The Secret to Work-Life Balance

You know the term “my cup runneth over”? They say whatever’s in that cup is for you, whatever overflows from it is for everyone else. Because you have to be a whole spring and well, flowing from Source, before you pour out. If you have no Source flowing through you and you try to pour out, you’re just pouring from ego; you’re going to be burnt out very quickly. Overall it’s not balance; it is not going to bode well for you.

Take a second to think, was there a time in your life where you just felt burnt out? Maybe you had a really long work week, by the end of a 70 hour work week you were absolutely done. Maybe you have been spending a lot of time with your kids, and as much as we love those little beings of light, they have really explosive energy (because they are always pulling from Source!). Perhaps playing princess and pirates all week has you completely beat, or have constantly been giving to someone who has constantly been taking (it can be in the space of a conversation, a friendship, or the other person is constantly draining your energy from the things that are going on in their life), or maybe they are venting constantly. They are putting the responsibility on you to make them feel better and you feel drained emotionally. There are lots of different ways where your cup can get drained. And that is not a space we want to overflow from.

“The lesson I came to is

the yoga itself is the balance!”

What do I mean by that? A lot of times, in our lives we are looking for how to balance, but the yoga itself IS already the “me time” you need to recharge. And then when you go out into the world to participate in worldly things like helping your family, going to work, supporting your friends, being part of the community to serve as a being of light in this physical space, THAT itself is the cup running over. So the actions are your overflow, and the balance is your replenishing the cup through yoga.

You may be at a point where isolating yourself, a quiet environment, with no other background noise or chatter or televisions going is the only way that you are able to get quiet enough and still enough to find the stillness in this inner space. Other people call this “me time”. For those of an empathic nature, we very easily pick up the emotions and frequencies of others, so this specific brand of quietude and stillness may be beneficial for you to recharge and fill your cup

(when out and about, networking, being in spaces with tons of different energy, very dynamic and socially charged atmospheres, it even helps to take a moment to separate from the environment in order to recharge, ground, and find this sense of stillness).

The balance is already in you. Doing the physical action is one half of the balance; finding the stillness is the other half of the balance.

If you are working all day, instead of taking those extra minutes to socialize with your coworkers on break or going out to eat with a large group of people, take some time to yourself. Go read a book and be in stillness. Go be in silence. Pop to the bathroom for a moment and take an extra minute or two for silence.If you are in a space of having to find a physical space in order to find stillness, by all means, GO! When you find that stillness that is always in your center, you no longer need to separate your balance.

Does this sound crazy?

What do I mean by separate your balance?

We have this perception of separation that does not exist. We think, “ in order to balanced, I need to do this thing or that thing…” It is very much like tipping the scales; a little bit here, a little bit there, back and forth and back and forth. The more you practice this back-and-forth, you will eventually realize that the balance is already inside of you.

Another great way ( if you’re like me and need a visual explanation) is something Abraham Hicks says quite a lot. She often references the imagery of you being in the center of a vortex. If you picture a vortex, or a tornado, the stillness of the tornado is at the very center of it. Think of the swirling winds of the vortex as the obligations you have to your community, the commitments you’ve made to friends, your children, your family, your career, any and all the things that you are taking action to sew into your dreams, your aspirations, and even the things that are not readily available for you to partake in but hopes and wishes you would like to see come true. These are all swirling around you because they are becoming physical. You are physically doing these activities, but the stillness is in You.

At this point in time, especially in our Western society, we still perceive stillness as something that needs to go be obtained. Which is why I said, for right now, if this is where you are, understand that it is OK if you feel you need to go ground yourself, if you need to physically remove yourself from your current situation and go find that me time. People often say, going for a run is me- time, painting their nails is me time (especially if you have kids, using the bathroom can be your me time or at least, those couple of minutes where they haven’t figured out where you were hiding and start banging on the door!).

From our action based society we often project outward things that are most beneficially practiced inward.

If you are at the space of awareness where you must go to find your stillness, by all means do it.

Soon you will, through this practice, find yourself going to find your stillness less and less and becoming the stillness. The space of stillness is already in you. Balance is already in you.