When You’re Off Balance it’s Easy to Topple Over
Balance is a facet of centering but slightly different. Balance offers deep calmness that seems to be an innate and compelling drive of your spirit and your heart’s desire.
As desirable as balance is as a goal, it can be a most paradoxical and difficult concept during illness. For example, balance implies some level of contentment, yet when does contentment become complacency? Balance implies serenity, yet when does serenity cross the line into sloth? Balance implies integration, yet when does integration become a self-absorption? What, then, is balance?
Balance can be defined in many ways, yet it’s probably in our behaviors, and the behaviors of others, where we can get the most accurate picture of it.
- Balance invites a divine dignity into your life, so you develop a long-distance view of your own destiny.
- Balance gives you self-control and invites you daily onto an eternal ascent to your inheritance from God.
- Balance gives you a contrite mind and a humble spirit, tactfulness in human affairs, and a tolerance for the shortcomings and deviations of others.
- Balance motivates you to speak the truth, to seek well-earned recognition but not undeserved sympathy.
Your life is a constant work of art, always in progress, always in process. Approaching illness with a centered perspective requires balance between, and within, your body, mind, and spirit; one builds upon the other. In the early phases of illness it’s common to focus almost entirely on your body. Soon, your emotional, psychological, and intellectual sides gradually required more of your energy.
It’s very common for patients to “hit the wall” after the intense body focus of medical treatment begins to wear off. It’s at this point where your spiritual needs emerge as a new horizon of intense interest.
As you mature through the middle phase of illness and beyond, your spiritual nature takes a more center stage position and your former myopic focus on the physical aspects of your illness recedes as your mind shifts and engages more clearly in service to your spirit.
Balance involves continuous attention to all three levels of human existence, moving toward ever-fuller integration of all three in peaceful and harmonious living.
Keeping balance requires that that you continuously monitor the coordination between your internal self and your external environment.
Balance is achieved as you regularly take in all these data from within and without and seek to adjust yourself to find your center point, the sweet spot of healing.
The degree, to which you achieve these changes, is the same degree to which you keep the flow of your health moving toward wholeness and grace flowing through you like a refreshing stream.
Read more about finding your balance in Staying Spiritually Centered for Optimal Healing.
Until next time….stay light and be bright!
Richard P. Johnson, PhD