Stephen van Beek MA (Tripos), Dip CTP, Member CAPT

Balancing

One of the great myths of our time is that it is desirable and necessary and even morally virtuous to strive for a balanced life. We are endlessly told how important it is to eat our daily dose of green leafy vegetables, to get plenty of exercise, plenty of nourishing rest, earn enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, spend lots of leisure time with friends, or go canoeing on a quiet lake, constantly learning and earning the brownie points that accrue to a well-adjusted normalized life plan.

It's pretty hard to resist the notion of balance. Isn't it everything we yearn for, we with our unbalanced lives, our veering from this to that, our restlessness and our fear for missing out on the good and getting only the bad?

The fundamental difficulty is, however, that living is an imbalanced activity. Balance is only meaningful as a state of recovery from an extreme. Old Montaigne was right in saying "Life is a wavering and uncertain movement."

I remember being taught by the incomparable Milton Trager, an exquisite acrobat and gymnast, revolutionary body worker and creator of Mentastics, that even in simple locomotion we are always teetering between a state of 'groundedness' and a state of lack of control. The simple act of walking obliges us to abandon a stable position in order to move in a new direction, and in this act of movement we are always at risk of falling.

It seems there is a fundamental binary or polar divide in the mind as in the body. We cannot avoid a degree of psychic separation if we are to cultivate a 'mind', since the mind is that which observes and comments on our life-activity. Other animals appear to lack this integrated split, and their consciousness is better understood as single, not complex. Simply to decide between scrambled and easy over eggs requires an imbalance; the eggs cannot occupy both conditions simultaneously. Nor can our thoughts be bifurcated forever; we certainly know we have to endure the frustration and even anguish of wanting to have two opposing thoughts co-exist peacefully together. We are creatures of extremes and come by it naturally.

Within psychotherapy this innate dilemma can either fuel change or impede it. Nowadays we are fearful of the consequences of not being balanced, and the dreadful result is that the opportunity for individuation is much diminished by our resistance to our becoming who we are intended, ultimately, to become. For the full glory of the human experience is the flourishing of our entire nature, with all its strengths and weaknesses, its disfigurations and transfigurations.

If you intend to enter a meaningful therapy, and are looking beyond a short-term bandage for a temporary wound, it is worth noting that your therapist will not be perfect. He or she will be a person whose abilities are connected with a sane appreciation of his or her lacks, deficiencies and shortcomings. Without these no therapist can be a good therapist. With them, and with a willingness to be open with you, a therapist can enable you to work with your own destiny as he or she has learned, at least partially, to work with his or her own. By destiny I mean the path towards greater and greater levels of personal individuation and consciousness of existence.

It should not be too great a surprise, either, if the therapist you select is a bit of a character, since character is the etching of experience on a human frame. The lines and scars give life a structure and a perspective on existence; no Botox here! It's not the fact that the therapist has a world-view that is different from your own that will be the issue; rather, you ought to question any therapist who wants to adjust you to the prevailing culture, who sees his role as being your 'life-coach', gives you unwanted advice, always has a convincing answer and a ready solution, and won't let you feel the full weight of your individual choices and their pains.

Granted, this viewpoint is increasingly unwanted in a world that overvalues the sleek and glossy at the expense of what has matured and grown despite the dents and scars of maturation. Do you ever remember longing for the wrinkles your grandparents had, that went so well with laughter and smiling eyes?

Balance is miserly in avoiding extremes, either of joy or grief. It favours an impoverished life and prefers fantasy for real pleasures. The Japanese have always had a particular high regard for the battle scars of existence, which in their culture they term 'wabi-sabi', the particular aesthetic of that which has proven itself to be of utility value, and has given of itself to existence. Like a beloved teddy bear, with all the velveteen rubbed off after a long lifetime of use, so we may emerge into selves that bring values to others and draw others to us. It won't come merely from balance.

Balance is grudging, balance doles out feeling by half and quarter measures, balance always wants to keep the emotional books in surplus. The parent who offers too little even becomes dead to us as children while continuing to breathe among us.

If there is to be a balance, it is healthy only as the expression of an internalized elastic and resilient tension. The push and pull of opposite forces makes us stronger, just as a rubber band makes the muscles stronger when we sustain its isometric tensions. In therapy we can learn to strengthen our capacity to be resilient, and abandon our hidden resistance to the flow of energy that is the essence of full living.