Lynne Herod-DeVerges, founder Center of Light Miracles and Miracles Directory
To understand the benefit of a balanced life, it’s important to first have a clear picture of what a balanced life is. A balanced life is one that has multiple, varying facets, each one blending with one or more others in relative harmony. Our lives have several components, including: education, family, job or career, health, relationships, finances, social relations, and spiritual practice. The key in all of these areas is to find and divide your time amongst each one in a manner that is right for you. No one can say that you should have 15% education, 39% work, 10% social interaction, and so on. The balance is based on how you see yourself fulfilled in each of these arenas. It rests on where you experience being at ease, joyful, loving and free. Balance comes from what you do to promote positive experiences in all these facets of life, and the flow with which you do it.
Below are some principal areas of life we generally work to keep balanced:
- Education: This may be a formal education such as working toward an advanced degree (undergraduate or graduate), or earning a certificate in a particular skill or vocation such as nursing, automotive repair or paralegal work. Education can also mean simply learning new things such as operating a specific computer program, picking up a new language, playing a new game like chess, studying finance, or reviewing any number of new subjects we might like to learn.
- Career/Job: This is a rather large region encompassing a high percentage of one’s life. At some time or other into adulthood (or sometimes during adolescence), a work life is established. Your profession or job is either one you chose or fell into. The difference can mean a substantial area of life you find pleasurable versus one that you perform simply out of obligation to earn money to live. For many, having a job means surviving from payday to payday. When you have a chosen career, there is often a greater opportunity for thriving and more joy. But when you’ve fallen into a job, it may not be as satisfying, and becomes only a means to an end.
- Health: This domain is very significant to the quality of your life when considering the level of ease at which the physical body is able to perform. Although taken for granted that the body will continue to function as designed, there comes a time in life when you are reminded that the body is vulnerable and must be given as much care as possible to retain its optimal performance. Some take very good care of their health, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually as well. On all these levels, health offers a viable and substantial means for thriving.
- Relationships: Whether they involve sexual mates or spouses, siblings, parents, children, work colleagues, friends or acquaintances, relationships can be complicated. They bring into play a number of different facets of interaction including communication styles (verbal and nonverbal), quantity of available time spent together, comfort levels, trust, support, and the feelings exchanged. So many emotions, feelings, sensations and triggers (mental and physical) come to the surface, regardless of whether the experiences are wanted (which we term “good”) or unwanted (which we term “bad”). But, relationships help you fully connect with another person, which helps you to get in touch more deeply with yourself.
- Financial: Whether you have money or not, can manage current living expenses or not, this sphere of life is often one of the weakest because you see less income and more outflow. This is not a blame on you. It simply is. The financial realm is one of the most explosive because it appears that if only you had more money, all other areas of life would be readily handled, and you happy by default. Alas, this is a myth. Nevertheless, without a positive cash flow that allows for discretionary income, finances can cause you intense insecurity and put you in a very dark place emotionally, throwing you out of balance with the flow of life.
- Social: This is another very significant part of life that people often undervalue. Having fun raises your vibration and energy. Being social allows you to forget your troubles, even if temporarily. Socializing moves you out of the way of continued focus on self and opens you to consider the welfare of others. It’s a condition that acts as caulking between all other aspects of life. It helps make dismal, out-of-balance situations more palatable while shifting your perspective to a higher, more open consciousness that embraces the opportunity for positive experiences.
- Spiritual: This part of life colors life’s other arenas. Spirituality is a grounded and sustained belief in something greater than your limited self that provides internal direction and guidance on your life path, supplies the motivating reasons why you traverse that path (“faith”), and dictates the way you do what you do to go about living out that path every day (your “spiritual practice”). It is what you do in times of challenge, blessing, and even humdrum routines on a daily basis. When you choose the path of light at any given moment, a choice made from the essence of spirit, your internal self decides the correct road to follow. Without direction from this connection to spirit, life is not worth living because only darkness prevails and hopelessness engulfs life.
All of these parts of life have their own specific functions. But treating them as separate compartments is how your life can become imbalanced. When you give more attention or energy to one area in sacrifice of others, then joy, peace, genuine love, and even freedom seem elusive. But the reality is, even when it is necessary to put more focus on one area of life over others, for a temporary period of time, your attitude, energy, belief systems, and emotional control can help you maintain your life balance.
Here’s an example: You have to work long hours at your job because of a special project. You’re not able to maintain connection in your close relationships. And socializing is absent. Your finances might increase a bit, but your health is compromised because you don’t eat as well and give no time for exercise. You might be learning something new from this project, but your daily spiritual practice is faltering.
Shift your perspective and begin with the spiritual area of your life. What do you believe about yourself, your relationships with others, your ability to do your job, how you learn, the blessings of your finances (no matter how much or how small)? How do you feel emotionally in all these aspects? Are you joyful in spirit no matter what? Do you feel content and at peace the way your life is for this short period of time? Are you loving your life and experiencing total freedom because you made the choice to work where you do and take on that project? If you answer these questions honestly and are able to say yes to the last few questions about how you feel emotionally, then you have life balance.
In this example, I invite you to look beyond the separate compartments of life. Here is how practicality can help you balance everything in this example. Although you are working long hours for your financial well-being, you can make a practice of getting up every thirty minutes, walk around for two to five minutes, and then, get back to work. You can eat healthy, wholesome low-fat, low-carb foods that feed the brain and body. Socially, you can interact with co-workers on the project and during break times to help boost your moral. These relationships strengthened with your colleagues can be very rewarding, particularly since you’re sharing a common interest. Seeing a higher paycheck is always a joyful experience, and learning something new that you do with others can be fun. But, taking time to start the day with meditation, journaling, reading or work on self-help exercises can be how you set the energy for the day so that you can answer Yes to what the Universe has waiting for you ahead.
The benefit of having a balanced life is that you can live life in a state of freedom – freedom from negative thinking, freedom from depression, freedom from struggle, and freedom from feeling trapped in a life you don’t want to live.
Practice balancing your life and enjoy the benefits!
Who do you turn to when you get stuck in a rut? Don’t know what your purpose is? Want to know the future state of the world or your life? Go to ASK-LYNNE and find out the answers!