What Does It Mean to Be in Balance?
Explore how Western concepts of homeostasis and allostasis, as well as Chinese medicine ideas such as yin and yang and qi, explain balance, allostatic load, and ways to restore resilience.
In Brief
Balance is motion, not rigidity—like riding a bicycle, health comes from constant micro-adjustments, not holding perfectly still.
Alice’s cancer treatment disrupted her body’s dance of adaptation, overwhelming her capacity to recalibrate and forcing systems into chronic strain.
Western medicine maps the mechanics of balance: homeostasis maintains stability, while allostasis achieves “stability through change”—but Alice accumulated overwhelming allostatic load.
Chinese medicine reads the patterns: yin and yang out of harmony, qi both deficient and stagnant, blood failing to nourish, fluids imbalanced across interconnected organ networks.
Both traditions converge on the same truth: balance requires gentle effort, not force—working with the body’s rhythms rather than against them.
Balance isn’t a destination but a practice—a daily process of listening, adjusting, and returning to rhythm.
The Dance of Balance: Motion, Not Rigidity
Alice’s scans were perfect. Her blood counts were stable. Her liver function had normalized. On paper, she was the picture of health—a medical success story, cancer-free and clear.
And yet she didn’t feel healthy at all.
She was profoundly exhausted, unable to think clearly, struggling with sleep that never restored her. Her weight climbed as her energy plummeted. Her hands and feet burned with neuropathy, her thyroid had failed, her liver had flared with autoimmune inflammation, and new symptoms emerged monthly like uninvited guests. Specialist after specialist had weighed in—cardiology, endocrinology, rheumatology, dermatology, psychiatry, palliative care—but no one could explain how all the pieces fit together.
This gap between what the tests show and what the body feels is where the journey to understanding balance begins.
So what does it mean to be in balance?
The answer is more subtle than we might expect. Balance is not stillness. It is not a fixed point or a steady state. Balance is motion—a continuous dance of adjustment, adaptation, and return.
Balance as Motion: A Living Process
Think of riding a bicycle. Balance doesn’t come from holding perfectly still—try that and you’ll fall over immediately. Balance comes from constant micro-adjustments: leaning slightly left, then right, shifting weight, making tiny corrections with the handlebars. From a distance, it looks smooth and steady. Up close, it’s all movement.
The same is true for the human body. What we call balance is actually a dynamic process of continuous recalibration. Your heart rate adjusts to activity, then settles back down. Your blood sugar rises after eating, then returns to baseline. Your body temperature fluctuates with the time of day. Your immune system ramps up to fight infection, then dials back to rest.
For Alice, this dance had been seriously disrupted. Cancer treatment pushed her body into a relentless cycle of chemical and immunological stress. Chemotherapy battered her blood counts. Immunotherapy ignited her immune system beyond recognition. Steroids disrupted her metabolism. Radiation taxed her tissues at the cellular level.
Each system strained to compensate, making heroic efforts to maintain some semblance of normal function. But eventually, the dance became too chaotic to sustain. Her thyroid collapsed. Her liver inflamed. Her nervous system misfired. The elegant choreography of health devolved into a struggle simply to keep functioning.
This is what it looks like when balance breaks down—not all at once, but gradually, as the body’s capacity to dance with change becomes overwhelmed.
Western Medicine: The Science of Adaptation
Western medicine has spent over a century mapping the mechanics of this dance. In the early 1900s, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term homeostasis to describe how the body maintains stable internal conditions despite constant external change. Body temperature, blood pressure, blood pH, glucose levels—all are regulated through intricate feedback loops.
A simple example: when Alice stood up from her chair during one of her many medical appointments, blood momentarily pooled in her legs due to gravity. But her autonomic nervous system immediately responded, tightening blood vessels and increasing her heart rate to keep blood flowing to her brain. Without this automatic adjustment, she would have fainted.
But life is never static, especially not Alice’s life over the past two years. Stressors—physical, emotional, environmental—constantly challenged her system. This is where the concept of allostasis becomes crucial. Introduced in the 1980s, allostasis recognizes that the body achieves stability not by keeping everything constant, but through flexible adaptation. “Stability through change,” as researchers put it.
Alice’s cortisol levels spiked and crashed throughout her treatment cycles. Her blood pressure rose during procedures and fell during recovery. Her immune system learned to recognize and attack cancer cells, then struggled to remember what was friend versus foe. Each adaptation served a purpose in the moment, but each also came at a cost.
This cost is what scientists call allostatic load—the accumulated wear and tear of living under stress. Like a car driven too hard for too many miles, Alice’s body showed signs of strain long before any major component failed outright. She felt exhausted even when her blood counts looked adequate. Her sleep became restless even when her cortisol levels tested normal. Her hands felt cold even when her circulation appeared functional.
When allostatic load becomes overwhelming, something even more concerning can occur: homeostenosis. Instead of maintaining the healthy, flexible ranges that allow for adaptive responses, the body’s regulatory systems become rigid, locked into narrow patterns that feel “stable” but are actually maladaptive. Alice’s system had lost its capacity to respond appropriately to changing conditions—her cortisol stayed elevated when it should drop, her nervous system remained hypervigilant when it should rest, her inflammatory responses fired when they should quiet. What appeared as stability was actually a diminished capacity to respond to stressors, like a thermostat stuck in one position regardless of the temperature outside.
From a Western perspective, Alice had accumulated overwhelming allostatic load that had progressed to homeostenosis. Her body was working overtime to maintain the appearance of normal function, but the effort was unsustainable and increasingly rigid. Eventually, systems began to fail: her thyroid quit producing adequate hormone, her liver erupted in autoimmune inflammation, her nerves began sending pain signals without clear cause.
Chinese Medicine: The Poetry of Flow
Where Western medicine measures the mechanics of adaptation, Chinese medicine reads the patterns of flow. For millennia, Chinese physicians have understood balance as the harmonious circulation of vital forces through interconnected networks.
At the foundation of this understanding lies yin and yang—complementary forces of rest and activity, cooling and warming, receptivity and expression. Health depends not on maximizing one over the other, but on their constant, fluid interplay. In Alice’s case, this interplay had been shattered. Her profound exhaustion indicates a collapse of yang qi—meaning her body’s entire energetic foundation has become severely depleted and destabilized. Without the harmonious dance between these two forces, they no longer function as a generative system, creating simultaneous and contradictory symptoms such as fatigue and thyroid dysfunction alongside inflammatory heat flares and autoimmune overactivity.
Qi, the vital energy that animates life, had become both deficient and stagnant in Alice’s system. Qi is responsible for movement, transformation, and protection—it fuels metabolism, drives circulation, coordinates immunity, and sustains mental clarity. Alice’s bone-deep fatigue, brain fog, and sense of being “stuck” reflected both a lack of qi and its inability to move freely through her body.
Blood (xue), in Chinese medicine, extends beyond red cells and plasma to encompass the dense, nourishing aspect of life force. It provides physical sustenance while anchoring the mind and spirit. Alice’s neuropathy, restless sleep, and emotional volatility could all be understood as signs that blood was not properly nourishing her tissues and grounding her spirit.
Fluids (jin-ye) govern all the body’s moisture—not just obvious fluids like saliva and sweat, but also lymph, synovial fluid, and the subtle moisture that keeps tissues supple. Alice’s dry mouth, oral lesions, digestive discomfort, and the way her body seemed to alternate between swelling and desiccation all pointed to profound fluid imbalances.
Perhaps most importantly, Chinese medicine views these elements as interconnected networks rather than isolated systems. The zang-fu networks—what we might call organ systems—each have physical, emotional, and energetic functions that influence all the others. Alice’s liver network, responsible for the smooth flow of qi and emotions, had become both inflamed (literally, in the case of her autoimmune hepatitis) and stagnant (in terms of energy flow). This affected her digestion (spleen network), her sleep and circulation (heart network), her breathing and grief processing (lung network), and her essential vitality (kidney network).
From this perspective, Alice’s cascade of symptoms made perfect sense. They weren’t isolated problems requiring separate specialists, but expressions of a single, interconnected imbalance affecting multiple networks simultaneously.
The Convergence: Two Languages, One Truth
Western and Chinese medicine use different vocabularies, but both describe balance as dynamic, relational, and vulnerable to accumulated stress. When we braid their perspectives together, Alice’s story becomes not a medical mystery but a coherent narrative of disrupted harmony seeking restoration.
Her thyroid failure can be understood both as autoimmune destruction of tissue and as qi deficiency affecting the kidney network’s ability to maintain essential fire. Her neuropathy reflects both nerve damage from chemotherapy and blood’s inability to nourish the peripheral tissues. Her autoimmune hepatitis manifests both as inflammatory overload and as qi stagnation in the liver network affecting the smooth flow of energy throughout her system.
One lens highlights mechanisms; the other reveals patterns. Together, they illuminate the whole person Alice has become—not just a collection of symptoms to be managed separately, but a living system seeking to remember how to dance.
Alice’s Daily Patterns: Reading the Signals of Disrupted Balance
Alice’s experience illustrates how balance reveals itself through patterns rather than static states. Her energy wasn’t uniformly low—it had rhythms. Mornings were hardest, as if her system needed time to remember how to begin each day. Mid-afternoons brought a brief window of clarity, followed by evening crashes that made simple tasks feel monumental.
Her symptoms, too, followed patterns. The burning in her hands and feet intensified when she was stressed or hadn’t slept well. The brain fog thickened when she ate late or skipped meals. The autoimmune flares seemed to correlate with periods of high emotional stress or seasonal changes.
Rather than random malfunctions, Alice’s symptoms could be understood as her system’s attempts to communicate. Her fatigue wasn’t just weakness—it was her body’s way of insisting on rest and recovery. Her food sensitivities weren’t just inconveniences—they were signals about which nutrients her healing system needed and which substances interfered with repair.
Alice also experienced small moments when balance returned, however briefly. After a particularly restorative night’s sleep, she might wake with her hands feeling warm for the first time in weeks. After a gentle walk in the afternoon sun, her mind might clear enough to read a few pages without struggling. After sitting quietly with her breath for ten minutes, the anxious humming in her chest might settle a bit.
These moments revealed that balance wasn’t something she had lost permanently—it was something her system still remembered how to find, given the right conditions. Recognizing these patterns can be a useful tool for understanding how balance operates in living systems.
The Paradox of Gentle Effort
What both Western and Chinese medicine teach in their own ways is that balance cannot be forced. The harder Alice tried to control her symptoms, the more elusive balance became. The more she pushed through fatigue, the deeper the exhaustion grew. The more she worried about each new symptom, the more her nervous system remained in a state of alert vigilance that prevented healing.
This reveals a fundamental principle: balance requires what Chinese medicine calls wu wei—action that is in harmony with natural flow rather than against it. In Alice’s case, this principle suggests that working with her body’s rhythms rather than fighting them might be more effective than forcing normal function. If her energy was lowest in the mornings, scheduling demanding activities for later in the day would support her system’s current patterns. If certain foods triggered inflammation, eating them less frequently would respect her body’s signals rather than forcing it to “get over” the sensitivity.
From a Western perspective, this principle makes equal sense. Allostatic load accumulates when the body is constantly forced to adapt beyond its comfortable range. Recovery requires reducing unnecessary stressors while supporting the body’s natural repair mechanisms. Rather than pushing harder against resistance, creating space for overstressed systems to access their innate capacity for self-regulation becomes the wiser approach.
Understanding Balance as Practice
Alice’s experience also reveals that balance is never “finished”. Some days feel more coordinated than others. Her thyroid medication keeps her TSH in the normal range, but her energy still fluctuates unpredictably. Her liver enzymes have stabilized, but she still experiences occasional flares of inflammation. Her neuropathy persists despite treatment.
From the perspective of balance as dynamic motion, Alice’s ongoing symptoms make sense. They’re not evidence of permanent damage so much as expressions of a system that hasn’t yet found its new rhythm. Balance, when understood through this lens, is not a destination to reach and then inhabit forever. It is a practice—a daily, moment-to-moment process of listening, adjusting, and returning.
This understanding suggests a different relationship to healing than what Alice has experienced in her fragmented care. Rather than viewing each symptom as a separate problem requiring a separate solution, balance principles point toward the connections between her various experiences. Rather than taking a different medication for each issue, the framework suggests approaches that support her system’s overall capacity for self-regulation.
Alice’s situation also illustrates that balance isn’t about returning to exactly how things were before. The health that’s possible now—in this body, with this history, at this moment—will be different from the health she had before cancer. But it can still be dynamic, responsive, and grounded in the deeper principles of what it means to be in balance.
What Comes Next
The precision of modern medicine can save lives—Alice’s clear scans are testament to that. But the complexity of restoring health after such intensive intervention requires a different kind of wisdom. It requires understanding balance not as a fixed state to be achieved but as a dynamic process to be supported.
Alice’s experience also reveals a gap in how we currently practice medicine. Despite having access to some of the world’s most advanced medical technology and expertise, she often felt like her various symptoms were being treated in isolation, without anyone seeing the larger pattern of which they were all part.
This fragmentation is not the fault of any individual practitioner. It reflects something deeper: the way we have organized medical knowledge and practice around specialized domains rather than an integrated understanding. We have built walls between different approaches to healing, walls that sometimes prevent us from seeing the whole person who needs care.
In the next post, we will explore these walls more directly—not to tear them down, but to understand how they formed and what it might take to make them more fluid, more permeable. Because if Alice’s journey has taught us anything, it’s that the path back to balance often requires bringing together different ways of knowing, different languages of healing, other maps of what it means to be whole.