Balance

Posted to FaceBook Mar. 9th
I am involved in a project right now that has immense logical detail to it.  Hundreds of logical decisions, each one with its own ripple effect bumping up against other logical decisions.  It requires being mentally focused for many hours in a day.  I can walk away from my days feeling like all of my energy is stuck up in my head.

LOP, the book, talks about balancing the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual parts of ones self, and the important role balance plays in remembering, believing in, and expressing who we really are.  For example, when I was depressed in my teen years I did not know how to balance my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual selves.  I didn't even really recognize that there were different aspects that I wanted to be balancing.  Being involved in a very mentally focused project has awakened my awareness of the importance of balancing them all.  So what can I do to balance things out?

Being physically active helps me to get out my head.  It feels like it helps to draw the energy, my focus, that is stuck in my head back down into the rest of the body.  My workouts, walks, stretching my body, are all a part of fulfilling that balancing -- now more than ever.  I am also planning a reflexology session, which I have always adored, and that too helps to redistribute my energy/focus more evenly through my mind and body.

For my emotional self I am wanting to remember to ask myself how I feel about what is going on in my day.  I want to stay in touch with my emotional guidance system as I am making all these decisions.  With so much detail and logic it can be easy to retreat to the mind, but the mind can only keep track of so many details at a time.  However, the emotional self will always clue me in as to when something just doesn't quite feel right and I want to take another look at a decision.

The fourth aspect to balancing myself is including my spiritual self.  To know what I really want, think, and feel, about something, I want to be listening to who I really am (WIRA).  To listen to WIRA I often need to create a space of time and quiet and just shut my mind off and listen.  It doesn't need to be big chunks of time off in the mountains somewhere.  I can remember Oprah saying that she has sometimes just excused herself and gone to the bathroom in order to create the time and space to listen. 

There is nothing like a busy time in our lives, or taking on something new, for creating an expanded experience of practicing LOP.

No Help Thank You

We are taught that 'good' people help people, and I would agree that someone LOP naturally helps/inspires others.  However, sometimes what we call 'help' may actually be more like 'rescue'.  We see someone headed for what we judge as a not so good outcome and we try to avert it so that they can feel better (and quiet often so that we can feel better).  And so my question is, might we be robbing this person of an opportunity to succeed?

I heard James Cameron, creator of the movies 'Titanic' and 'Avatar', say that he is thankful he was not helped, not given a hand up (I think he was referrring to when he was a kid and a young adult).  He could see how not being helped had made him rely on himself, had forced him to believe in himself, had given him the opportunities to try on his own and experience successes.

Maybe having the opportunity to figure something out can lead to me feeling good about me.  Maybe me feeling good about me can lead to believing in myself more.  Maybe believing in myself more gives me the confidence to trust who I really am (WIRA).  Maybe trusting in WIRA helps me hear the unique expression of me.  Maybe the unique expression of me is what I have to contribute to the world.  Maybe what I have to contribute to the world is me being successful.