At the Dharma talk a few weeks ago, Dan Zigmond, our Zen teacher gave a talk about the Middle Way between the indulgence and denial of sensory pleasures. Practicing the Middle Way is about finding the balance between seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. What struck me was that the Middle Way, he said, is where we can find freedom from suffering.
While this teaching sounded simple in concept, I struggled to translate it into practical applications for our daily modern life. How do we actually apply this to our lives? I asked the teacher. He said, Everyone’s center is different. You need to keep finding your center. His response left more questions than answers.
After the Dharma talk, a friend and I chatted about love and relationships. He confided that he was afraid to fall in love because he’s afraid of getting hurt. While falling in love brings us a deep sense of pleasure, joy, and euphoria, when we fall too deeply in love, we are also vulnerable to immeasurable pain and suffering when we have to confront the loss of this love.
I thought to myself, isn’t this the perfect topic to further examine how we can come back to the teaching of the Middle Way? How can we find our center between loving deeply and fearing the loss of love? How can we find the Middle Way between loving wholeheartedly and not attaching our heart to this love when it’s time to let go?
In his Dharma talk, Dan mentioned that ending is inevitable. Impermanence is the only certainty in life Everything we cherish, value, and love will come to an end, whether that is a breakup, or old age, sickness, or death. So what is the Middle Way between loving deeply and eventually grieving for that loss of love?
If we avoid to love fully or deny the grief that we feel when we lose our love, then we are in denial and not living the path, not embracing the impermanent nature of life.
Yet, what makes finding the Middle Way challenging is that the loss is experienced as a form of suffering while love a form of pleasure. As humans, we gravitate towards pleasure and avoid pain. When we reach towards love, fear comes in and whispers in our ears, “Remember the last time you got really hurt when you loved deep? We don’t want to experience that again, do we?” Fear pulls us away from our heart’s desires. Fear makes us doubt ourselves and live in the projection of love, rather than truly loving unconditionally, without attachment.
Fear says, “I love you because I need you”. Fear comes from a place of lack and insecurity. Fear seeks external validation of love because there’s a part of us that feels incomplete. Fear becomes a form of attachment.
Love says, “I am love. I have what I need, and I am willing to embrace what I feel and what is present”. Love is free. When we truly love, we give that love freely, without expectations. We are willing to love others fully, deeply, to feel the love within ourselves, to feel the generosity of our heart, the joy of our spirits, and be willing to share that with those we love. At the same time, we are willing to let go and accept the impermanence of the relationship.
What is the middle path between love and fear? How can we seek freedom from the inevitable suffering?
Upon reflection, I realized that it all comes down to our Core Wound, the wound we experienced early in our childhood that made us feel rejected, neglected, abandoned, and ultimately disconnected from love. When we are young, this loss of love can feel overwhelmingly frightening and painful. Our developing psyches need the security of our primary caregiver’s love to feel safe in this world, to feel safe to be and express our authentic selves. When that love is lost, trust is broken. There is a ruptured in the way we relate to those most intimate relationships, which creates a rupture in our own psyche and our relationship with our self and our wholeness. We, thus, we spend our whole lives seeking to heal that wound, repair that rupture, and reclaim that loss of love. We lose trust with ourselves and give away the responsibility to care for our wounded inner child to an external figure, often to our partner. At the same time, the fear of abandonment pulls us away from loving fully the moment we sense rejection, neglect, and the risk of losing this love. We start to grasp for that love. We become deeply attached and lose our sense of self. This then becomes codependency, a form of emotional addiction. We become the drug addict, looking for that hit of love dose, to fulfill our deeply wounded core.
So coming back to my original question, how do we find the Middle Way?
We cannot give what we don’t have. We cannot love when we have not cultivated that love within ourselves. When we have not found our center, we are compelled to reach for the extremes, between pleasure and pain, indulgence and asceticism, because we want to feel something, we want to feel the parts of ourselves that we have numbed due to that Core Wound, the wound of abandonment, neglect, rejection, the loss of Love at a young age. For years, my body had been numb. The chambers of my heart had been closed to fully feel and to deeply love. Every time I felt something, fear would come in and take over. Fear disconnects us from love. As a society at large, we have been perpetually starving for love, the kind of love that is unconditional, accepting, and unattached.
To find the Middle Way, we have to find our way back to this Love, the love that each and every single one of us possess within ourselves. It’s not the attached kind of love. It’s not about seeking love from others but rather owning our love. To touch that pure essence of Love, we have to touch our own wounds, the depth of our suffering. We have to touch and feel our own suffering, to tend the wound inner child who felt rejected, neglected, abandoned, not good enough or worthy of love. We have to go back and tend the frightened inner child within our hearts, within our psyche and give them the love that they didn’t receive. Instead of waiting for someone else to come and save us, we have to rescue ourselves, to reclaim the parts of us that we had abandoned, and tell them, I love, adore and cherish you. I am here to see you, hear you, understand you, and value you. You are lovable, worthy, and enough.
For years, I carried the narrative of being the “Princess-in-Waiting”, who had sat on the curb, waiting for Prince Charming to come and save her from her wound of abandonment and feelings of unworthiness. I abdicated my own power, hoping someone else will come and rescue the little girl inside and give her what she lacked.
In finding the Middle Way, I am realizing that I am not a “Princess-in-Waiting”. Instead, I am a Queen, already royal and sovereign. I have everything I need to be a whole sovereign being, with a heart full of love and joy. When I look deeply within myself, when I find my true self, I realize that that Love that was “lost” had always been inside. When I reclaim that love, I can then love fully, love deeply, love fearlessly and courageously. Most importantly, I can love freely. When I healed the wound of my inner child and integrated her into the wholeness of my being, I resurrected what once felt dead - my imagination, curiosity, joy and wonder once again, came back to color my world.
So how do we find the Middle Way between loving deeply and not attaching ourselves to that love?
“Learning to rest in the middle way requires trust in life itself.” - Jack Kornfield
To find our middle way to that detached love, the courage within our hearts, we have to learn to trust in life, to walk alongside Life and know that we have everything we need within. The answers do not come from the outside. Finding the Middle Way is to keep searching for that center within ourselves.
Many blessings and thank you so much for reading.