Our world is a world of abundance: Hardly any limits on our access to comfort, entertainment or food. Life is filled with choices, big and small: “What shall I do today?”, “Where will I be in 50 years?”.
If all we want is to be in balance and feel good about ourselves, what should we do?
Whether something is poison or medicine is determined by the dose—balance between too much and too little is the road to well-being.
Often we think that moderation is best. The majority decision is often the best bet.
But not always. More and more people feel bad or down, despite their freedom of choice. Or maybe because of it?
When we fail to achieve balance in mind, body and with the food we eat; we experience pain, lose connection with our body and find it difficult to live in alignment with our dreams.
Balance is about finding your way back to balance, again and again. The tightrope walker is constantly making small adjustments to regain balance. The more we practice balance in life, the faster and more precise our adjustments become. After a while, it starts looking easy.
Then you’ve achieved elegance.
Diet is the most personal. Our bodies are unique and constantly changing. We need to find food that keeps us feeling good and try to stick to it: A systematic process of abstaining or replacing certain foods for a while and evaluating the results, that Amanda is really good at. Food can be medicine, fuel and entertainment—try to limit the latter.
Our bodies look different but are similar in terms of what movements are healthy for us.
A few minutes of strength training every day is all our muscles need to keep developing.
A few minutes of movement training every day ensures that we never lose our ability to move.
When we eat and move well, it’s much easier to feel good.
At the same time, our enormous frontal lobe means that food and exercise is not everything.
What does it mean to be in psychological balance? I can summarize it briefly:
Confront your demons, keep your feet on the ground and your head in the stars.
And a little longer:
Take some time each day to accept all your unpleasant sensations, thoughts and feelings;
it will help you to be present, flexible and determined enough to keep going after your dreams.
Accepting what we cannot fully influence, like the sensory signals our bodies produce, how our emotions flow and our thoughts flow—a superpower today and a necessity tomorrow.
Like the Buddhists do when they meditate; basically face bodily pain and discomfort while detaching yourself from thought. To free up the energy you need to pursue dreams—the ones you have left when you’ve cleared out all the static in you head.
When we accept what we can’t avoid we find peace and quiet. Stress people experience is mainly the result of constant attempts to avoid unpleasant sensations, thoughts and feelings—a struggle to avoid the present.
When we’re not stressed we’re open to signals from our surroundings. We can enjoy birdsong and the company of other people again.
Humans instinctively want to direct all this energy that becomes available through inner work—towards something, we want to create something. A happy life is not one where we’ve fulfilled all our dreams, but one in the pursuit of fulfilling them.
It is a common misunderstanding that we’re satisfied when we get what we want. We’re not really, in that moment we just want more.
We are happiest when everything flows perfectly in the pursuit of the meaningful goal.
There is no more meaningful goal than your life’s purpose—the one you create by chasing the white rabbit of your innermost aspirations and ideals.
