The Middle Way: Grow Without Fixing Yourself

I’ve been on the personal growth path for about thirty years now. Long enough to have baskets of journals, a master’s degree in religious studies, more coaching trainings than I care to count, and at least four former selves who were totally convinced they had it “all figured out.”

There’s one paradox that’s stayed with me through all of it.

Truth One: Nothing Needs Improvement

This one hit me hard in my thirties, after a Dark Night of the Soul and a whole lot of deep-dive truth-seeking: at the level of being, I realized, nothing is missing. Consciousness—or Soul, or simply Reality—is All That Is.

Nothing exists outside of it. Which means you and I, messy and amazing as we are, are already included in the whole.

Already intact. Already enough. Nothing about us needs optimizing.

The sky doesn’t need to become a better sky. It just is.

And at the core of who we are, the same is true.

Truth Two: And Yet… We Still Grow

And yet.

At the human level, of course we grow.

I’m not the same woman I was at thirty. Or forty. Are you the same person you were ten years ago? I’m guessing not.

Our bodies change.
The way we deal with life changes.

I can sit with things now—in my 50s—that might have flattened me in my thirties.

So, yes, we integrate trauma. We learn skills. We create and manifest new things. We get better at being ourselves.

It’s undeniable: something in us clearly evolves.

How to Balance The Paradox

At the deepest level, nothing about our being needs improvement.

And yet… at the human level, we grow.

Both are true.

So how do we live inside this split? Here’s what it looks like for me.

Let’s say something shifts unexpectedly in my life, or in my business, and that old fear and uncertainty creeps in. Maybe my belly tightens. Then my mind starts up with old narratives: If I don’t take control, something bad will happen. I’ll lose business. Fall behind. Maybe end up homeless living in my car. As Michel de Montaigne hilariously put it: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

It’s that ancient fear mechanism, the mind monster, that flips on and says: Grip the wheel, sister! Fix this. Take control.

And just like that, growth has turned into anxiety and fear masquerading as manifestation.

But if I swing too far the other way and hide in “everything is perfect as it is,” something else goes quiet. The part of me that loves creating and stretching and experiencing and taking risks.

And losing that inner spark doesn’t feel true either.

The Middle Way: Wu Wei, Flow, and the Inner GPS

Somewhere in the middle is where it’s at.

Aristotle called it the Golden Mean. Buddha called it the Middle Path. Christianity might call it surrender. The Taoists call it Wu Wei—effortless effort. Not forcing. Not collapsing. Just moving with what’s actually happening.

I call it flow.

Not the shiny, peak-performance kind. The ordinary kind—where I pause long enough to listen. Where I follow trust more and fear less. Where I check my inner GPS instead of white-knuckling the wheel. And where I lean into that smallest nudge of excitement to see where it wants to take me.

Sometimes it says: grow here. Have the hard conversation. Take the risk.

Sometimes it says: rest. Stop optimizing. Just be. Let this time be totally boring, quiet and ordinary.

Flow isn’t doing nothing. It’s doing what’s aligned. What’s true in this moment, now.

Final Thoughts

The sky doesn’t resist the storm or cling to the sunshine.

It lets all the weather move.

We’re not that different.

We are the sky.
And we’re also the changing weather.

Nothing to fix.

And still… so much left to explore. 🌤️

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