HOME HOLISTIC WORKOUT: VOL 21
Finding Balance
Last night I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine about how finding balance in ones life is completely different from person to person based upon their circumstances and life goals. He’s an actor, who for the past 5 years, has been going hard working on a TV show and in this time has struggled to find what he believed to be a balanced lifestyle. He said that when he looked around at all of our friends, everyone seemed to be so good at keeping their shit together and keeping a healthy mix of work, rest and play. Over the course of the conversation and after delving into the different circumstances that all people on this earth have to deal with, he came to realize that his life wasn’t as out of balance as he previously thought and it required a shift in perception to be able to see this.
1. Two Forces
There are two creative forces that govern the natural laws of our existence and the Chinese named these yin and yang. The yin and yang are in a constant dance, finding momentary periods of stillness, only to be shifted into flux again moments later. We can look at our actions and behaviors in this way, with our outward and expressive behaviors being considered expressions of yang energy and our inward or introspective behaviors being expressions of yin energy. When someone is seeking more balance in their life, usually it means that that they are spending too much time emanating either of these types of energies.
2. Time
Often times people feel out of balance because the construct of time that they are using to frame their situation is too small. To demonstrate what I mean by this, I want you think about some of the Northern European continents and how in the different seasons they can have up to 20 hours of darkness per day. If you were to visit Sweden for example in the Winter, coming from somewhere much closer to the equator, you might think that this is a completely unbalanced way to live. However, for the residents in that area, this is just a normal phenomena of the natural world which, for the person with a more expansive concept of time, they understand that this will be balanced out in the Summer by the same amount of daylight.
The same thought process can be applied to the way that we might live our lives according to the seasons, with Winter being a time for rest and recovery so that we can party hard and enjoy the sunshine in the Summer.
3. Vision
If we compare our lives to someone else’s without having an understanding that our visions for life might be completely different it can be easy to think that one way of living might be better or more balanced than the other. This is a false assumption however, which I explained to my friend, as there is no way I could do what he does on set all day for days on end and the same thing could be said for him in regards to how I live my life. We cannot compare one persons way of finding balance to another because we do not have the same thoughts, dreams, goals or aspirations and so our necessity to emanate more or less yin or yang energy will also change at different times in our lives.
To learn more about Nick, his workouts, and to sign up for a class, visit homeholisticla.com. Thanks again to Ty Williams for the lovely illustrations to lead us through our third lesson.