Beyond balance!
Me pretending to be zen (no I just blinked when the photo was being taken!!!)
Instagram photos of people pretending to be zen, boring Sunday afternoons and the colour beige. Those are my primary associations with the word balance. Oh and smug lifestyle coaches, therapists or maybe even…yoga teachers.
I’m so tired of hearing about balance - life-work balance, it’s all about balance, inner balance. I don’t think it’s helpful any more quite frankly. It’s serving the wellness industry nicely because it’s something they can create products for as they’ve already convinced most of the population that finding balance is their life purpose. When that happens suddenly life will be perfect - beautiful relationships will appear, the dream job will land etc etc.
Balance exists and it is important - walking a high wire over NYC for example!!! It might also be desirable - running a ridge, doing a yoga pose, surfing a wave. And in less physical terms, the avoidance of extreme views or expression in order to respect others. But this idea that we must, at all costs, seek balance in our lives seems dangerous to me. I don’t think this version, marketed so appealingly across the world, exists as a general concept related to us as human beings. This version suggests a static place that is discovered and maintained and where we are happy or peaceful or fulfilled. But life is constantly changing, we are in development and flux all the time with the natural highs and lows of all the interactions with our universe. There are fleeting moments of zen, and that to my mind is exactly how life is supposed to be!
What would life be without the ups and downs? Balance suggests a sort of beige colour to me; inoffensive, tasteful, sensible but undeniably dull and lacking in inspiration. Personally, I don’t want to live in beige! If we embrace the goal of ‘lifestyle balance’ I think we risk missing the point of living to be honest. We risk abandoning our ambitions and dreams, our creativity or instinct for exploration and those aspects of ourselves that make us individual. Perhaps you would like to be beige…ok…but are you sure about that?!
So, I’d like to propose we stop talking about balance as a general concept and start thinking about play instead. Physical balance isn’t static at all, it’s a complex dance of tiny movements and adjustments made by many layers of physical tissue and neural messaging. I know this to be true from my dancing and yoga experiences - hold a pose on one leg for any length of time and pay attention to the process of holding it. It doesn’t matter how accomplished you are, the ‘holding’ is a type of movement in itself. How breath moves through your body, how muscles contract and relax minutely around your bones in response to any wavering, how your eyes focus, how your mind must centre itself. All those are processes not single actions.
Let’s think instead about play. The dance between extremes and sometimes at the extremes. Rather than striving to find the perfect balance in training, diet, work, social life, wardrobe…let’s pay greater attention to the interplay of our minds and bodies between extremes. What happens when we wobble in the yoga pose or over train ourselves- what gives? What do we learn? How does it feel and how do we react?
And for those of us who like to push ourselves physically and are probably told that we’re overdoing it, we must be running away from something or we’re adrenaline junkies, should we stop our ‘extreme’ activities even though we love them and they bring us joy? Of course not, unless we push ourselves to injury or have an unhealthy motivation for going to the extreme. It certainly can be an addiction and can come from a place of negative motivation, for example the need to prove one’s personal worth by winning or going beyond the average. I’ve been there and I’ve also pushed it too far and over trained but I have no intention of doing less. What I’ve discovered instead is the possibility of balance inside the extreme.
Physical balance in the extreme - like ultrarunners use - modulating their pace and energy to make sure they can keep going. Using intelligence to keep going and keep up rather than just pushing the body to work harder. You can run pretty fast in quite a relaxed way (I’m not talking about Olympic sprinting!) allowing for the body’s needs but at the same time not giving in to fatigue or minor aches and pains. Often I when I relax while running it soothes a niggle in my hamstring or knee for example and it just disappears.
Mental balance in the extreme - pretty similar. Allowing the emotions and mental states but like in meditation not necessarily acquiescing to their demands. Keeping my mind relaxed, slightly neutral we could say, is something important I learnt from practising yoga in a hot (40 degree) studio. I could be exerting my body for many hours but I don’t have to keep my mind in a state of tension, gritting my teeth the whole way.
I invite you to consider what you think about the concept…maybe we need a new word? Any suggestions?