The Balance Point: Finding the Still Center Between Opposites
via Florence Scovel Shinn
The Balance Point: Finding the Still Center Between Opposites
You wake into a world of tensions. Push and pull. Effort and surrender. Becoming and being. Your blooming self lives in this territory between opposites, and this morning, instead of choosing one side, you're invited to find the still point where both truths coexist.
Begin your practice by stepping outside, or if that's not possible, standing near a window where you can sense the quality of light. Feel your feet rooting into the ground beneath you. Notice the weight of your body pressing down while simultaneously feel the possibility of rising up. This is not a contradiction. This is the architecture of growth.
Start walking slowly, and as you do, bring your awareness to both sides of your body equally. Feel your left foot, then your right. Left arm swinging, right arm swinging. Rather than focusing forward into a destination, soften your gaze slightly and become aware of the peripheral world on both sides. This bilateral awareness—attending to left and right with equal presence—naturally settles your nervous system into a state of balance.
As you walk, think of Florence Scovel Shinn's insight that "you do not find your direction, you feel it, and then you follow." Notice how your intuition speaks to you not as a loud command but as a felt sense. It emerges in the middle ground between your thinking mind and your body's wisdom. Stop trying to figure out where you're going. Instead, drop into the felt sense of rightness moving through you.
Alan Watts taught that "the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." But notice something true today. The dance requires a center. A pivot point. You cannot truly move with life's flow if you're fragmented between what you think you should do and what you genuinely feel called toward. The still center is not stillness as absence—it's the quiet clarity beneath all motion.
Continue your walk for five minutes. When a choice or question arises in your mind, don't push it away or toward resolution. Instead, feel into the space between the options. What wants to emerge from that balance point?
Today's intention I trust the felt sense that lives between my doubts and my certainties, and I let that feeling guide my choices forward.
This practice takes 5 minutes. Do it before checking your phone.