Holding Two Truths
Our modern world doesn’t like complexity. We are told to pick sides, to declare what is right and what is wrong, who is worthy and who is not. Black or white. Left or right. Sacred or secular. Yes or no.
But life doesn’t really work that way.
Every day we are asked, sometimes consciously, sometimes without even realising it, to hold two truths at once. We can be horrified by someone’s thoughts or actions, and still mourn them, still decry the violence that ended their life. We can love someone deeply and not like them very much in a given moment. We know this in our relationships, especially in families: parenting is perhaps the clearest example. To love your child and not like their behaviour in the same breath … that is the daily paradox of parenthood!!
Yoga, especially in the Tantric lineage, names this paradox as spanda — the sacred pulsation of life. Everything exists in vibration, in contraction and expansion, in joy and grief, in shadow and light. To live awake is to feel that pulsation, to allow both truths to exist, to let the opposites reveal their belonging to one another.
This isn’t just a philosophical idea. It’s a practice.
When we cultivate resilience in our bodies — steadiness through āsana, steadiness through breath — we become more able to meet the world without shutting down. When we strengthen the heart through mantra and meditation, we can hold a greater range of experience. When we refine the mind through study and awareness, we can sit with discomfort instead of rushing to fix or deny it.
The practices of yoga don’t erase the grotesque or the difficult. They give us the strength to face it. To weave it into our understanding without collapsing. To know that love and grief can co-exist, that outrage and compassion can rise together, that we can hold someone close in our hearts and still disagree fiercely with their behaviour.
This, to me, is the radical gift of yoga: not to make life easier or neater, but to help us live in the pulsation of opposites, to hold the both/and, and to remain awake to the sacred web that connects it all.
And if this speaks to you and if you are curious about the empowerments of the heart, about the practices that help us expand our capacity to hold love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, I’ll be running my Empowered Heart Immersion (a journey through the Divine Abodes of the Heart) soon. Send me a note if you’d like more details, and I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.