Discharging Emotions: What balance means to me

On Neutrality, Desire, and Letting Go. I don't have a quick hack for you, but a daily practice that helped me.

A personal reflection on balance, not as work–life harmony, but as neutrality. In this essay, I explore how desire and fear become charged, how obsession and resistance pull us out of centre, and how a simple practice of awareness helps me return to a more spacious way of living and creating.

For a long time, I thought balance meant work–life balance.

About three years ago, I started working on it intentionally. I tried to organise my days better, create clearer boundaries, and build a life that felt productive but also spacious. I genuinely believed that if I tried hard enough, I could reach a point where everything felt aligned: work, relationships, purpose, creativity, health, play, and rest.

Recently, I realized something important, at least for myself.

Balance, as I imagined it, doesn’t really exist. Or at least not in the way I used to think about it.

When balance is usually talked about, it often sounds like having all areas of life working equally well at the same time. Or like managing time and energy so efficiently that nothing ever tips too far in any direction. Over time, that idea started to feel unrealistic, even impossible, and exhausting. So I had to redefine what balance actually means to me.

Balance a neutral state. Not indifference. Not giving up.

What I call balance now is neutrality. Not indifference. Not giving up. But a state where my attention isn’t charged, where I’m not pulled too strongly by desire and not pushed around by fear or resistance.

I’ve noticed that obsession and fear feel different, but they create the same internal tension. My thoughts speed up, my body tightens, and play disappears. And I’ve learned that I perform best when I play. I create best when I’m relaxed. And I’m relaxed only when I’m closer to a neutral state.

Let me give you an example.

This year, whenever I wanted something very badly, opening a space where everyone can create freely, having an exhibition, pushing some other projects forward, things seemed to pause. Not collapse, just stall.

At first, I felt frustrated. Later, I started seeing it as information. My own interpretation is that my attention was too tight. I was talking about it too much, needing it to happen, needing it to prove something.

It felt charged.

Over the last three years, I’ve explored different practices, meditation, breathwork, journaling, walking, listening to my own thoughts without interacting with them, and sitting with discomfort. All of them helped in their own way. Not because they delivered balance as a final result, but because they made me more aware of when my attention was stuck. They helped me notice when I had drifted away from neutral.

Letting go, however, is still one of the hardest parts for me. What I’m learning is that letting go isn’t something you master once. It’s something you practice, daily, imperfectly, often awkwardly.

Practical steps on how to let go and find balance

Now, whenever I notice myself becoming obsessed or overly scared, I pause and do the following exercise.

1. Draw a scale

Take a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line.

On the far left, Write –10. The negative side of the scale is fear, resistance, avoidance — the things I strongly don’t want or feel overwhelmed by.

On the far right, write +10. The positive side of the scale is desire, wanting, longing, craving — the things I want very badly.

The 0 in the middle represents neutral attention.

2. Identify what feels charged

Write down whatever holds your attention tightly in this moment — the desire or fear that won’t quite let go.

3. Map charged items on the scale

Now, place honestly charged items on the scale.

Ask yourself one simple question: Where am I on the charged scale right now?

4. Move charged items closer to 0

I’ve learned that we don’t need to jump straight to calm or pretend we don’t care. All we need to do is move one step closer to the centre (0)

So I ask myself questions, not to fix anything, but to soften the charge. Maybe that question moves me from an eight to a seven. I still want the thing, but with a little less urgency. Then I ask another question, and I notice the charge loosening again, maybe I’m at a six now. The wanting is still there, but it no longer dominates my attention.

Let me offer a concrete example: my fixation on opening a space where people could create freely.

My attention was highly charged, around an eight or nine.

My thoughts sounded like this: "I really need this. I can’t wait. I had trouble sleeping, my mind full of ideas. I felt excited, almost euphoric, but also restless. I kept asking myself: Why isn’t it happening yet? What if I miss my moment?"

So I paused and asked: "What am I actually afraid will happen if this doesn’t happen right now?"

That alone brought me down to a seven.

Then I asked: "What part of me is really asking to be expressed, the space itself, or my need to create?"

The answer was clear: it was the need to create. The charge softened again. I was closer to six.

Next, I asked: "What is the smallest version of this that already exists in my life?"

I took my notebook and a small portable watercolour set that had been sitting in a drawer for at least a year. I started there. The urgency softened further.

Finally, I asked:"What would I do if I trusted that this would unfold in its own time?"

At this point, I even played with lowering the charge deliberately by listing a few unromantic sides of the desire: less time for audiobooks, less time at home with cats. It was surprisingly helpful. I was no longer fighting the moment. I was close to neutral.

At some point, something shifts. I find myself thinking: "You know what, I’m actually okay with the current state." Not because I gave up, but because the grip relaxed. I was probably somewhere around a two.

I don’t stop caring. I just stop forcing.

And from that more neutral space, things tend to move again, sometimes quietly, sometimes in ways I couldn’t have planned.

So balance, for me, isn’t a final state or something to achieve. It’s a daily practice of returning, of noticing when something becomes charged and being willing to loosen my grip.

If it doesn’t flow, I try to let it go

 — not as a rule, but as a reminder.

And that’s how I’m learning to live: less obsessed, less afraid, and a little more available to what’s already here.