. And to make things more complicated, acting according to my sense of right and wrong is important too.

So how do you do it? Accept wholeness, and still make great choices?

Buddhism² and meditation are both helpful to cultivate this type of awareness, so I’m on it, kinda sorta anyway.

Speaking from experience, if any one of us has spent a life trying to ‘be good,’ and our dark side shows up in our face, it is unsettling at best and destabilizing at worst. Most folks will repress undesirable self-awareness and pretend it doesn’t exist in order to feel okay with themselves.

But the real trick, IMHO, is to accept all sides of ourselves, find the underlying ground beneath our ideas of right v wrong, and live from there.

In relationships, this means believing others also have this kind of multi-dimensional awareness, and treating them accordingly.

Tuning into Nature makes most folks work together for survival – because this is a basic instinct. Only when ideas of winning v. losing, or more v less, or mine v. theirs take root, does hoarding and cruelty emerge in behavior. These dichotomies are accelerants into duality. And we can guess what behaviors emerge after that.

Duality as a tool to tap emergent awareness

Do you remember a time you told a friend a deep secret and to them it was no big deal? Or have you ever faced a deeply held shame or fear only to find yourself stronger and okay afterward? Maybe awash in tears, but fine, accepted, and loved nonetheless?

Sometimes an awakening to our deeper self happens by breakdown, sometimes by addiction, betrayal, transcendent healing, by courage, or by deep grief. Any one of these paths can lead to a deeper place from which we find out from where we really emerge today and every day.

And, the choice is always ours: where we stand, and what we do in this deeply mysterious flow of life. Our choices are private to make, but easy to see.

Be a tree.

I just put this last line in here because, it rhymed nicely, and I’m pretty sure we’d be happier if we understood ourselves this way: rooted, clearly emerging from the Earth, and reaching for the stars.

FOOTNOTES

1. Take a free Myers Briggs personality test and find out yours. ↩︎
2. Post on mental conception, which I like to call confections sometimes ↩︎
3. In my daily life, I have lived by strong ethical guidelines, political leanings, and have a clearly defined value system. And I’ve found even if my awareness includes acceptance of ‘both sides’, I can still absolutely choose how I’ll act. In fact, it feels even more important to act in accordance to the world I wish to create. ↩︎
4. Buddhism posts include this one and this one and this other Tina Turner one. ↩︎