The Tyranny of Harmony
We are avoiding all the crises, anxieties, tragedies, shame, guilt, and humiliation.
When we seek therapeutic spaces, it is because we need help. And how helpful it is that these anchoring and nonjudgmental places exist. It is crucial to have someone support us in difficult times, listen to us, and cherish us. These are undoubtedly valuable sharing places, as increasing individualization tells us that we must solve our failures, mistakes, or crises alone. This is enormous violence for social beings like us, who have been communing crises together for thousands of years.
But in a reductionist and immature culture, there are invisible and insidious pressures on the living paths of Life.
Life as an ecosystem breathes and transforms itself, not giving in to the violence of the linearity we want to impose on it. But we are acculturated to understand this organic Life as a stain to be cleaned or a problem to be solved, ignoring its powerful intrinsic value.
Many balance and harmonization techniques circulate in the fabric of collective wisdom, some dating back a thousand years, others more recent, some appropriated, and others reciprocal. However, the general idea is that we have to stay in harmony and balance always because anything outside of that is an error, a deviation, a crisis, or a mistake.
So, we blindly apply every possible technique to maintain a preferably palpable harmony that is quickly visible to the naked eye. We believe that if we are more disciplined, Life will have fewer surprises if we control ourselves a little more and finally manage to grasp and contain harmony.
We are avoiding all the crises, anxieties, tragedies, shame, guilt, and humiliation. All the flaws stay out of the clean and well-covered box of harmony and balance.
We want “everything flowing,” and god forbid we have internal or external junk that holds us back or weighs us down, that blocks and interrupts the flow of abundance (whatever that means for each of us). Everything has to be cleared and maintained, always under the tragically limited expectation of bringing only harmony and balance (though this never happens.)
This tyranny of harmony brings us to a reduction of the full spectrum of Life.
Instead of recalling tools of passage and transition from the inevitable crises of Life, it avoids them at all costs, neglecting all the Life they regenerate. The tyranny of harmony makes us expect that all is well, always.
On the other hand, the attempt to block the flow of something in a living and dynamic system deregulates the whole system, taking energy away from emerging and spontaneous possibilities.
Life becomes barren and surface, for it can only be harmonious… nothing else. Instead of an immanent and living forest, it becomes a laboratory of control, where everything is reduced, objectified, and limited to something (one fantasizes) predictable and controllable.
The established idea that “personal development” is a line of progress made up of lists of things to implement does not help the profound experience of Life in all its nuances, its paradoxes, and the richness of each moment.
We reduce ourselves to technique and lose the link to what is. We follow all the lists, hoping to fixate on harmony that tends to escape, that elude us at every corner.
To become aware again of the richness of our experiences, from the marvelous to the visceral pain, awakens in us what the bones know to be true: that Life is sovereign in all its phases and moments, that we can remember its powerful creativity by assuming our humble singular place in its web.
