Balance Cannot be Bought.
I often write about peace, mindset and being in conversation with the universe in my professional and personal writing. I have had two profound spiritual experiences. Profound, meaning it felt as though the breath of the earth and my own beating heart seemed to move together in harmony. I abandoned my sense of otherness and felt truly at one with my actual self, the essence of who I was under the shape-shifted person walking this earth. I felt her calling to me to gently caress my doubts and fears, and she whispered through the tendrils of air surrounding me that the possibilities of what I could do and who I could be, were boundless.
I felt that unadulterated calm twice, once at the ripe age of fourteen in my childhood bedroom in the earliest hours of the morning and then again at twenty while doing afternoon yoga in a large 19th-century house on my University’s campus. Both occurred when my spirit was encased in unrelenting darkness. When I was so deeply in survival mode, unbalanced, barely breathing, she [the universe] was listening, watching, never releasing me from her embrace.
I yearned for the feeling often, to be with her again. It felt like I lost her when that feeling subsided, and I was again left to figure out where it came from. At fourteen, the first time was a gift; she showed me what was possible. A gate was forever opened, though I thought I had lost sight of it. The second time, at twenty, she reminded me the gate was right there; I needed only step through it, find her and speak to her in moments of confusion.
We talk about many things she and I, and I ask many questions, sometimes through gritted teeth or glazed eyes. I ask her if her answers are real or a figment of my imagination because her voice sounds an awful lot like mine. Once she said, “it’s because I am and you are me. We are one. You are born from me.” I asked her if I would return to her and see her face when I stopped breathing. She told me to just be a part of the human experience, to honour my spirit’s choice to be here and feel it all.
The more often I do just that, honouring my spirit’s choice, the more I feel that peace she once showed me. Though it’s different, it isn’t as intense and overwhelming. It is an ebb and flow and blows with the wind; every time, it tells me to seek balance. Perhaps that’s my inner Libra talking; I wear a necklace with a scale etched into the pendant daily as a reminder. Finding balance, seeking it out and fighting for it is not simple or easy in a world that thrives on chaos. The last two years of collective isolation and suffering have shown us how much balance is needed. In our time alone, we all realized how little balance we have and how much pain we all live in because of it.
We fear looking outside the box or looking at an ugly box. So we recognize the need for balance, package it with a bow, and make it consumable, marketable to an audience who so desperately want it but don’t realize how attaining it comes entirely from within. These are the traps I have fallen into; some I have escaped from, and others still laugh at me.
I thought if I bought a yoga membership, bought groceries from certain stores, budgeted my time so I had “dedicated self-care,” and read every book on the self-help top sellers list, I would be balanced. I thought if I took a job that offered me a couple of days a week at home, I would be balanced. If I allocated time toward specific categories (eating, washing, breathing, entertaining, relationship) in a careful calculation, I would find balance.
But it is not an equation; it’s a dance. A careful stream of movements across an endless stage where spins, jumps, and rests spill into one another. It is constant and cannot be measured, sold, or planned for. Achieving balance comes from having a good relationship with yourself. Knowing your cues and listening to your body and mind when it tells you what you need. It is not preparing for a particular benchmark; for example, “on Sunday, I will put my phone down and take a bath and get groceries. On Monday, I’ll spend time with friends, etc.”. Those benchmarks will only serve to disappoint you (unless you are someone who craves organization down to the second if that is what your calling is).
It doesn’t work because what happens when Sunday comes, and you don’t want to take a bath, you want to go to a movie with your friends, but Monday is your allocated social time; or when Monday comes, and you would rather curl up with a good book than spend time with other people.
You cannot buy balance. If you seek it, you must first learn how to listen to your essence. The beating in your chest and catch yourself in your mental battles. Align yourself with the ever-changing nature of your spirit’s needs. Remember that even when the universe feels like it is silent or gone altogether, she never releases her embrace.
