Yoga is among my fitness and wellness loves for many reasons. Peace of mind. Weight loss. Stress reduction. Flexibility. Heart health. Strength. Yoga is a tool for fine-tuning our inner and outer selves. It’s fun and it’s challenging. It can be gentle and it can build strength. Balancing postures are among the most challenging and most rewarding postures. Besides you look really cool standing on one leg while holding your other foot in your cupped hands, kicking out your other leg parallel to the floor and putting your forehead on the knee of your kicked out leg. I know. Sounds complex. But it’s also really cool. Not only do you look like a star athlete. You feel a sense of clarity and accomplishment. It may take you several tries to master Standing Head to Knee for more than 3 seconds and even longer before you can hold it for 30 seconds. Some days you may stumble and have to begin again. But in the process, you learn to direct and manage shifting energy and opposing forces. As you wobble, searching for stability, you become skilled at knowing exactly where to put your focus. You realize that you must pull up in your core/belly as much as you press down with your standing foot. Balance comes from applying equal & simultaneous intensity to two opposing forces. The peace is in the intersection of the complementary energies. There are many things in life that can make us wobble. It’s balance that helps us be a Weeble. Remember those toys that wobbled but didn’t fall down? Here are three inspirations, motivations and quotations to help you find that sweet spot in the center.
We’ve all probably heard the phrase “opposites attract”. We can think of couples where one partner is outgoing and the other is reserved. They seem so different yet their relationship is quite strong. We also see ideas about “opposites” in many spiritual traditions. In traditional Chinese medicine, there’s the theory of yin and yang as well as the patterns of open and closed lines used in the I Ching. Within the Yoruba-Ifa divination system, the priest/healer uses patterns of open and closed shells or other instruments to provide guidance or to explore someone’s destiny/purpose. These observations open our eyes to the power of complementary forces. For example, courage involves both be willing to take a chance and being mindful about the best course. We find our courage in the ability to balance fear and daring. These complementary forces help us CREATE A THOUGHTFUL APPROACH.
I grew up in the south and I often heard my elders say, “You don’t miss the water ‘til the well runs dry”. Sometimes they were describing a forlorn lover missing the lover who left because of poor treatment. Other times they were describing the ungrateful person missing the kindness that they’d failed to acknowledge from another person. My elders called attention to the power that losing something has to both teach us it’s value and connect us to our true desires for it. Here’s the wisdom. Allow lack to teach you how to pursue abundance. Let illness guide you toward health. These seemingly opposing forces are complementary forces that help you SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS AND BRING YOUR LIFE INTO BALANCE.
Nothing and everything coexist. This is Universal Balance. Many creation stories refer to primordial waters, the state of no-thing-ness in the Universe. Nothing existed, yet the potential for everything was present. As descendants of the Universe, we embody the creative codes for unending possibilities. I used to teach a workshop to teenage mothers called, “Not Just Child’s Play: Using Your Imagination to Improve Your Life”. My goal was to open them the power of their minds and hearts. Everything begins with a thought, a mental image, an idea, something invisible yet it has the potential to become visible. My mother often quoted a verse from Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”. Your visionary power is an essential ingredient for transforming the invisible into the visible. HOW WILL YOU USE THE POWER WITHIN TODAY?
© Sandra Y. Lewis