The Missing Middle

I noticed something today while sitting in class.

A familiar tension arose — the feeling that something important was being skipped. Not wrong, exactly. Just… incomplete.

The teaching spoke about balance. About not being affected. About remaining steady amid disturbance. These are familiar spiritual gestures, and they point toward something real. But as I listened, my body tightened — not in resistance, but in recognition.

What was missing wasn’t the destination.
It was the middle.

So often, teachings describe the end state — equanimity, non-reactivity, transcendence — without naming the process that actually gets us there. The part where feeling is allowed to happen. The part where emotion moves, expresses, digests, and settles.

Without that middle, language about balance can sound — especially in the body — like suppression.

And for those of us doing the work of emotional expression, that matters.

There is a difference between pushing emotion aside and metabolizing it. They can sound identical in abstraction, but they feel nothing alike. Suppression moves away from sensation. Metabolization moves through it. Integration allows it to complete its arc. Balance comes after — not before.

What I also noticed was my own impulse to intervene. To say, “Wait — something essential is being missed.” At first, it felt like wanting to be right. But as I stayed with it, I saw something else underneath: care. Ethical pressure. A wish to protect lived experience from being flattened into ideals.

Instead of speaking or silencing myself, a third option appeared.

I could witness.

I could stay present with the teaching, notice where the language landed, and hold what I saw without needing to correct it in real time. Not suppression — but timing. Not withdrawal — but field awareness.

This feels important, especially as I think about how ideas move through groups. Not every insight needs immediate expression. Some need space. Some need a different door.

What stayed with me most was this clarity:

Balance is not achieved by stepping away from feeling.
It emerges when feeling is allowed to complete.

And yes — I find myself insisting on this more and more clearly now:

Feeling belongs inside awakening.
Not outside it.

→ The Missing Middle: Completion Before Balance