A balanced life means that you spend enough time doing what you really want to do. It means that you have enough energy and emotional balance to fully enjoy what you have to do. It means that you spend enough time with loved ones and friends, enough time socializing. You also spend enough time in solitude, exploring yourself and uncovering life's deeper meaning. A balanced life means that you work enough, rest enough, play enough, pray enough. It means that you spend enough time working on your self-development, including developing your gifts and talents, building upon your strengths and recognizing and overcoming your weaknesses. It means that you spend enough time indoors and enough time outdoors, enough time in the city and enough in the country.
The key word for balance is "measure". When you do everything in right measure you experience that state of harmonious power and peace we call balance. Ironically, to create such a life begins with living in a balanced way.
The ancient Greeks said, "Unbalanced forces perish in the void." Someone else said, "Whom the gods would destroy they first make popular." What do these two sayings have in common? Our craving for approval and acceptance drives us to lose our balance for it. We do not say "no" when we need to say it. We push ourselves too hard to accumulate symbols of worth because deep down inside we do not feel worthy ourselves. We strain and drain ourselves worrying about what other people think because we have given their approval power over our well-being.
Balancing yourself begins with awakening to yourself, waking up to what you think and how your thoughts affect you. We presume that we think alright while blaming others for our frustrations and disappointments, until we discover that our unconscious thinking bears responsibility for our frustrations and disappointments. For instance, if you feel stuck, locked out of opportunity, hindered from rising to the level of your profession that you desire, that feeling originates entirely in your mindset. If you feel trapped in a bad marriage, blocked by circumstances or other peoples' demands from doing what you really want to do with your life, held back in areas of finance, health or love you can trace those feelings back to a negative, self-limiting illusion that you impose upon yourself.
Notice what you think and how it affects until you see that you create a limiting idea of yourself or of your circumstances and then you live in that idea as if it was reality. You create the idea. You create the reality. Until you see this, you remain trapped by your own mind. How can you awaken? Pay attention. Pay closer attention to your experiences and to the internal process that generates what you experience. Pay closer attention to your thinking and to your emotional reactions. Notice more closely what you say and do and why you say and do it. Pay closer attention to your inner drives.
To develop the level of awareness that awakens you to the internal cause of your frustrating limitations requires an abundance of energy. If you are too tired, you lose awareness. Everything becomes confused. It looks like the world is against when it is really you who are living your life against the world. How can you energize yourself sufficiently for the higher level of awareness that you need? It comes back to balance.
When you live life in a balanced way, giving the right measure of attention, time and energy to each facet of your life requiring your involvement, you experience higher energy. Imbalance drains energy and wears you out. Balance nourishes you with energy and lifts you up.
Approval seeking may be considered one of the root-causes of unbalanced living. Deeper than this, we find the real cause to be low self-esteem. Feeling unworthy of love, life, success, health and happiness, we strive anxiously in all situations to prove ourselves. To find balance, commit to being yourself, not proving yourself. To be yourself you simply let yourself be instead of struggling to make someone like you. Being yourself involves a letting go of any excess effort. This conserves your energy so that you have all you need to create the balanced, conscious life you really want a balanced self can awaken to what is really going on, to the real cause of his problems and the solutions. A balanced self automatically creates a balanced life because your life is a reflection of how you live. Many of us live in reverse. We justify our behavior based on our circumstances. If someone does something that disturbs me, I react with angry criticism. I blame that person for how I react. It never occurs to me to regard my angry reaction as my anger problem. Until I take responsibility for my responses I cannot create a balanced life because I will be blaming my life for my unbalanced reactions.
An unbalanced self creates only chaos. Hold out your index finger and balance a pen upon it. Notice what occurs when the pen is not perfectly balanced. It tumbles down. That happens to you when you lose your balance. An unbalanced state means that you have fallen out of control. You cannot control your thoughts, emotions, actions or speech. These run you, like a team of wild horses that you cannot reign in. Where do unbalanced reactions lead you? Into mental confusion, emotional turmoil and chaotic circumstances.
Balance empowers you to establish proper boundaries in your relationships. It protects you from working too much or too little. It makes sure that you neither sleep too much nor too little. It keeps you from spending too much time alone or not enough time alone. It gives you control over your daily diet and physical exercise routine. Why? In a state of balance you can register the signals that come to you from within. Balance acts like a compass. In a balanced state you can feel when any choice leans you toward unbalance, and you can draw back and make a different choice before you stray too far. From balance, you can heed the signals of balance. Outside of balance you have no clear sense of what you should do. Imbalanced people rely on authorities to tell them what to do, but authorities usually make choices based on their own self-interest. Under any and all circumstances we have responsibility for taking care of ourselves.
If you find yourself out of balance, the first step toward balance retreats from blame. Notice when you blame circumstances or other people for your stress and strain. Notice when you justify or defend your rushing around, your sleeplessness, your over-eating and under-exercising. When you catch yourself making someone or something else responsible for the choices that you make, stop. Stop and take responsibility. Tell yourself over and over, "I cause myself to feel the way I feel, to think the way I think, to speak the way I speak, to do whatever I do." Even if you don't believe this at first, practice affirming this many times a day. Adopting the attitude of responsibility for yourself sets you up for balance.
Why do we choose unbalance? We choose it because we think we have to. We believe or assume that we have to work too hard, sacrifice our dreams, worry ourselves into constant headaches in order to be responsible. Therefore, another root-cause of unbalanced living is ignorance. We give up our unbalanced ways when we learn that an unbalanced self creates only chaos. When you lose your balance in a strained effort to control your circumstances you end up causing more problems than you solve. Pushing yourself to get too many chores done, to complete your tasks without a break, to sacrifice time you really need to spend with your loved ones, to sacrifice your dreams for your paycheck, really pushes good fortune away.
You lose your balance for control when losing your balance costs you more control. You have lost your balance whenever you begin feeling much impatience and frustration. Your impatient, frustrated reaction wastes your energy and distracts you from your point of power. You cannot change things from a state of frustration and impatience. You can only react in ways that generate more frustration and impatience, driving yourself and others too hard, rushing, feeling scattered, holding on too tightly, not letting go. When you worry, when you talk too much about your problems, when you cannot relax, when you do enjoy yourself and appreciate the sacred gift of this moment, you have lost your balance.
When you fall into unbalance, in an attempt to make things better, you have ended up making things worse.
When you lose your balance you make poor choices, cause accidents, commit errors. A very angry person reacts in ways that drive loved ones away. But what does he want? He wants them closer. He wants more influence. He wants more cooperation. But he cannot control his reaction, so he reacts in a way that produces the opposite of what he wants.
You lose your balance when you experience overwhelming emotion. There is nothing wrong with overwhelming emotion when you know how to deal with it. How NOT to deal with it is by seeking to escape it or by lashing out or lurching out for someone to rescue. Deal with overwhelming emotion in a balanced way be relaxing your body and giving up all resistance to how you feel. Go through the experience of overwhelming emotion consciously, like a student, and you might learn something very important about how to live, how to love, how to win and how to lose. Going through unbalance consciously leads you to wisdom and leads you to balance.
Unbalanced living leads to a constant state of uneasiness or dis-ease. In other words, it makes you sick. If you suffer from headaches, back aches, stomach aches or much heart ache you witness a sign that you are losing your balance. You lower your immune system when you live out of balance because unbalance places a strain on your entire organism and depletes your vitality. As you restore balance to you manner of living and responding to life, you move from disorder to order, from unhealth to health, from feelings of scarcity to a secure sense of rich abundance in every department of living.
You do not have to work at creating a balanced life. You simply have to live your life in a balanced way, which makes life feel like less work, not more work. From balance, let your sense of balance guide you in your choices. Choices that send you out of balance lead you in the wrong direction, away from your goals, into a more chaotic life. Some of us mistakenly presume that we like a chaotic life. We think that it gives us a rush, a high, a feeling of zip. We fear order because of the sense of flatness and dullness that we associate with it. However, the craving for chaos leads to a real lack of fulfillment. You do not know what you really want because to know yourself clearly you have to be in a state of balance. You think you want chaos because you do not know yourself, so you continue making choices based on a lack of deep and clear self-knowledge, which can never work. Your life spins farther and father outside of your control and you experience far too much internal chaos to bear.
The way out of unbalance takes you through a more vivid awareness of your experience. The way into unbalance takes you through increasing unconsciousness of your experience and that part you play in creating it. Therefore, to find your way into balance usually begins with the painful awareness of the unbalanced condition. Let's take a closer look, therefore, at some of the symptoms of unbalance. See if you can recognize any of these operating in your own life. With your conscious recognition comes the dawning of your freedom.
Bob Lancer leads individuals, businesses, families, and associations to fulfill their greatest dreams. He does this through a wide variety of venues, including his WSB radio show, Bob Lancer's Parenting Solutions, a show that focuses as much on the raising of ourselves and of our society as on the raising of children. The show has been on the air since 1995 and broadcasts to 35 states over the radio, and worldwide over the internet.
He is the author of numerous books and he has created dozens of motivational recordings on his themes.
Bob Lancer transforms audiences through his dynamic keynotes and seminars on parenting, marriage, and personal and professional development at live events, including conferences around the nation and overseas. He has been leading his audiences to greater personal and professional success as a public speaker, seminar leader, consultant and author for over 20 years and his work has been featured on CNN and other network television stations, in national magazines and in major newspapers.
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