Words like success and failure, multi-tasking and boredom, illness and wellness all point to the yin/yang nature of life. We have ups. We have downs. In each darkness there is a ray of light. In each lightness there is a ray of dark. We have both within us. It isn’t our job to drive out the darkness. Good luck even if you try! We experience harmony when the yin and yang are balanced.
I’ve never met someone who is up all the time. I’ve never met someone who is down all the time…although I’ve met some who work damn hard to stay miserable. Everything thrives when it is in balance.
Work-Life Balance
Vacations are great. What’s not to love about sitting on a beach with an exotic drink in your hand? But we don’t live on vacation. We need to strike a balance between work and life with family, friends and activities that renew us. If we work too hard our health suffers, our families suffer and we aren’t happy. If we work too little we don’t have the resources to enjoy the finer things in life. Striking the balance is essential.
Rest-Play Balance
No matter how much you love adventure, you simply cannot swing from trees every day of your life. Even God rested on the 7th day. I am starting to think that God quite purposefully built the law of rest into the human condition so that we could appreciate how important it is to turn off the outside world and tune in to our own inner worlds. If you don’t meditate yet please start. At first you might sit there for 30 minutes thinking of the laundry list of to dos you have. Eventually you will discover that your quiet inner world is full of wonder. Please be sure to not short change yourself with sleep either.
Discipline-Indulgence Balance
I thrive on routine. My health is best when I wake and go to sleep at relatively the same time every day which is a bit of a drag on weekends, but the truth is the truth. I thrive when I am in the habit of using my mini trampoline for 10 minutes every morning, when I drink my smoothie for breakfast and when I eat my dinner before 8 p.m.. Indulgence is a beautiful part of life though. The ice cream cone on the warm summer evening, the ice cold beer on the beach, or the slice of my husband’s heavenly pizza cannot and should not be missed. It’s when I take 2 slices of pizza, drink beer several summer nights in a row or indulge, even in the coconut milk ice cream, too frequently that I feel off. You know your limits. You know how far you can indulge before you tip the scale out of balance. Live your life by that scale.
Illness-Wellness Balance
Every living thing thrives on balance. In the natural world it is called homeostasis. The definition of homeostasis is the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes. The human being is her own biome, his own ecosystem. The liver is not independent of the brain. The heart is not independent of the lungs. The spinal column is the superhighway connecting these parts. You need the entire biome to function in homeostasis to achieve wellness. Sometimes the biome gets out of whack. Sometimes a stressful event, either physiological, emotional or mental, sends your biome out of balance. We are human. It happens. Rather than think of healing the body, what if we focused on rebalancing it? Treating a symptom is often no more than silencing a messenger trying to tell us that the biome is out of whack! If the treatment throws the body further off kilter is it really beneficial? I think that’s why we have so many people in this country on multiple medications. They take the first to silence X symptom, but need the second, third etc…to silence the side effects, aka other symptoms of imbalance, that result from not seeing the body as an ecosystem, but rather a group of independent parts. If I am constipated, does it make more sense to take a medication to get things moving again or does it make more sense to learn what caused the constipation in the first place and make the change at the source? This distinction between treating the body as a group of independent parts or seeing it as a biome of its own is the distinction between conventional western medicine and (w)holistic care.
Earth Balance
Our planet is a wild place. Human beings haven’t done a great job stewarding the planet we call home. Earth, herself, will do what is necessary to restore balance. Earthquakes, those not caused by man-made fracking, wildfires, and mudslides are all violent acts of rebalancing. Just as the immune system of the human body forms a tumor to protect itself from toxicity contained within, earth uses all means at her disposal to restore balance. The earth acts independently of the people who inhabit her. She will do what she must to restore her natural order even if that means lives are lost in the process.
It behooves us to get better at listening to the cues. Imagine a two-sided weight scale. When we are out of balance, if we throw everything we can on the other side the scale is thrown out of balance in the other direction. I’ve tried that, by the way. I did that for the first couple years post-tumor diagnosis. I thought if something was helpful, more of it was even better. I was 100% wrong and experienced many instances of tipping the scale too far. Add and subtract a little at a time. Underreact rather than overreact. Nudge it ever so gently. Be patient and aware. Pay attention to signs and symptoms of imbalance before the scale tips too far in either direction. Apply this wisdom to every area of your life. Make ‘balance’ your mantra, your teacher and your goal.