Transformation Over Tapas

One Monday morning at 5:00 am in the fall of 1999, I was taking a catnap underneath my desk at work. I had worked since Sunday morning through the night, and would go on to work until 6 pm that day. Other than my hour-long nap under the desk, it was a 34-hour workday, which came at the end of three weeks of 100+ hour weeks.

With a schedule like that, balance was a dream.

When I left that job, I went to the opposite extreme; I never wanted to work a full-time job again in my life! Things shifted, but just became imbalanced in a different way; I had plenty of time to pursue my interests, but financially I was struggling and had no career.

Slowly, instead of going to the extremes of imbalance, I am finding a way to design my life consciously to incorporate all of what is important to me. In the process, I’ve realized that how I think about balance affects the actions I take. Below, I de-bunk three myths of balance, and in the reality find more useful metaphors that result in being able to take more effective action.

Myth: Balance is External

We have control over both our internal state and some aspects of our external environment, so when we think about designing our life for more balance, we will have greater impact by taking both into account. What would “balance” feel like as an internal state? For me, it brings a sense of calmness, equanimity, and harmony. Every moment we decide to, we have an opportunity to check in and see what tiny adjustments we can make to shift our internal sense of harmony. Something as small as taking a sip of water, adjusting our position in our chair, or taking a deep breath can work wonders.

Externally, we might look at where we are spending our time and how much energy we give to various areas of our lives. Are we paying attention to what is most important to us, both short and long-term? Do we notice when something begins to slip through the cracks—like our self-care, or a key relationship—and make changes immediately? As we work with both internal and external aspects we can notice how they interact with each other; how is the internal sense of harmony impacted by the various choices we make about what we are doing?

Myth: Balance Means Equality

If we think of balance as being equal scales, we come up with concepts like “work-life balance” that give us a false dichotomy. We think that we need to equally balance our life between our career and everything else, and create artificial separations between our work and the rest of our life, lumping a lot of who we are into an amorphous concept (“life”) that covers facets that are important to us, such as relationships, creativity, spirituality, and our health.

Instead of thinking of two scales, a different metaphor for the experience of being an active participant in life with a lot going on is a wheel. If you imagine a wheel that’s spinning, we’re often living life on the outside rim. There’s a lot happening but we don’t feel in control, we might even be jumping from one spoke to another trying to manage it all (and wondering how long we can keep from slipping). If we can move to the center of the wheel, where it’s the most still, we can have that sense of internal stability but still have a lot happening in our lives. We have more control, yet can still have a lot of movement.

Balance is also a concept in the design world, and its use there applies well to thinking about balance in our lives. As writer and artist John Ruskin said, “In all perfectly beautiful objects there is found the opposition of one part to another and a reciprocal balance.” Balance is not achieved through having some set form of equality, it comes from the relationship of all elements and dimensions of your life within the whole. Just like in a great photograph or painting, or the beauty of a story well-told, it’s more about the harmonious arrangement of the elements and the rhythm between them.

Myth: Balance is a Steady State

When I think about how I want my life to be, I tend to go to some ideal, where I create a life of balance and can be done with it. I think I can “reach” balance and that will be it, I can then focus on something else and forever more my life will be in balance.

Yet balance can only be a steady state when there is no movement. Since there is always movement in our lives, balance is dynamic, something that we are always adjusting. Applying our physical experience of balance to how we design our lives allows us to see a new way to be.

Most of us don’t remember learning how to walk, but you might remember learning to ride a bike or skateboard, surf, ski, skate, or move around on a sailboat that is heeling. At the beginning, it’s difficult. You fall a lot. You overcorrect and use a lot of muscles that aren’t necessary as your body adjusts and learns what it takes to be in balance in this new orientation to the world. Eventually, you do all of that less and less, and find balance becomes more embodied. As you become proficient, you make subtle corrections so quickly that eventually you no longer think about it, and can barely remember a time when it was any other way. When you are walking, you are constantly out of balance, but with your automatic adjustments it becomes a fluid movement and you are not even aware of making corrections. When we reach this level of proficiency, balance looks like a steady state, even though it is not.

We can achieve this proficiency in how we live our life. When I was ping-ponging between the extremes of working too much to hardly working, I was in that early stage of overcorrecting. Now, my corrections are a bit more subtle; I pay closer attention to the small signs and try to make adjustments more quickly, and see how those adjustments affect me. I’m still not where I’d like to be; my goal is to notice so quickly that I’m out of the center of the wheel, and both know what adjustment to make and be able to make it, that I look like I’m living in that steady state.

When we bring all of these metaphors and realities together, a powerful picture emerges of how to design our life for balance.

We can simultaneously cultivate the inner state of harmony while we consciously choose what to spend our time and energy on. As we make these choices, we constantly assess, just as we do when learning to ride a bike, how they affect our internal state. Over time, we continue to fine tune both our internal sense of when we are getting out of balance as well as what it takes to recover, to the point where eventually we correct so quickly that other people admire us for our poise. Living in that center of the wheel, with our life constantly moving around us, we can get a lot done on the things that are important to us and, most importantly, enjoy ourselves in the process.

We’ve all heard that the body and mind are one, but for those of us who have lived largely in our mind, it can be difficult to grok. Yet we actually all experience the interactions between thoughts and the body when we become aware of how we feel—how our emotions and chemistry change—when we think certain thoughts.

Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton has written in his book The Biology of Belief about how our thoughts have an affect on our genes; the “brain” of a cell is not the nucleus (as many of us were taught), the membrane serves this function. What happens at the membrane, which is the cell’s boundary with the outside environment (and includes our thoughts, or the chemical traces of our thoughts), determines what goes on in the nucleus. In other words, genes can be turned on or off based on what goes on in the environment, which includes the thoughts we think as well as what we put on or in or around our body.

I’ve heard before the idea that thoughts are just energy, and certainly I’ve been aware of the experience of my chemistry and emotions changing based on what I’m thinking. Lately I’ve experienced even more strongly how thoughts are energy.

I’ve used what I consider to be cognitive/behavioral tools in the past, such as Byron Katie’s The Work (a great tool I highly recommend for working with those pernicious doubts, judgments, and limiting beliefs), and I always thought of them as separate from other types of tools that work directly with energy. Lately, I’ve been using more of the energy tools (such as EFT, among others), and have become more aware of my physical response to working with energy. I recently went back to doing The Work, and lo and behold, noticed the same physical response when going through the four questions that I have when I’m moving energy, namely yawning like crazy and my eyes tearing up. This has helped me understand at a different level that the thoughts I’m thinking are also energy that is affecting my body, and therefore my health.

We can’t always “control” the thoughts that come into our minds, but that’s ok, we don’t necessarily need to. We can be aware of what we are thinking and how it affects how we feel, and work with those thoughts through various techniques and tools (such as The Work,  Nonviolent Communication, Sedona Method; there are many tools out there). Eventually that work will shift the thoughts that we think.

Making this kind of change requires choosing a process and committing to use it over time. Either set a time to do the practice each day, or do it as you notice thoughts that you want to work with.

What steps can you take to clean up toxic thinking patterns?

photo by go_greener_oz on flickr

The products we use around our home are a major source of chemicals, many not good for either ourselves or the planet. It’s easy now to find “green” cleaning products for your home and avoid those with toxins, and there are even cheaper home-made alternative solutions to many household cleaning tasks. Other products to think about replacing are laundry detergent, laundry soap, dishwasher detergent, and fabric softener. Dr. Gloria Gilbere posted an article on her blog recently listing eleven dangerous chemicals used around our homes, offices, and cars, including mothballs, pesticides, chemicals in carpets and laser printers, air fresheners, flame retardants, and lead paint.

For a sobering list of the hazardous ingredients in common cleaning products, as well as information on particular types of cleaning products and healthier alternatives, see the Guide to Less Toxic Products put together by the Environmental Health Association of Nova Scotia. Treehugger also has a lot of information on green cleaning, as well as some scary statistics (did you know that only 30% of the 17,000 petrochemicals used around the home have been tested for their affect on our health?).

This information can be overwhelming, so if you’re just getting started, start small; choose one room to make healthier at a time, or start with one type of product, and gradually find out more and replace other products as you use them up. If you have small children or if anyone in the house has a chronic illness, however, you might want to speed the process up a bit. When undertaking a new project around the home, such as painting a room or replacing carpet, do some research to find healthier alternatives; you might pay a little more initially, but reap the greater savings of living in a healthy home.

photo by Sergio Russo on flickr

I’ve written a few times about expanding our sense of our overall wellness to include all areas of our life, as how we are doing in our career, spiritual life, relationships, creativity, and so on all impact our overall wellness. Even within a narrower scope of physical health we can still think in the same way; what all is our health dependent on?

We might be accustomed to thinking about health in terms of what we put in our body; the food we eat, the water we drink, even the quality of the air we breathe. Our health is affected by more than what we take in, however; I’d like to take a look at other things we do that impact our health and some concrete action steps we can take to directly support it. These include what we put on our body, what we use around our home and work, and what happens in our mind.

On Our Body

What we put in our body has received more attention and generated more awareness than what we put on our body. If you are a woman, raised in this culture that values beauty so highly, you are likely to use a whole list of products that contain toxic ingredients, including;

• Makeup, such as lipstick, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara, foundation, blush, etc.
• Nail polish
• Deodorant
• Lotions, such as moisturizer, anti-wrinkle cream, and sunscreen
• Perfume
• Hair products, from shampoos/conditioners to hair color, sprays, gels
• Bath products – bubble bath, salts
• Soaps and cleansers

Men certainly aren’t exempt from this either, since they also use soaps and shampoos, shaving cream, aftershave, cologne, and deodorant.

Many of these products contain toxins linked to cancer, and some categories include substances that help the product penetrate deeper into the skin. While any one product may not have enough to cause a problem, when it is used daily and added to the whole list of chemicals you are exposed to every day, the result can still be toxic overload.

Since all of these are products we use by choice, we can choose to reduce our use of them, stop completely, or choose products more wisely. To help with this choice, the Environmental Working Group created their Skin Deep Cosmetics Database, with over 69,000 products you can search to find those with the lowest toxic load. To read more news and research on the topic, also check out The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

The easiest way to begin to make this shift is to slowly replace the products you currently use; as you use up and need to replace your lipstick, moisturizer, makeup, or deodorant, take a few minutes to look up and try a healthier alternative. Most health food stores will carry the less toxic versions of these products, and you can order online anything that you can’t find in your area.

Our health is our most precious resource, and one we often don’t think about until it is compromised through injury or illness. Taking a few small steps to protect your health through watching not only what you put in your body, but also what you use on it, can have a long-term positive impact.

photo by Mike Licht

I recently shared an article on social media from the Alliance for Natural Health called “Too Much Sitting is Killing Us” that cites a couple of studies showing the repercussions sitting too much has for our health. I’ve been aware of various studies about the problems of excessive chair-time, especially since my work entails a lot of time in front of the computer. I finally decided to look into this more.

I asked Jamie McHugh, a fabulous somatic coach who has been teaching movement-based work for over 30 years and pioneered Somatic Expression, for his views on whether sitting is really killing us. He had a slightly different take, suggesting that the body is far more flexible and adaptable to different contexts than these studies give it credit for, and that sitting is just a newer context. Though he agreed that excessive sitting is not a good idea, he also said; “Most people have never been taught how to efficiently sit.” When we explore sitting as a somatic practice and learn how to sit comfortably and with awareness, we begin to create a new baseline for ourselves. In working at our desk, we will then go back into our usual habits, but we can periodically remind ourselves of our baseline, which eventually re-organizes our habits.

Since I’ve noticed recently how terrible I feel if I’ve been mostly sitting at my desk in front of the computer all day, I decided to experiment. As of last week, I have begun to work alternating between standing up and sitting down. Since I don’t have an adjustable desk or the accoutrements, when I stand I pile a box and some books on my desk, and my laptop sits on top.

A few things stand out for me in this experiment (pun intended!).

I notice that when I stand, I stay much more in touch with my body. When I sit for long periods of time working, I notice that I easily lose touch with how my body feels, and can go for quite awhile without moving, until my body (or mind) screams at me in some way that I need to shift. Standing, I don’t find this happens; I stay more in contact with how I feel overall. I move much more—I wiggle around, adjust my posture, change the position of my head and neck, and stretch far more than I do if I’m sitting. I also find myself reaching for my water glass more frequently, which I suspect results from being more in touch with what’s happening in my body. As I’ve written about before, most of us need to be drinking more water, so this has to be a good thing!

In exploring how standing affects me as I work, I’m reminded that what Jamie says about people not knowing how to efficiently sit applies to standing as well. I recall being in one of his classes years ago and going through a process of re-aligning my body while standing, becoming more aware of the miracle of my feet and how all the bones in my body from my ankles up are all designed to be stacked and aligned for ease in the upright position. When our body is aligned this way, we use our core muscles for standing, which is what they’re designed for, and the rest of our muscles are at rest. Standing in this way can be a very dynamic, yet quiet, activity. I remind myself of this baseline alignment while I’m working, especially when I notice I’ve shifted to a much less efficient position.

I am finding it much more difficult to explore sitting in a new way; my automatic patterns assert themselves more quickly since I am accustomed to working in that position. The increased awareness from standing is slowly leaking into my sitting time, however, and I shift more frequently. I’ve also made a few adjustments for greater support and alignment, such as putting a pillow behind me and moving my laptop closer to the edge of the desk when I’m sitting.

What I’ve come to so far in this exploration is primarily that I like having the options, and that whatever option I choose, I want to as much as possible be aware of how I am being in my body. I want to bring myself back to awareness of it when I get overly focused and make those adjustments while I work that bring more ease, comfort, and fluidity.

After all, even in the most head-y work, we don’t want to forget that we are also a body.