WHAT HELPS ON A WOBBLY DAY – DAY 4
Life in balance… if only! Do you ever feel a bit of a failure because your life is wonky, unbalanced, near to capsize?
The word ‘balance’ is not particularly helpful if we expect our mental-emotional state to get ‘corrected’ and stay firmly in one place. The idea of a human heart-mind that is unmovingly stable is, surely, a contradiction. Because no living thing is actually still! The planet is spinning so dizzyingly fast that we do an entire rotation in 24 hours! The sea isn’t still, nature is in constant flux, weather patterns, plants, animals and birds are all in motion.
The word ‘balancing’ can be so much more useful – the idea that life might move in and out of balance, coming and going, and mainly being stable enough. This makes more sense to me, especially when I stand on one leg. Perhaps try it? Balancing is about sway, re-balancing, and finding peace in the moving – a stillness of heart in an undulating body.
How is this relevant to RAIN? (see Days 1-3)
Because we:
• Recognise the flux in our heart-mind-body of stress
• Allow it, not rejecting our self because we have slipped out of balance
• Investigate by inviting our attention to move back to the bigger picture.
As we move from narrow focus to bigger picture, we are re-balancing. Inevitably, we get pulled back into narrow focus, onto the thoughts, sensations and emotions of the awful thing that has upset us. It’s natural. We, too, are in flux. Balancing becomes the capacity to repeat:
• Recognise (R): “Oh look, I am back AGAIN!”
• Smile, and Allow (A) that this happens (a lot, for everyone!), and
• Investigate the bigger picture.
Today I suggest we notice rainbows: anywhere and everywhere – on the rim of your glass, in soap bubbles, on your walls, in the sky.
Rainbows are in the bigger picture. They are an embodiment of the balance between forces of nature. You may want to read Day 3’s post to understand why the bigger picture helps.
Looking up and out at the big picture of life around us, and using the capacity of being as interested and investigative as possible, we move from narrow to broad focus over and over again. This is the sway of balancing. Giving up on expecting any mental-emotional state to be permanent, and instead simply experiencing how re-balancing helps on a wobbly day.
Inspirational Poem
Wendell Berry: The peace of wild things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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