It is always difficult to find balance. As a martial artist, I know that “stealing” my opponent’s balance is the key to throwing them. Without going too deeply into the analogy, when your balance is disturbed you do indeed fall more easily. So, what exercises help with balance?
Self-awareness is the first place to exercise. Knowing what it is that disturbs you most helps you to seek balance when others or life try to disturb that balance. The second might come as a surprise but it is self-esteem. I know me, I know that I have weaknesses and that those weaknesses started at the very beginning of my life. In those days, I was worthless, never good enough, and believed that I was not smart enough. That has impacted my life for lo, these many years.
While how I see myself has helped me to be a good therapist and led me to be a contemplative, it has also been a life long wrestling match for balance. I am always the peacemaker, even when I don’t necessarily want to be. It makes me the negotiator you want when people are upset and I am good at it. But, it also makes people believe that I am weak, passive, and easily manipulated. And that hurts and has cost me a great deal over the years. And, I think what is worse is that it hooks in to my age old issues of self-esteem.
Being marginalized is the worst feeling in the world. It makes you feel like you don’t matter and that is where the fight for balance begins. The fight ends with realizing that if the Savior of the World was ignored, marginalized, disrespected and destroyed how can I demand to be treated better? And that is where the need for balance comes into play. I fight to be less and less each day, to not be the center of attention in this world and that is the tough part of the battle. It is the right thing to do, but it hooks into very painful feelings. And I am thinking that you are like me, you fight the good fight and find it painful when you lose the daily battle and give in to your own needs.
Well, my friends, as they say at church, hear the Assurance of Pardon: being you is not a sin. Who you are is not a sin. We are created in the image of the Living God and we are good enough the way we are right now, warts and all. We all fight this battle, the sin part comes in, I think, when we stop fighting, not when we lose a round in the fight.
TMM