Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose – A Metaphor for Staying Grounded During Uncertainty
Photo by Virginia Warner
What can we do to stay grounded in the midst of uncertainty, stress, and pressing concerns that legitimately need our attention? In times of heightened stress and difficulty, we humans are wired to want to fix or get rid of the problem, often at the expense of fully understanding what may be needed in the moment. Slowing down just enough to notice our reactivity creates an opening for a more skillful, more effective, response.
A well-known teaching on meditation uses the metaphor of a stringed instrument to illustrate a balanced approach to practice, one that finds a middle way between extremes of too much and too little effort.
Feeling stuck in his meditation practice, a lute player asked for instruction.
“What happens when you tune your instrument too tightly?” the teacher asked.
“The strings break,” the musician replied.
“And what happens when you string it too loosely?”
“When it’s too loose, no sound comes out,” the musician answered. “The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.”
“That,” said the teacher, “is how to practice: not too tight and not too loose.”
The practice of “not too tight, not too loose” is the practice of equanimity, or what Pawan Bareja defines as an “even-keeled inner balance” of heart and mind that helps us remain calm in the midst of turmoil. Many therapeutic modalities offer a framework for cultivating and resting in this inner balance.
Mindfulness-informed therapy instructs us to refrain from grasping or avoiding, and instead to simply observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they arise and subside. Imagine a pebble sinking to the bottom of a roiling stream. The turmoil may well continue around you, but you yourself remain steady.
Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us to notice the tendency to think in absolutes like “always” or “never,” and that we can reframe a situation with more adaptive thoughts and behaviors. We find inner balance by embracing a stance of “both/and” instead of “either/or.”
In the language of somatic-informed therapy, we restore balance when we practice grounding skills to regulate the nervous system’s response to perceived danger. In time, we learn to relax into the natural ebb and flow of hyperarousal (fight or flight) and hypoarousal (freeze/collapse), reconnecting with the body and releasing stored survival energy.
Whatever the strategy or practice, equanimity is what helps us to find the sweet spot between over-reacting and under-reacting. And as any musician knows, the only way to maintain a beautiful sound is to tune (and re-tune) each time we pick up our instrument.