The Scam of Life Balance

Let go of the concept of “balance.” It might seem odd, but I’m sticking by my statement. But it’s good, healthy, even ideal for each of us to attain balance in our lives, right?

In the early days of my protracted mid-life crisis, I told myself I would finally get myself balanced. That I would discover and stick to a fitness routine that would render me not only strong and college-days-of-old-thin. And because what I arrived at was yoga-based, I was also convinced it would give me emotional and physical balance. Like I would be able to—metaphorically speaking—hold myself in the balance of a crow pose indefinitely.

“It’s the routine I’ve been searching for,” I told myself as I hit “purchase now” on the website for the DVD-based program. For a mere $99 (plus shipping and whatever handling is), I was paying short money for a long-term balance. A no-brainer.

What Forcing Toward Balance Causes

What I neglected or perhaps refused to internalize inside myself was that the yoga program was really yet another flavor of what Buddhist meditation teacher and author Miles Neale called “frozen yoga”—our society’s ripping up of ancient practices from their contextual and meaningful roots.

This was not actual yoga (the word meaning “union,” referring to body and mind). It was fast-food fitness ridiculousness. Never mind the fact that the instructor and all the “students” on the DVDs were in their 20s, and I was pushing well into my 40s as I forced myself to follow the program calendar’s call for hour-plus daily high-intensity workouts.

I ended up with throbbing joints as I jammed my body into cobras, down dogs, and warrior poses. Sure, there was some so-called meditation at the end, but that seemed to be an afterthought, or better yet, a pre-thought of “let’s dress this up with some McMindfulness as well.”

Ignoring my aching, truth-telling body, I kept ramming my body through the workouts and ended up with raging tendonitis in both elbows, the right of which ended up requiring surgery. My yoga DVDs ended up in the basement, doing a perfect “Shavasana” (corpse pose) along with a host of other dead DVDs there on the shelf.

Sure, it was part of my midlife experience, and yet don’t we all, crisis or not, try to force ourselves toward perfection and permanence in a distorted quest for the fictional nirvana called balance?

Not only did I fall on my ass repeatedly during the routines, but I was also completely unbalanced in my expectations of what would bring alignment, strength, and flexibility into my life.

Turning Balance Into a Verb

Take ballet dancers, the highest example of balance-prowess. They, unlike most of us, seem to physically “get there” around balance, don’t they? They stand on the tips of their toes. They glide across the floor as if suspended by divine strings. Balance, for sure.

And yet, any actual dancer will tell you that they never “balance” while on stage. They don’t assume a pose and hover their body there. They will tell you that their expertise is how they flexibly and skillfully are balancing. With thousands of hours under the waistbands of their leotards, they have shown up over and over to the skill of quick shifts of posture and weight transfer. If you look closely, they are constantly in motion, their tiptoes fluttering, wiggling slightly to shift and adjust. They are highly skilled balancers.

You could try standing on one leg. Keep your eyes open, though. Close them, and you’ll find yourself wavering, perhaps toppling over, trying to stand rigidly there, particularly without the input your open eyes give your balancing brain.

In many moments in personal and professional endeavors I have tried to rigidly stay put in my expectations as I reached for something. The problem is that in doing so, I also closed my eyes. I limited my awareness of what I needed to keep flowing and flexibly balancing with the ebb and flow of others and situations.

Don’t do a balancing act. Instead, get moving as an apprentice in the balancing art.

Balancing Practice

• Try standing up from where you are, breathing in slowly and deeply into the belly, and reaching upward toward the ceiling (or sky if you’re outside). Get yourself “balanced”—easy, right?
• Continue to breathe in, reaching upward, and really feel the stretch in your body. Notice any shifting you need to do, the "ing" of balancing.
• Take another breath and try coming up onto the balls of your feet, still reaching upward, again noticing the shifting, the balancing.
• See how long you can hold the pose, not balanced but ongoingly balancing, imperfect, sure to change, and allowing yourself to stop, start, shift, and do what is necessary to reach and bring yourself flexibly higher.

And unless you’re crazy-bold, don’t even think of trying to stay balanced on just one leg with your eyes closed. Not even those DVD-frozen yoga addicts dared do this one.