Balance in the Extremes

“Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.”  -Jalaluddin Rumi

Many people start practicing yoga to find balance in their lives.  Maybe they are burnt out from working too much, or emotionally worn down from a stressful life event, or in search of connection to what really matters to them.  There are a million and one reasons to try yoga, and all of them are equally valid.   Whatever the impetus that draws people to yoga, many practitioners do find that they feel more emotionally balanced over time – but the key words there are over time.  Everybody is different.  Every BODY is different.  The road to mental and emotional balance is never a perfect, one-size-fits-all process.  It requires patience and trust in whatever path you are taking.

Here’s where it’s helpful to remember what the great Sufi poet Rumi says about balance.  It’s less likely that we experience prolonged periods of perfect balance, and instead more likely that we have expansions and contractions, ebbs and flows, peaks and troughs, ups and downs.  We may feel awesome in a yoga class one day, able to stretch beyond yesterday’s limitations and maybe even get our stubborn hips to let us sink into a yogi squat!  And then, as soon as we leave class, we may be tasked with putting out small fires in the other realms of our lives.  Or, we may find ourselves literally counting down the minutes to savasana right after class starts.  (Believe me, it happens to all of us!)

But if that’s how you’re experiencing things – great!  Because that’s the natural state of things – expanding and contracting.  Over time, we get better at weathering those extreme movements of the pendulum.  Responsibilities in our lives may try to sway us right and left, but as we get knocked off our balance a few times and persist through those extremes, we figure out the strategies that do keep us more anchored to the ground.  In doing so, we cultivate a balance within ourselves that can outlast changes in external circumstances.

So next time you have a rough patch – in yoga class or outside of the studio – it may helpful to remember that those experiences are necessary to keep us balanced, and that our hard work in enduring the muck will develop the strength we need to stroll into calmer, stronger times.

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”  -Napoleon Hill

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