Chinese medicine is based on the maintenance of harmony. Yet how can harmony be maintained? I used to think of harmony as synonymous with balance - almost like walking a tightrope where the left and right sides have to be equalized. This is how many people approach healing and fertility, too. Moderation, balance, harmony. Not too much of this, not too much of that. While it is true that too much of anything will make the organism unstable, life carries a miraculous ability to return to equilibrium with or without our help. We do not have to keep ourselves walking the tightrope of life, too afraid to be set off balance. Life is meant to be lived, fully, vibrantly, and sometimes in excess.
You don't grow your hair, beat your heart or create skin cells. Nor can you create a baby through living a controlled life.
I recall a woman I treated who went through an IVF cycle just before the holidays. She carefully managed every controllable aspect of her life, yet her pregnancy test came back negative just before Christmas. So distraught at the unfairness of life when she did everything right, she went to the other extreme - eating and drinking in excess, smoking cigarettes, staying up late and partying until New Year passed. She never got her period. The next pregnancy test came back positive. And yes, the baby was just fine, adjusting to the excesses that are a part of life.
Remember when our mothers thought it was ok to drink, smoke and even diet during pregnancy? We turned out kind of okay. Obviously, I don't advocate this. Moderation and balance tend to induce health and well being. But what we can control needs to be balanced with what we cannot. We can't control life itself. Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an organic process to be lived. We try, we fail. We fall, we get back up. Sometimes life works out the way we expect it to, sometimes it doesn't. We go on and do the best we can, laughing, crying, and making it up as we go along. Life is not composed of rules to be followed.
Life is the way it is, not the way we would have it be. Our individual life expression is always in harmony with the whole. It's laws are carried in the heart, subject to a higher law than imposed order. The Tao te Ching tells us that when man forgets the Tao, he creates laws and rules. Order is a poor substitute for the spirit's unimpeded expression
Life comes through the friction of opposites - the highest ecstasy of the lowest expression. Birth itself is violent, messy, and life threatening. yet from it comes a love so tender, nothing can threaten it. Stop trying to control, manage, or fix yourself. Give yourself over to life as it is. Let the spirit of life use you as you are, desires and all. You aren't a mistake to be remedied. You are life's expression, bursting with harmonious imbalance, longing to be expressed!