With her poised Vriksasana and a beacon of a smile, she is the picture of literal and figurative balance. Each inward breath has its corresponding exhale; each negative thought is replaced with a positive spin on the situation. She charges the molecules around her and derives energy from her surroundings. More so than material wealth or the fleeting esteem of the public, her equanimity is the emblem of her life’s success. She is an inspiration.
Very few are so composed. Many struggle simply to accomplish the most basic of tasks, pulled in a plethora of directions. The push to earn money to support one’s life can be an all-consuming endeavor, particularly as the price of living in our community grows ever higher. With precious few hours left in the day, it is nigh impossible to counterweight the burdens daily placed on one’s shoulders. As the years mount, those stresses bend the body and/or mind until one or both topples over from exhaustion.
There is a better way. When viewed as obligations, the need to be present for work, family, recreation, social activities, and community involvement is a daunting proposition. A shift in perspective can easily turn these responsibilities into opportunities. If you are trying to balance your life around the solitary axis of financial gain, you will find it quite wobbly. Having the firm footing of multiple life outlets will let you balance much more easily. It is the difference between riding a unicycle and a four-wheeler. The former requires many deft correcting movements to remain upright, while the latter requires very little of you and allows you to concentrate on the journey ahead.
To add more to your repertoire in order to reduce stress is counterintuitive. But, when those additions bring you joy and add excitement and meaning to your life, you will not feel pigeonholed as merely a cook or doctor or lawyer or receptionist. Feeling restricted by life is a major source of stress. By expanding your world, you will be exposed to new people, new vistas, new possibilities. You will begin to understand how to wring the most out of our short existence.
Caution: unbridled expansion is just as dangerous as a one-track life. One must be mindful to decline invitations in order to concentrate on those aspects that bring you contentment. There is a reason why most tables have four legs and not forty; there is an optimum level of construction. Only the individual can truly understand what works for them. Some may derive the ultimate balance from juggling ten different chainsaws; most of us work better with less.
Even when the structure is in place and has worked well for some time, adjustments will be needed. A family illness will require more time at home and the other dials must be tuned accordingly. When a big work project threatens to subsume everything, taking an hour out of the day to go for a bike ride or a hike provides the necessary countermeasure to keep everything stable.
Being in balance is not simply about concocting a life’s agenda or addressing internal malfunctions. Balancing one’s life also entails being able to absorb external inputs that threaten to throw one off-kiler. It means accepting that the universe seeks its own equipoise; that we must revel in the good as well as processing the bad.
Certain days are lower than others, but the long-view shows that valleys are met with hills, zeniths with nadirs. If we do not let the negatives bring us into the abyss and instead address them as a temporary setback, then it becomes so much easier to appreciate the beauties of life. Litigation is a process primarily populated by people who have no idea how to reconcile a small or even massive problem within the larger framework of their life. Funding legal representation forces the primary concentration back to monetary accumulation and diverts precious ducats from vacations, recreational implements, dining experiences, and other life salves. The existence of a litigant becomes defined by the conflict and balance is perhaps irretrievably lost.
When our yogi is wronged by someone or thing, she takes time to consider the parameters of the issue, how it affects her body and mind, and then allows it to flow over her like water over a river stone. She does not rant, she does not push back, she does not threaten. She just is. That is all that she will ever need to be.