A BALANCED PERSONALITY PART 3: FINDING BALANCE

We all have a “dark” and a “light” side to our personalities. I believe that the key to happiness and personal power is a balance of the two. If you’ve read my other two posts in this series, I’ve discussed how trying to exist in either extreme - light or dark was not a good thing. For me, too light and I lived in a world of fear - too dark and I lived in a world of hate, and I was unhappy in both.

We are generally taught to see “light” as good and “dark” as bad, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think you need both to be whole. People contain both positive and negative energy, and I think we are happiest those two things are in balance. However, it seems that our beliefs, learned patterns, habits, and conditioned responses tend to mess up that balance so finding it isn’t an easy task.

LIGHT IS EASY TO LOVE

“Light” is easy to accept. We are taught that those “light” qualities are positive “heroic” qualities. The light side is generally seen as including love, joy, selflessness, harmony, compassion, courage, humility. Those things are good, but if unbalanced can be harmful, creating a person who is taken advantage of and lives in fear.

Accepting the dark parts of our personality is where most of us tend to get off track - we either run with the dark parts completely because it feels safer or we attempt to deny them because we think that is what we are supposed to do or that it will make us happy.

ACCEPTING THE DARK

For most of us, I think the key to finding balance lies in accepting the dark side of your personality. When you try to accept to dark side of yourself. It isn’t easy. You come across many parts of yourself that you don’t want to accept. We are generally taught to deny or suppress “dark” feelings like anger, greed, lust, hatred, vengeance, fear, competitiveness, envy.

We are taught that we are somehow supposed to not experience them, to transcend them, if we are “good” people. It’s true in most cases that if you give in to the “dark” feelings and act as a result of them without any thought or control that you will end up hurting people and hurting yourself and your life will be unpleasant.

But part of being human is having those bad feelings and thoughts. Denying them only gives them power and makes balance a struggle. It seems that if we deny them, then they come out subconsciously in other ways - moodiness, addictions, anxieties, and such things. That being said, just because you have them, doesn’t mean that you have to act on them. You cannot control the feeling, that’s human nature, but you can control the choices that you make resulting from the feelings.

I think the goal is to accept the negative feelings, just acknowledge their existence without trying to stop them. If you can do that without letting them control you, then you can find where your personal power lies — and that is in taking control over and choosing your actions.

FINDING THE BALANCE

Successfully finding the balance between dark and light to me means being concerned about others, but ultimately realizing that they make their own choices and you are not responsible for those choices so you can let it go. Trying to stay in between, allows me to sway slightly into “dark” or “light” depending on what the situation calls for.

Balance is also helpful in dealing with negative emotions. Often, we view things or situations that hurt us emotionally as “negative”. As I find myself becoming more balanced, I find myself more able to separate the thing causing the negativity from the feelings themselves. The thing itself might be awful, the negative feelings or emotions around it aren’t bad in themselves - they just are. (And frequently I find that they aren’t caused by the immediate situation.) They are simply a natural response to something that causes us damage or pain or something/someone that we miss that is sometimes amplified from something from our past.

With that separation between the “event” and the feeling and the acceptance of “negative” feelings, I find that I can more easily look for the lesson in things. It seems that the universe continually gives us events and people in our lives that will help push us toward balancing dark and light if we can just get out of our own way long enough to see the lesson. And the more lessons you learn, the easier it becomes to find balance.

Learning to love the light and accept the dark makes you spiritually and psychologically balanced and that is where real happiness comes from. After so many years of being taught that light is good, I think I am still being pulled slightly toward light at this point in my life, but here is how I think of things to try to stay balanced:

Be selfless, but know your boundaries and set them firmly
Be patient, but don’t enable those around you
Be tolerant, but stand up for what you believe
Be humble, but have confidence
Be honest, but know when to shut up
Be sensitive, but know when to shield yourself
Be generous, but don’t deny yourself
Be understanding, but don’t be a doormat
Be trusting, but don’t be blind
Be optimistic, but add a dose of realism
Be open minded, but know your own values
Be balanced . . .

Love and Compassion are the only two things I can think of that I don’t think really need to be balanced, but I think that is a post for another day.

See the other parts of my A BALANCED PERSONALITY series:
PART 1: WHY LIGHT DOESN’T EQUAL HAPPY
PART 2: LIVING IN DARKNESS
PART 3: FINDING BALANCE