As a wellness professional, I’m often reflecting on the art of finding balance in this frantic and busy world and how our sustained wellbeing is dependent on it.
Clearly, I’m not alone. More and more holistic and integrated approaches to health are catching on. More and more people are using apps like Headspace and signing up to yoga, Mindfulness and Self Compassion courses. And never before have these teachings been so needed. We live in a day and age where chronic stress is commonplace.
Stress is the body’s call to action in the face of threat. Our system floods itself with chemicals as a way of enabling us to react to life threatening situations. In today’s modern world it’s not so much about us running away from bears, as us constantly running onto the next thing. And the pace at which we live our lives becomes habituated. Rather than stress being an appropriate response to external demands we get stuck with the red button on. Our nervous system can get locked into a fight or flight response, as we increasingly lose the capacity to self-regulate. Instead we lurch between full acceleration and collapse. We get addicted to our own neuro-chemicals and can eventually burn ourselves out.
Awareness is key to breaking this cycle. When we practice Mindfulness, we are creating a gap in that momentum. A space to pause, drop into awareness and check in with ourselves. We come out of our heads and into our bodies. We learn to consciously relax and begin to steady our attention. And from this place of more calm, we can begin to notice the habitual loops we are running in our lives – the storylines, the dramas, and the behaviours that keep us hooked in unhelpful patterns. When we are more aware of what’s actually happening, we open up the possibility of choice. Rather than just acting out of habit, we get conscious and creative. We learn to apply appropriate effort instead of just blindly pushing through. To have the skill to know when to step back and ask the relevant questions… ‘What do I need now?’, ‘What might help?’ in any given situation. To stay live to what’s happening at any given time and in that, to what might be a more skilful response. Knowing when it’s appropriate to push, to slow, to soften, to assert. And so, we learn to self-regulate – to release the nervous system, and to wake up.
Self–regulation is all about balance. Our modern lives are full and varied and often pretty demanding. A bit like spinning plates, we need to give each area appropriate attention to sustain healthy balance. The dance between the professional and the personal; between self and other; between applied effort and knowing when to let go; finding balance between steady focus and holding a broader perspective… the list is endless. With ongoing Mindfulness practice, we are learning to navigate this terrain and actively refine these skills.
In time, we also begin to notice that something like work/life balance is not only about how much time and energy we give to the different aspects of our lives. It’s fundamentally about how we are in the working environment, how we are in our personal lives. Are we curious and attentive to what’s here now? Or are we in automatic pilot and so somewhere else? In each moment, there is choice.
And, we do our best. One of the key aspects of Mindfulness is cultivating a kind and non-judgmental awareness. This doesn’t mean we lose our capacity to discern or apply our minds critically. Rather, that we are not believing all our critical thoughts. For most people that’s one of the biggest game changers… learning that we don’t have to believe everything our minds tell us. We are not our thoughts.
And so, we train ourselves in the artful skill of pausing, noticing, reflecting and then acting. With regular practice and gentle and steady perseverance, we gain more balance, ease and perspective in our lives. We become a little wiser and quite naturally begin to find a middle way.
With Mindfulness, we are learning to give our lives our full attention and in time with practice, a quality of richness begins to weave itself through everything.
