Balance Comes From Roots

Balance is a great word and something people strive for in many ways. 

Yoga and training have given me completely new ways to look at the word balance Yoga and training really do give you lessons to take outside of the gym an off the mat! There are so many things that apply to life from the physical practice.

When we think of balance, we usually think of it visually like a teeter totter or a juggler. Keeping things balanced. It seems like it's tough because we look at the things that are up in the air instead of at the juggler.

Or we focus on going from one side of the teeter totter to the other as it keeps going up and down and up and down and trying to add to each side making it stay flat.

When you are training or doing balance poses in yoga, you realize that balance comes from the stable leg or the standing leg, not the one that's moving around doing all the fancy stuff. If the stable leg or arm isn't grounded and rooted, balance has no chance.

When you do tree pose, it's the standing leg that is the important one. When it is grounded and rooted, then you can move your arms into prayer position or above your head or do whatever variation you want that will make the pose look pretty. As soon as you start focusing on your arms, you will lose your balance. You have to focus on your leg and your toes and your gaze.

Maybe this can help with the idea of balance in life. If we have strong roots, the other stuff won't matter as much. So rather than focusing on going back and forth from work to fun to exercise to hobbies to whatever else is important and trying to gain balance that way, which is frantic and like running from one side of the teeter totter to the other and expecting it to be flat eventually if we add the right amounts of each on each side, we can focus on making sure we have the most important things holding us up and then all of the extras can be there whenever we want.

Save the teeter totter for the playground. It's not fun when it's flat anyway!

The important stuff to us should be in the standing leg, it shouldn't be the balls in the air. I know I mixed the metaphor, but I hope it made sense.