Navigating You & Me With Love & Compassion: Our Dualistic Dance of Relating

The Everyday Dilemma: Do I take care of myself now, or everyone and everything else first, including my career?

Most of us truly wish to infuse our lives with love, compassion, and caring. And, you have probably been enticed by the common notion that bringing these words to life requires you to ‘be’ and to ‘do’ things in a certain way.

Trying to live these words out loud can produce a lot of confusion and frustration as you juggle meeting your own needs and the needs of your beloveds – significant other, children, parents, siblings, friends, and of course, your career or job.

This is an inner tug-of-war that is particularly strong in both masculine and feminine hearts. We are each conditioned to be care-takers but in different ways.

The man works hard to protect and provide, while it is the natural bent of the female psyche to rise above fight or flight and to befriend. These both tip the ‘me or you’ scales to an imbalanced position.

You may be left wondering what to do with your desires at the end of the day when there is no more time or energy left. Although many women, and men, have certainly come a long way at moving differently in the outer world, you may still feel a confusion and nagging doubt in the inner world that something is not yet fully right.

When I discovered that ‘me and you’ is an interdependent polar pair, a door opened. I was presented a new way to understand and navigate this on-going life dilemma. Polar opposites are always interdependent when each one defines itself by the absence of its opposite. In other words, you can’t have the notion of ‘you’ without the notion of ‘me’, and visa versa.

I began to realize if this is true, then you can’t have beauty without ugliness or intelligence without stupidity, knowledge without ignorance, love without hate, or compassion without anger. Discovering this made me dance for joy as the stress of trying to only be beautiful, intelligent, knowledgeable, loving and compassionate melted away.

It was like a magic stain remover that once applied, caused what I thought was an intrinsic blemish on my Being to simply disappear - not only before my eyes but also from my feeling body! It was truly natural to have the experience of both sides of each coin!!!

You can learn to not only conceptualize this natural flow between polar opposites, but actually navigate it in your body.

This makes knowing what to do much easier. Closer proximity to your inner guidance clarifies whether ‘right action’ is to tend to yourself or to tend to the other (includes your job!). You can see you don’t have to choose between taking care of others and taking care of yourself, because the presence of duality will always present each of them, again and again, over and over.

Balancing the two is the goal and knowing how to navigate duality frees the balancing to be more effortless and easy.

Most importantly, consciously navigating duality reveals the clever way it has quietly tucked Oneness inside itself. There is an organic unity between any two polar opposites and in this organic twoness rests the Oneness we seek – right here and right now.

As you learn duality’s rhythm, the ability to infuse life with love, compassion, and caring becomes a very different kind of dance. Embracing all the steps becomes easier, softer, quieter – and you realize the Love that has no opposite does indeed take care of it all.