When you accept and integrate your polarities you become more YOU

When you accept and integrate your polarities you become more YOU. You become genuine and authentic. You enter that straight path that always leads you to your purest essence. A path that always begins in you and returns to you.

But what do we mean by polarities? Polarities refer to the extremes of the same continuum.. Extremes that are opposite to each other. If one is the light, the other is the shadow. If one is passivity, the other is action. When one is light, the other is dark. We speak, therefore, of the extremes that the same continuum has.

On a more psychological level we can find examples of these polarities in the following pairs: Sadness-Joy, Euphoria-Tranquility, Extroversion-Introversion, Femininity-Masculinity… I’m sure you already understand what I mean and can even complete the list yourself. Furthermore, it is likely that you have experienced each of these opposites from within yourself. Who has not felt sad and happy? Who hasn’t been euphoric at some point despite being generally calm?

Although culture contains part of your polarities, they are still in you

Polarities tell us about life in all its extension. They tell us about what life IS and what life GIVES. If there is this in life, there will also be that. Are you looking for light? I will give you darkness too. Being able to see these polarities and how being at one extreme or another influences us is part of our personal growth.

Culture, social norms, family inheritance, disguised mandates… sometimes silence and mistreat one side of the continuum, one extreme of the couple. Silence one side of the polarity. It amputates our essence, often not allowing it to grow. Like a sprout of grass that struggles to come out, but is always cut off. The energy it occupies wanting to get out is totally amputated by the tool that cuts.

However… the energy is still there. And if it doesn’t come out naturally, it will come out in other less healthy and more violent ways.. This is what happens with our polarities. How many times have you surprised yourself by seeing yourself as aggressive and hurtful, when perhaps the image you have of yourself is that of a calm and patient person. How many times have you been surprised to see yourself calm and collected, when you consider yourself to be someone nervous and easily excited by your surroundings.

To identify with only one part of the polarity is to deny our authenticity.

That is your authenticity, that is your true genuineness. You are both extremes. You are aggression and you are delicacy, you are tranquility and nerve. You are light and you are shadow… Normally we position ourselves at one end of the continuum, denying with total conviction the existence of the other end. “I am very calm, I never get angry!” “I am very independent and I don’t need help.”

And it is at that moment, when we deny part of our nature, when we harshly criticize the other. If I am not able to accept what I repudiate in myself and what society urges me to repudiate, I will see it and repudiate it in others. But… not in me, because that “is not me.” “Because I am very calm and I never get angry.” However, when I see others doing it my being boils and explodes.

We identify with those parts of which we are proud or with those parts that the culture in which we live reinforces. Being a man and “being feminine” (what society considers to be feminine) is sometimes perceived as something strange in certain cultures. However, in others it is something totally normal and natural.

If we appropriate what we deny, we will no longer project it outside.

Once we recognize our extremes we can accept ourselves. When we accept ourselves we stop projecting onto others what we don’t like about ourselves.even when it exists we can understand it without judging it. We will contemplate it calmly and without feeling disturbed. Since we will not be projecting what we do not like about ourselves, we will simply be contemplating it.

Work for your genuineness, to integrate your polarities. The more you accept yourself, the less you will reject the other. The fewer prejudices you have, the freer you will be. The more you accept yourself, the more you can work with yourself from love to improve, eliminating the need to project what you don’t like onto others.

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