Last winter, when you picked your way down an icy NDG sidewalk, did you do so with purposeful, prudent steadiness; or with mind in turmoil and fearful footing.
Did you have balance?
That graceful Tango progression you pulled off, finally, after an evening of struggling and feeling like roadkill? When your balance kicked in and it all flowed? Or the amazing tennis shot from last year, that you’ll never forget, when you leapt up and slammed it home to a stunned and off-balance opponent.
The physical balance that makes these possible, comes from strength and flexibility, kinesthetic awareness… but it is also dependent on emotional balance, as state of mind sets up body.
Balance could be the emotional state that maintains some shreds of equanimity when there’s a detour just added to the first detour and the traffic is like a huge metal constipation, daycare is closing in 15 minutes and you were late yesterday and they’re mad at you and the gas empty light is on but not yet flashing, maybe the gas will make it to the daycare.
Emotional balance can help us more skilfully meet the many challenges we face in managing our own lives, or managing others.
Through balance, life has evolved from four-legged to upright. This upright posture is a crucial attribute of the human being, and a factor in human dominion over the earth.
We are told that our work as a species of adapting physically to standing on two legs is still not complete. Those sore backs! Also incomplete is our ethical, social, ontological evolution: becoming fully upright and balanced enough to steer our earthly dominion away from disaster.
So even if evolution were not proven, we would surely have to invent it. And whatever force in the universe may or may not determine our fate, we can choose to work on our evolution: as individuals, and as a species.
Your local yoga studio can help with balance.
A chair class can help people for whom balance and mobility are daily challenges, as it warms up and works through the whole body in a chair, eventually to standing for a short exploration of balance.
Intermediate classes occasionally explore inversions: balancing upside-down on hands, forearms, heads…
In partner or couples classes, as well as kids classes, people learn to entrust their balance to others, and prove worthy of that trust themselves.
Meditation classes address inner balance, and clarity.
