Seeking Balance in our Lives
What is balance in our lives? Is it the balance of exercise vs sitting for hours? Is it time spent with family vs time spent at work? Is it time for self vs time for others? Time for children, community, church being limited by work or exhaustion?
Over my lifetime, I have dealt with all these surges to rebalance my life for my health, for my children, my church, and my community. These times of reestablishing new practices to bring balance into my life lasted for several years or sometimes just months. My health has suffered. My kids felt alone. Over time church commitments overran my time with the kids. I was always in the efforting to rebalance my life’s activities with my larger concern of always caring for the well-being of my children. I didn’t always get it right. My children, as adults with children of their own, are stuck in the same routine of balancing work and raising children. They have modified my practices and started some of their own. It’s heartening to see that they have found different ways to protect and nurture their children and their own passions. How are you doing in these efforts?
It’s hard to sustain and maintain these balances when work demands us to be available 24-7. Forty years ago, you could ‘get out of cell/phone range’. That was a sufficient excuse to be somewhere where you weren’t beleaguered with the demands of work. There was no great power of social media. In our family it was an escape to our West Virgina home. When the internet became available all over our rural communities, the educational support was lauded while even these rural enclaves lost some of their capacity for balance in their lives and we, as weekend visitors, lost our excuse for not being available for work contact.
How do the children of today find balance in their lives? If they are infected at every moment of the day with social media, when do they get to breathe free of the incessant pressure to respond. Where are children free to be themselves and enjoy moments of peace staring at the sky. In my parents’ youth in the 1920s and 30s, they were free to run, play in their rural homes or city streets. In my youth in the 50s and 60s, we were encouraged to be outside playing all day. In my children’s youth in the 70’s, 80s and 90s, there were more latchkey kids which meant they were more alone and vulnerable and TV babysat them. In the 2000’s our children are more and more absorbed by television and the social media/game world. Giving children access to their own phones and laptops is now decreasing with parents trying to return their children to free play with friends outside of technology. How do we teach our children to find balance in their lives as we each as adults in our various stages of life, still seek to find balance in our inner and outer worlds?
Most of the modern world has moved leagues beyond our indigenous roots where connection to and listening to the earth, nature, winds, animals is part of the balance they live. Their work to survive and thrive depends on those connections and those moments of deep listening. They are in a deep respect for the land and the waters, so their rituals and practices convey that respect. Most modern people don’t listen deeply to any of nature whether the tree is in their yard or the stream is behind their homes or in their parks. What is missing in our modern lives when we don’t communicate and honor the nature that exists around us? We are part of nature , not separate. I find messages often become obvious when I deliberately observe and pay attention. I believe that this non-observing/non-listening is causing something to be deeply missing from our modern world. I believe that it is this deeply listening to nature – be it the trees, the birds, the animals, the winds, the waters and the clouds. What do they tell us? Is it advice or warning? I have heard both.
There is also communication offered through our higher dimensional forces that we don’t listen to. It’s time for all this non-listening to stop. We need to open up our hearts, our minds and our souls to listen deeply again. We need quiet time for this listening. We need to be quiet internally and physically. This requires that we hold the intention to listen more deeply to nature and the higher dimensional powers and forces which some people call God, Goddess, Great Spirit, Creation, Source, your Guides or higher Teachers.
Often indigenous wisdom is offered to us through books. Several years ago, Yunkaporta’s ‘SandTalk’ was especially poignant in this attempt to offer the practices and perspectives of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Today the wisdom of the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevadas in South America is offered to us through the book, ‘A Book of Balance’, by Lucas Buchholz. The LOC Institute is offering a discussion of this book on the third Saturday of the month starting on October 18th. We hope that their wisdom practices will help us in the re-creation of peace, connection and deeper listening in our lives. Join us for this 60–90-minute discussion once a month. Let’s talk about our lives together and in the multiple ways that we can bring more balance into our lives. To join the discussion –https://www.loc-institute.com/product/book-discussion-the-book-of-balance-by-lucas-buchholz/
