Got balance?

How is your life balance right now? Are you feeling inspired yet challenged? Are you balancing work with play, rest with activity, creativity with contemplation? Is your body telling you anything about this balance or lack of it in your life?

Integrative body work and massage can help with balance in a number of ways, first helping us remember where we are in gravity, on this little blue planet hurtling through space. We find our edges and have an opportunity to get a sense of our weight or our lightness. What is it to feel heavy? What is it to feel lifted or light? What could feel easier? Have you taken the time to be still long enough, lately, to hear your inner voice prompting you to remember?

When I get into my daily habits and patterns, I sometimes lose track of what my body could feel like if it were softer, freer. And some days I don't stop and still myself long enough to hear my authentic voice. Today, my shoulders are telling me I've had too much inside time, sitting and working (it's been raining too much to be out hiking - or at least that was my excuse) I'm ready to get some body work and massage and be reminded how light and soft and free I can feel as I move about with increased energy.

Pain and discomfort can be invitations. They invite us first into the moment and into our bodies. They are messengers. They tell us that something is out of place. Oftentimes discomfort is a result of habitual patterns of using the body that pull us out of our optimal alignment, and so pain appears to show us where the energy is blocked or piled up as a result of imbalance.



The body really does want to function smoothly and with ease, and as luck or grace would have it, we seem to have the ability to self adjust quite beautifully - quite naturally. But our lifestyles tend more and more toward patterns that seem to be less and less varied. We get into routines and sometimes they get into us - shoulders round and slump forward, toward our devices and steering wheels; backs curve back into couches and chairs; necks crane forward over books and smart phones, etc., etc.

Nowadays, each time I feel the pull of fatigue in my upper back or shoulders, I stop and rearrange my body. In fact this is what my discomfort is inviting me to do. I can simply rearrange myself so that my relationship to the earth in gravity becomes more natural and effortless. Sometimes, though, it takes a little help from a skilled body worker - to open up areas that are restricting my ability to find that right relationship in gravity.

For years I have been balancing rocks. I most enjoy finding a great big one with a tiny point on one end and standing it up on its tiny point - because it presents an interesting challenge and because my eyes tell me it is beautiful this way. And, of course, the satisfaction is sometimes directly proportional to the challenge - if I pull it off.



I bring this up because there is something I feel in the stones as I balance them. When I can get them into right relationship to each other, it feels as though the two stones lock into each other and become one. It’s a remarkable sensation, really, as if there is an energy flowing between them that merges them somehow, as if extending a container to hold more fluid.

This, to me, is like being in balance in the body so that my structure is aligned well enough to rest effortlessly in gravity - whether in this chair, finding the sweet spot where my spine stacks squarely on my seat, or standing in such a way that I feel the earth rising to meet my feet, ever so gently, and again each time I fall forward slightly into walking.

Now, having answered the invitation of pain or discomfort, I have re-oriented myself to pleasure, ease and gentle connection. Now, if I can keep reminding myself to find this arrangement (if I don’t, discomfort probably will), then pretty soon I will have trained my brain to redefine this comfort as my new habitual state.

Of course, as much as I would like for this to be an instantaneous change, it remains a process and a practice. With a little help from my massage therapist and a lot of presence and awareness, I am moving easier and re-orienting myself. This inspires me so much!