Too Tight/Too Loose?

During the Wednesday introductory meditation session today, we talked about the importance of not taking the breathing method as something to hold onto too tightly. Really and truly, it's only a method for being aware, and it's even in the "recognizing one has lost awareness of the breath" that one feels a certain kind of joy.
    There is often a discourse in meditation that goes back to the Buddha's idea of stringing the lyre: one's practice is neither "too tight" nor "too loose". But I have begun to wonder recently, can the metaphor of the lyre go too far in the sense of literally dividing the mind between two opposites? The problem with metaphors of "balance" or "in between" is that there really turns out not to be any absolute "middle" at all. The Middle Path does not necessarily even entail a kind of middle point, and it's certainly not a point on a graph. In Surangama Sutra, Buddha even repudiates Ananda's view that the mind is somehow situated in the "middle" of one's body and the outside world, by saying, "where exactly is this 'middle'? Even from a geographical perspective, what seems "middle" to one person in one country is not the middle in another country. Again, the idea of a middle between two extremes can seem deceptively simple, but it's not so easy to apply.
   I think that meditation practice is coming to mean learning how to lose, both literally and metaphorically. What, though, to lose? It's to lose the attachment to self, and to trying to "be" anything for the sake of the self. If I am coming into the practice with a specific achievement orientation or even a poor relationship to my body, it will show in the meditation. And if that happens, there is no reason to feel bad at all, because the self-grasping that leads to tension is also just phenomena that one can be aware of: none of it is inherent to a person.