Stressless Optimization over Endless Frustration
Yin-Yang Balance over All-or-Nothing Extremes
1-Minute Tip Sheet
“If I can’t have it all, I’ll have none of it.”
“They (or is it I) must have it absolutely perfect. It’s killing me.”
Nature and reality are not like that. That’s why they remain ‘imperfectly perfect’ and are still thriving—embracing the good, the bad, the indifferent, and all that’s in between in just the right mix.
The perfectionistic, all-or-none way has its specific niches, although rare. Most of the time, it is a source of undue stress and anxiety. Often, it is also counterproductive, even crippling.
The 2000-some people in my lifestyle coaching program learned from that and made their improvements as another Healing Habit—one of stressless optimal balance. To them, this was not philosophical but practical. Let me illustrate the lessons learned from that balance in our own bodies.
Disease, Dis-ease
All but every function in our body works in a ‘Yin-Yang’ dual fashion, like the brake-and-accelerator system in a car. One signal tells a biochemical reaction to go, and another tells it to stop. And every stop-or-go triggers another related Yin-Yang duo to go certain ways, and so forth, in a complex, multi-dimensional network of chain reactions.
COVID-19 has been a mighty and resilient killer. It is also a great teacher of health and life, as are many severe and chronic disease conditions. Let’s at least take some lessons from these tough ‘drill sergeants’ since we’ve been paying them so dearly.
The COVID virus over-stimulates our inflammatory-immune system so that the body’s over-hyped defense damages many of our own vital organs with “friendly fire”. To counter that, we tested many anti-inflammatory drugs, such as steroids. They all failed to work.
To date, we have found no one-dimensional drug that can conquer COVID because of the dual-interplay nature of our biology. Only the drugs’ side effects are multi-faceted.
We have also tried medicinal steroids before for other infections. But they sometimes over-suppress our defenses, thus letting “opportunistic” infections sneak in as second-wave invaders. Also, hammered by these steroids, our inflammatory response can no longer trigger its cousin healing process to proceed normally. This leaves open injuries unhealed, which is a terrible price to pay, among others.
Like steroids, many other drugs, notably certain ‘carpet-bombing’ cancer chemos, seem to act primarily in an all-or-nothing mode, with no midway in between. They can leave ‘scorched earth’ side effects and still get out-smarted by the diseases they are supposed to treat.
By contrast, in our natural body, everything is inter-balanced, inter-dependent, and in dual inter-play with everything else, unceasingly, dynamically, and in real-time. It’s like an inter-connected network of teeter-totter scales or Yin-Yang circles, as illustrated in the image below. Think of it as an old-fashioned Swiss watch, but with the gears running in either direction, depending on the need of the moment.
Illustration by Metacardio.org
Such Yin-Yang, see-saw, and cyclical inter-plays are typical of our biological life. To function well, we must balance and sync with it well. Otherwise, we may be left with extremist choices for all or none. For example, should we amputate a severely infected diabetic foot or risk death?
For humankind, if the purity of Nature is the Yin, then the prowess of modern technologies is the Yang. An intelligent balance can enable us to live in the best of both worlds. For instance, we do have many new and effective medications with more targeted activities, and some are better balanced for various effects, including side effects—akin to how Nature works.
The video clip at the bottom from the Metacardio App may help you visualize this somewhat tricky Yin-Yang interplay better. Again, this ingenious dynamism in our body is not philosophy. It’s physiology. All living things have it.
Reality, Really
Everything in existence outside the body also seems to be in the same kind of interplay and balance between opposites—non-stop, push-and-pull, give-and-take, never-fixed, not always equal, yet all-in-all pretty even. And everything is linked to everything else.
Here are some familiar real-life examples:
Computers operate by an on-and-off or 0-and-1 binary system.
In life, there is birth and death. In all, every beginning comes and goes to an end.
In the universe, all matters are made of equal measures of positive and negative energies, such as +/- electric charges, matter and anti-matter pairs. There is no one-dimensional anything anywhere. Every existence has at least one opposite—its non-existence. “He loves me. He loves me not.” Like that.
All of reality is multi-dimensional. Getting all hung up on the absolute, all-or-nothing extreme, calling it ‘perfection’, only gives you and those around you stress and frustration to no end.
There can be no good without the bad. We need both to move us to strive for better—in health and everything else in life. To live well, we must embrace reality's multi-faceted, interactive, and inconstant nature, and optimize a possible, desirable, and adjustable balance for each unique individual.
Optimal living is rarely at the extreme ends
of best or worst, all or nothing.
It is in the proper balance somewhere in the middle
that is just right for you.Metacardio©
Only you can find that right balance in your own life. Healing Habits are about the how. And how to balance on it once you find it. We do it in the real-life context of ‘health and wellness’. I’ll leave “wealth and hellness” for others to try.
Road Test for The Healing Habit of Duality
Student: “My relatives are absolutely impossible.”
Teacher: “It’s all relative, not absolute. Do your breathing exercise and find your balance.”
Student: “Oh yes, meditation. Absolutely. I know it works well in practice, but does it work in theory?”
Steve Bhaerman
HEALING
Let’s balance these pairs of opposites.
Pain and Pleasure
Without the pain of a tooth abscess, it can worsen into meningitis before you know to see a dentist.
With all the pleasures for the palate today, welcome to our obesity epidemic.Growth and Destruction
Unchecked growth is obesity. Unrelenting growth is diagnosed as cancer.
Metabolism, the fundamental biological process of life, is the body breaking bad (waste) and making good (growth)—in the proper balance.
We need to feel pain for warning.
We need to suffer sorrow to be wise.
We need pleasure to feel good.
We need satisfaction to be fulfilled.
Winner takes all.Metacardio©
“Paradocs”: There are good docs and bad docs. There is no one best doctor. Good ones all have something unique to offer, just like you.
No one is perfect, not even you. If you’re imperfect, you pass the perfect ‘smell test’ for life. You are real.
Sages believe that only paradoxes are believable, even though many of them don’t even believe in beliefs, only direct experiences. In medicine, though, there’s one clinical condition that’s absolute, but only one. And absolutely everybody gets it, including the absolute perfectionist. !Death! Uh, don’t try this at home.
“I’m not perfect,
but parts of me are excellent.”Ashleigh Brilliant
EATING
Eat multi-dimensionally, i.e., a good variety of tastes, colors, and textures. For instance, many fruits and veggies on the Mediterranean Menu generally contain a great variety of essential and healthy nutrients. Fresh food with unusual colors and shapes tends to be particularly so.
Looking for the perfect diet or going on one can make you go nuts, or go nuts for do-nuts. If you fall off the wagon, like the ‘mortal majority’ also do, get up and re-balance yourself. Wellness and weight are reversible.
Eat when you’re hungry. Duh! But only when you’re hungry. Oh…
Stop eating before you’re over-stuffed. Definitely quit when you’re full.
Once you have developed this healing habit, its natural balance will become automatic. All other living things in Nature have it. What sacrifice? What discipline? What diet?
MOVING
Life is a movie, not a snapshot. So, snap out of it and get moving.
Metacardio©
Rigidity only turns you into a stiff. “If I can’t do it perfectly, why bother?” is an all-or-nothing kind of ‘dis-ease’.
Physical activities, breathing exercises, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, and other mind-body practices are like “body whisperers” that help you get to and stay on an optimal balance. The best ones make you ‘try not to try too hard’.
A bicycle that’s standing still cannot balance itself. It has to get moving, like you. At least, don’t sit and sit—the new smoking habit.
A Nudge from the Metacardio© Healing Habits App (free)
MINDSET RESET
The polar bear gets fat to survive its winter hibernation. The tropical monkey stays slim to scoot and swing despite bananas everywhere all year round. They have, and Nature is that optimal balance.
No living thing in the wild ever goes to the gym, on a diet, or on a shrink’s couch. Absent natural disasters or human interventions, they all naturally balance on their ideal weight and physical fitness to thrive optimally in their environments.
Ways to sync with Nature: Sing to it, dance with it, frolic in it, go visit, look at it, picture it, keep a pet, grow a plant, or just close your eyes and breathe effortlessly.
Only your own body wisdom knows what your unique optimal balance is. You don’t have to figure it all out in your head. (Who can?) Just listen to it, help it do its job, and don’t wreck it.
Learn what you can about wellness, nurture yourself accordingly, and don’t upset your body’s balance with neglect, bad habits, undue stress, or a sickly environment. Getting into Healing Habits is one such optimal, non-extreme way.
Nature is imperfectly perfect, just as it is.
Get in sync or be sunk.
Clear the noise and heed your body’s wise whispers.
Don’t ignore it. Don’t impair it.Metacardio©
1-Minute Tip Sheet
for Stressless Balance
Is it good or bad? Well, it’s both. So, cherry-pick.
Take the good with the bad. Tip the balance as you wish.
When maximal is not optimal, you have to make a choice.
Frequently, good enough is just that—good enough.
At times, being good holds you down from trying harder to be great.
Oftentimes, perfection is the enemy of excellence.
Usually, it’s the last 1% that consumes 99% of your effort.
Nature is nothing, if not always in imperfectly perfect balance, naturally.
Life is relative. Only death is absolute—even for the last perfectionist.
Bonus Video on Yin-Yang Duality Interplay
3.5 min Animation
This tenth stand-alone post is of a series, Healing Habits, based on the successful solutions of some 2000 patients and coworkers in a lifestyle clinical program. 2024
Unlabeled images above are curated from iStock with subscription.