Richard Soehl
1. Living in the Middle – The Middle Way
1. Living in the Middle – The Middle Way
What is the Middle Way? From a Buddhist perspective it is the pathway that will lead to Nirvana; the ultimate goal in enlightenment. For our purposes here, The Middle Way is more of a viewpoint of how to approach life. It is a philosophy and perspective that derives from the Middle Way of Buddhism.
As a viewpoint or philosophy, the Middle Way is an approach to bring balance to one’s life by avoiding extremes that tend to attach to us as we journey through life. These extremes can influence how we perceive events and situations swaying our perspectives, our thoughts, and our emotional responses. Be those good or bad. Ultimately, they will influence how we live our lives.
Extremes. We all know that there are extremes all around us. There’s the far right side; the far left side; way up high and even way down low; the North Pole and the South Pole; hot and cold; Love and Hate. I’m sure you get it as you most likely experience many of these extremes personally. We all do as we venture through life surrounded by extremes. Sometimes we even ask ourselves why people indulge themselves in such extremes. Most often this comes up when we see the harm that comes from indulging in extreme tendencies.
One thing we should understand is that we, as people, are much like a pendulum moving through life. We are pulled in two different directions and are constantly moving between two points at any given time. It is the duality of living. We are naturally moving between two extremes such as night and day, waking and asleep, breathing in and breathing out, alive and dead. Therefore, we must never forget that WE are the central focus of influence from where these two extremes originate from while on this path of our pendulum.
So, if we swing our pendulum in one direction or the other we will eventually experience the opposite – the extreme of one side or the other. Be it an extreme emotion such as joy or sadness or we could end up changing loyalties and beliefs from one belief to the opposite belief. Keep in mind that the further the pendulum swings in one direction, the further it will eventually swing in the opposite direction. It is merely human nature and we will all experience extremes at one point or another. After all, we are seeking balance in our lives and to find it we have to journey to each side/extreme until we settle on that balance – what I like to call, The Middle Way or Living in the Middle.
But, it is when that extreme approach dominates the path of our pendulum that we get stuck in that one extreme direction leading us to experience problems or conflicts. Getting stuck in one extreme interferes with that natural balance and we end up taking things too seriously; too definitively. We could end up experiencing impatience, irritation, anxiety, depression, anger or even hatred without a true realistic cause. If we continue to take an extreme too seriously, where it becomes habitual, we risk becoming obsessive. This obsession has the potential to suppress our development as a person and negatively influences how we treat others. We end up getting stuck in life. Don’t we? You may even feel that way right now. But there is hope…always hope.
Buddha put it best when describing how the Middle Way came to him. He explained (I’m paraphrasing now) that when he was listening to a sitar being played, it was the tuned sitar that played the best. The Buddha noted that the one strung too tightly is sharp and will break the string, while the one strung too loosely had sounds that were dull and flat. That stuck with me and really made sense. For our lives to be at their best we should seek to be in tune. Not too tight and not too loose. We should strive to create a balance. For me, I liken it to a bowling alley. As we roll the bowling ball our goal is to get as many pins as possible. If we roll the ball to the extreme right it goes in the gutter and we end up with nothing. The same occurs if the ball rolls to the extreme left – we again end up with nothing. But, if we roll the bowling ball and it stays somewhere in between the two extremes we will knock down pins – we score. The closer to the Middle the ball rolls the more pins we knock down – the more we score. We don’t always have to be in the very middle. That’s not realistic and that’s okay too. We are simply striving for balance (not perfection) and that middle spot changes all the time. We just want to knock down pins. Even one pin will do. And there will be days that one pin is all we can achieve. But we do know that our pendulum is always moving and we can seek to keep it in the middle somewhere. That’s the goal. Balance.
Living in the Middle (by the Middle Way) is not an easy task and can be like walking a very thin line. Staying in the middle requires being aware and focused on what we are actually doing at that moment, not what we are trying to do. We need to be committed to our actions and our goals in seeking to live our lives in the middle. This does not mean to jump from one extreme to the other or taking an extreme action to make amends for an unfortunate action, like treating someone poorly. We should not try mixing extremes to obtain a false sense of balance. Like believing one extreme action will counter the other. The Middle Way does not work like that. It is also not intended to be a practice of absolutely avoiding any extremes. This is kind of extreme thinking, isn’t it? If we choose to avoid extremes then the pendulum of our lives will stop swinging and we become stagnant and unmotivated. We end up zapping the spirit out of living – the energy of life. We can’t have that.
If we step back and look at the pendulum we can see that the string is attached at the middle section between two points (the two extremes). The string, however, is attached above the two points. So, the Middle Way is actually not on the same level as the extremes but lies above them. We must remember that. It is how we should try to live each and every day by rising above the extremes in our lives. This will generate our love for ourselves and others as we begin to understand a sense of oneness with our world around us – our universe. That sense of balance.
When we are balanced we become compassionate and connected. We begin to see clearly. We are able to ward off even the most extreme situations while remaining true to ourselves. We understand what is really important and what is not. When we maintain a Middle Way practice we are able to avoid extremes by seeing things for what they are and what they seem to be. With a strong Living in the Middle attitude or approach we can prevent becoming misguided and prevent taking one view over another. We begin to understand that we should embrace change as it is inevitable and not to be too hard on ourselves or on others around us. We are all just trying to live with one another on intersecting pendulums.
So, in a nutshell, living in the middle is more about being aware of the right amounts (the balance) when taking life in and being able to have a sense of humor about it (not taking yourself too seriously). It means to be wide awake and realizing that the end is directly related to the beginning and that the path in life lies within us. We are the line between the two extremes that we must be able to rise above as we seek to balance our lives each and every day.
When we Live in the Middle we create universal harmony in our lives…