The End of All Pain

I have been reflecting recently that there are two different pulls in life: one is toward the comfort of belonging and being loved, while the other is in the direction of non-self and non-attachment. Life 'kneads' back and forth between the rhythms of deep belonging and deep 'bottoming out', where the first represents the nurturing of a secure self, while the second represents letting go of that same self. It's interesting how this works, because it seems true that without the firm foundation of the first, the second is not going to happen very well. It's important to know at every single instant in life where a person is at with regards to these two.
  The analogy is something like what happens in meditation. If I try to fight pain and prove that somehow I am immune to it in some way, I only end up reifying the meditation into a struggle to 'man up' to the pain, or to somehow put a tough persona in front of the pain. This is going in the direction of trying to break the self before it festers into an indulgence or attachment. This only creates more attachment, because there is still a strong self lingering and attaching to the fight against pain. If, on the other hand, I forget this and try to nurture of comfort myself by any means possible, I also lose my method: I become too deeply involved in wanting to spare myself from all frustrations. What if the middle way were simply neither of these extremes at all? This is the dilemma, and I think that somehow the middle embraces both.
   Part of the balance of life is knowing when one feels so frustrated that they need nurturing and support, and when they can then challenge themselves to let go of this support as needed, little by little. It's not that one ever gets over the former, but one needs to gradually expand their ability to simply be without any objects at all: to be tender toward everything that life has to offer without picking one experience over the other. But without support, this can easily become something else: a kind of toughening up in life, or even a sense of shielding oneself from everything out of fear or a need to control. It's important, in my opinion, to be clearly aware of the difference between these to very different states: one 'hardening' toward the world and the other tender but open.