What is life balance and why is it so important?
There’s a lot of talk about balance these days, probably because few of us feel that we’re reaching it. I learned my definition of life balance the hard way, which I’ll tell you about in a moment, but first let me share it with you:
Life Balance is not an accounting formula, a set of rules, or a place you arrive.
Life balance is a process of ongoing communication between all areas of your being: mind, body and spirit.
One cold March day in Toronto, Canada, I arrived at my office. It had been the usual 90 minute commute on bus, train and subway. My husband had dropped our daughter off at her home daycare, while my expectant body worked on nourishing our son, due in May. We had recently bought our first house, and I was vaguely hopeful that I could keep going at work until the last moment. Like many of us, I somehow believed I was indestructible. Yet now I was feeling a little strange… Maybe all I needed was to sit down, for the first time that day. Then something hit me hard, on the cheekbone, and everything went black.
What had knocked me out, I learned later at the hospital, was a cement floor, from my full standing height. It was one of many things I hadn’t seen coming. I hadn’t seen how, day by day, as my moving got slower, I had less time for the things I needed: rest, careful exercise, and the right foods. I hadn’t seen how I, after working as a trained communications expert for 15 years, had lost all communication with my own body. The precious burden I carried was now seriously at risk.
It was while shivering under a thin hospital blanket, not knowing whether or not I had lost my future son, that the first principle of Life Balance came to me:
Balance principle 1: Always focus on what’s most important.
You can imagine the tremendous remorse I felt when I realized that I had been ignoring my son’s needs. In my excitement to earn money to pay for a better home, for his future, I had actually forgotten what I owed him in the present moment. We were both fortunate to survive, and to have a lesson which has kept our life in balance ever since.
Maybe the title of this point seems overly simple to you. Of course we all want to emphasize what means the most – our health, our loved ones. Yet how many of us map out what’s important, and match it to a schedule of how we really spend our lives? I did, after I almost lost my baby, and it’s a process to which I return often.
2: Be aware of the choices you’re making. (Don’t let others profit by taking you off track.)
Advertising is one main reason we lose our focus and then our life balance. That beautiful home in the newspaper that we can’t quite afford might in truth be an ugly picture – one that shows us working far too many hours and disappointing those who need us.
In order to spend less time working, I’ve learned to avoid decisions other people would like me to make. I’ve stopped watching television and blocked ads on the Internet. I don’t go to stores as often as I used too. When I do shop, it’s with a written list and a time limit. If I browse, it’s online, and with a cool head comparing prices and value.
3: Be guided by your principles, not public opinion. (Balance is individual).
Recognize also that there is an inner kind of marketing, when ‘keeping up with the Jones’’ threatens to take over. Make a list of your family’s unique priorities, and the chances are ‘having a car as new as the neighbor’s’’ won’t even make it on.
4: Listen to your body. (Balance is natural.)
Our own bodies, which are equipped to self-heal, make energy from good food and respond to exercise, have never been so abused. The ‘brain work’ that most of us are now doing has trained us to ignore the body’s signals, even to treat it as separate from the mind. Heart disease and obesity are reaching closer each year toward us and our children. Most of the kids I teach at the school board prefer onscreen ‘brain play’ instead of the outdoors. Teach yourself and your offspring to care for their body. As for a loved pet.
5: Act, don’t just read, for health. (Research is not enough)
I teach a regular evening Wellness class at the local YMCA. When I ask people what they’re doing to keep well, most of them say: “a check-up every year and I read the Mayo Clinic website”. There’s nothing wrong with either of these, but both are passive. They are better than nothing, but neither show that the individual is taking charge of her health. She is leaving it in the hands of others. Nor do they show forward planning or adaptability. Life Balance is not a textbook formula or something you can rely on someone else to do for you.
This was identified by such great men as Thomas Edison, who said to his students, “I can teach you nothing”. There is a huge difference between just collecting information and true learning, where we make knowledge our own. Balance can only happen when we take the giant step of making good habits fit our schedule and thus change our own behaviour.
6:Avoid extremes.
It might seem obvious that extremes are the opposite of balance. Yet many of us, when we resolve to bring more balance into our lives, start with an extreme. Here are some examples from people in my area. They may seem familiar.
A woman who is just getting back into fitness classes after fifteen years, decides she will run a marathon, one week from today.
A man who has been prescribed daily heart medication abandons it in favour of an unregulated, unproven homeopathic remedy.
The problem that the above actions share is an ‘all or nothing’ attitude. Force is counterproductive. A body, like a human psyche, prefers its developing needs to be met in flexible, adaptive ways.
7:Plan for life as well as work.
Transfer the discipline and planning skills you use at work to strategize your workouts, nature moments and quality time with loved ones.
8: Connect with your true self every day.
By this self, I mean the being who is part of Nature’s unity. On this level, you are aware of yourself as a creature born with a wondrous body and abilities who deserves to live in health and wellbeing. As Deepak Chopra writes, “Spending time in Nature will give you access to the field of infinite creativity, freedom and bliss.” Find time to fit in a quiet walk every day of the year – before work, at lunch or on the way home as needed.
9: Put your health to good purpose.
We’ve all experienced the joy of giving, and the mutual wellbeing that results. Your health is also a gift you can allow to flow from you to benefit others. As psychotherapists like Dr. Frank Burns have documented, the momentum of taking action can carry you physically out of fear and moping toward strength and health.
Further Reading:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec06/helping.aspx
Nature's Path 