Mid-December 2017 Newsletter

Hello, and a delicious Mid-December to you!
Welcome, or welcome back, to my newsletter. Today's issue has an article about living a balanced life. Enjoy!

When corporations started talking about "work/life balance" several years back, I wondered if it was just lip service. Did they actually care about the hard-working employees who stayed late at the office, went home for a quick meal, then got on the computer for a few more hours of work? I knew someone who went to the gym "after work", then went back to the office! This same dedicated guy worked in an engineering area where the management often had food brought in in the evening, encouraging or even requiring folks to keep working after dinner. As much as I might like my job, this doesn't sound like a balanced life to me. Remember that saying about all work and no play?

If you love your work, whether you work for someone else or for yourself, you may not need as many breaks or as much down time. And you still need to unplug, time with friends or family where you're not performing and producing, time in Nature away from the computer, time to relax and even be silly. You'll need to find what fits your situation, but I can't work for more than a few hours before needing at least a short break. Then I always return to my work with renewed enthusiasm and some fresh ideas. If I work too long without giving myself any chance to do something different, even if it's just the laundry, I feel like I'm in a rut and my energy starts to slump.

People can work too hard or too long, maybe pushing themselves to meet a deadline, then go on vacation to recover, and spend the first several days in an exotic locale sleeping! This is not balance. Ideally you can get some slower-paced periods in your work day or work week. Then when you do take dedicated time away from work, you're not exhausted, on the brink of getting sick. You can enjoy being active on your vacation because you'll have the energy and motivation to engage with the new environment and the experiences it brings. As I write this, I'm newly returned from a week-long trip to an island 5 time zones away, to learn from my energy teacher. I like peace and calm and routine, so travel can be a challenge, with missed plane connections and delays and noisy strangers crowding me. I stay in relative balance by meditating on the plane, being friendly to everyone (my natural tendency is to withdraw when I'm anxious), and preparing as well as I can, like knowing my gates ahead of time, or reviewing the airport map, or having a shuttle or taxi expect me on arrival. And still things can get thrown off track, so I have to be flexible, ready to shift gears into Unexpected Wait mode or High Activity mode.

Thinking about balance, a big part of it is just that, the ability to easily adapt when the situation changes. On a routine day, a crisis or even a positive unexpected event demands our focus and attention. If you're paying the bills and your child calls needing your help, that's the priority -- the bills can wait. Studies say one of the measures of a healthy person is the ability to respond to change in a constructive manner. Balance is not sleeping in bed or sitting on the ground. It's not stuck on the see-saw in either the up or the down position, but rather moving easily from one to the other.

Give yourself a few quiet moments to think about your life. Where might you be out of balance? Are you always rushing, your mind on the next task before you've finished the current one? (This is one of my own biggest challenges.) Do you spend all your time alone, or all your time with others? You need both solitude and companionship in your life. Look at your indoors/outdoors balance, and your learning vs. being entertained one. If you're lucky these can both happen from doing a single activity. Don't be like Johnny One Note. Be the cat with 2 different-colored eyes, each contributing to who you are. You'll have a richer more multi-faceted life, and be interesting, maybe even fascinating, to others.

To read about my experiences with vision and balance, click here.

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Please send me your questions and comments
Let me know what you've wondered about concerning energy medicine or vision or dreams. I'll be glad to write a short article addressing that topic. Thank you to those who have sent me questions, or see a question you asked me in a private session written about here. You're helping many other people! Enjoy the rest of your December, and the tail end of 2017. I'll write again in a few weeks. Take care!