We live in a world of duality: love/fear, right/wrong, negative/positive, doing/being, sickness/health, comfort/risk, inner/outer, self/others, powerful/powerless, etc.

Living with these dualities, we experience tensions every day. Why? Because we tend to accept one side of the duality and reject or deny the other. We hold opinions that one side is good/right and the other is bad/wrong. And this attract/repel view of the world creates a lot of suffering for us.

When we look at how we put all our attention on one end of any continuum of opposites, (it doesn’t matter which end), we can see that our energy is out of balance. Accepting only one side of a duality and rejecting the other does not lead us to wholeness.

This is why trying to live with a positive mental attitude can be such a struggle. Life’s energies are always seeking balance but we’re resolutely clinging to just one side.

So what is the key? How do we work with these tensions? How do we process, heal, balance or resolve them?

As a first step, it helps to remember that it’s the very contrast of the opposites that gives each its identity. We can’t know ‘hot’ unless we also know ‘cold.’ The two sides need each other to make sense.

A next step is to find a new viewing point that can acknowledge and accept both extremes at once. A viewing point that embraces wholeness. The key word here is ‘acceptance.’ If we can let go of the mind’s view of the situation – the opinions and judgments that inherently resist some aspects of life – we can perhaps directly experience life as it is as opposed to what we want (or don’t want) it to be.

When we bring together two opposites into a higher understanding, we grow in consciousness. We discover that the parts can both coexist and have meaning and purpose in the more universal, inclusive picture.

Meditation supports this integration. It opens us to a higher energy that includes everything and therefore helps us find balance and peace.

~ John and Patrice

 “The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.”
-- James Hollis

“When you make the two one, and when you make the outside like the inside, and above like below; when you make the male and the female as one, then you will enter the kingdom of God.”
-– Gospel of Thomas

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