B A L A N C E

This morning I did something really rare. I had the day off from work, and I sent my kids to daycare anyway! (I know!!) I was really lucky to be able to participate in a lifelong friend’s yoga class. At the end of the practice, while sinking into shavasana, my mind began to wander. This is pretty common for me. “What time will it be when I get out of here? Will I have enough time to get some errands done before picking the kids up? Did I take something out for dinner?” [Insert any other thing I’m NOT supposed to be thinking about during shavasana!] But all of the sudden my ears picked up on a single word from my friend’s reading - balance. She said, “If you don’t have balance inside yourself, you can’t balance the world.”

Whoa. If you don’t have balance inside yourself, you can’t balance the world. I mean, I’m not going to get all epiphany on you, but this was definitely an ah-ha moment for me. I was sitting in the first group fitness class I’d been to in well over a year -in a year that has been a struggle for me in many ways. And the crux of that struggle has been around the ever-elusive “balance” - trying to be a full-time working mom who can still provide her kids with stay-at-home mom kind of attention. I’ll tell you - this attempt at trying to be both hasn’t gone well for me. And I don’t mean that I haven’t done a good job. I literally mean that it hasn’t gone well for ME.

As I listened to that little nugget of wisdom at the end of my yoga class and reflected on what brought me there, I realized this: I’ve putting all of my energy into balancing the world around me falsely believing it would lead to balance inside of myself. I’ve been so wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was like a light went off, and I thought, “Holy shit. I have no balance inside of myself.” I’ve been putting the balance of the world before my own, and that explains a lot about how I’ve been feeling.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my life. I love my husband and my children and even my job. But I have got to start loving myself a little more - in real ways that show it. I can’t go another year without going to a group fitness class. I’ve got to stop believing that a trip to the grocery store without kids is “me time.” I haven’t quite worked out my plan of how I’m going to make it all happen, but I’m committed.

I took a few minutes tonight to make a list of the things I love doing - or lovED doing at some point in my life. One thing on my list was writing. I’ve always loved writing. As a young girl, I spent hours writing elaborate stories. In junior high, I rifled through journals documented my pre-teen woes. As a high school-er, I wrote a lot of music, and in college I dabbled in some poetry. But since adulthood, I haven’t done much. In this blogging age we’re living in, I’ve often thought about starting something. I usually go into self-defeat mode next: “How many people would even read it? Who would care about my life?” And you know what? Maybe no one will! Maybe some will. I’m not really sure, but I’m realizing that for me, this isn’t about followers or likes (although having someone pay me lots of money would be nice!). For me, this is about reclaiming myself - about doing something that I’ve always loved, something that has always been therapeutic for me. So I’m writing this for me - to begin balance myself inside. And if in any way it helps you, and you want to follow along, then maybe I’ll be balancing the world a little, too.

#Yoga #InnerBalance