Balance

When you learn to balance, you have to take a few tumbles before you understand what muscles you have to contract, and what you have to lengthen to stay balanced.  No one can teach you to balance, really.  Someone can tell you to keep your knee soft, tighten your abdominals, and focus your eyes on a specific point, but then you have to go it alone, even when you’re sure you’ll wipe out. 

Making mistakes is how we learn.  Some parts of balancing are intuitive, others are conscious.  You just have to feel it.  Sometimes we have to allow ourselves to fail before we know how to do it right.  And we have to allow others to fall down and understand that they are just trying – as we all are.

I have fallen down in front of a class.  You get to a point while falling where you know you can’t save yourself and you just resign yourself to going down.  If you let yourself relax during the fall, your chances of hurting yourself are minimized.  

At the point where you’re falling, if you try and resist it, that’s when you can really get hurt.  You are contracting your muscles to tense for the fall and it will hurt more when you finally land.

In life, we sometimes just have to go with what our intuition is telling us.  If we resist too much, we can end up, figuratively, hurt and on our butts.  If we can go with the flow, when we know there’s nothing else we can do -- even when it’s scary – we can somehow find our way to balance.

This is all part of trusting what we feel and trusting who we are.  If you trust yourself, you are not afraid to fall and make a mistake.  If you trust yourself, you know you will find your balance eventually.

I’ve had situations in my life when I was totally off-balance.  I knew, in the deepest part of myself, what I had to do to become happy again.  I hesitated because I knew that some people around me would not approve and would, in fact, be very angry.  These people loved me, but they had an investment in me showing up as I always had.

I had to remind myself that I am not a mean person, I would never purposely hurt another and I had every right to joy.  

I had to fall a couple of times, but I knew what I had to do to regain my balance.

Trust yourself.  You know what’s best for you.

You can always find your balance.