Balancing Act

I’ve been finding over the past week that my balance has been quite off in all the balancing postures I practice.  I actually love balancing postures and usually find myself quite stable in them, particularly in my favourite pose, ardha chandrasana (half moon pose).  I’ve even been working on bringing both hands off the ground, which I think is quite a feat.  But recently in my practice, I have not been solid at all in my balancing poses and have been finding myself quite shaky and wobbly.  Of course initially I became consumed with frustration. How come I can get into these poses no problem most of the time, and now I can’t? What has changed all of a sudden? If I’m practicing more consistently, then shouldn’t I be advancing?

It took a mini mental breakdown last weekend to figure out what was wrong.  The balance in my life has run amok!  I’m just over a month into my training, and in the beginning it was smooth sailing. Ok ya I had to cut back on some of my social activities (read: my alcohol consumption), miss out on brunches dinners with friends, and leave the bar 5 minutes after getting there, but I was ok with it because I was loving what I was doing.  But after 5 weeks now, even though I still am extremely into my training, I think I was starting to feel a bit out of touch with my life.  I wasn’t seeing my friends as much as I used to, I wasn’t reading as much non-yoga related books (on top of being yoga obsessed, I am quite the book worm), I wasn’t even seeing my parents or sisters! The balance in my overall life was quite off, and it took me 5 weeks of intense practice and training to get a dose of reality.  I got home from yoga one Sunday afternoon, after a pretty challenging day, and I completely broke down. Cried for an hour, yelled at my sister (this time I didn’t even have a semi-legitimate reason) and refused to see any of my friends. 

After calming down over an episode of The Real World (trashy television always turns my frown upside down) and a glass of wine, I began to make sense of what was going on. No wonder my balancing postures were unsuccessful lately, my entire life balance is off!  I had become so incredibly focused on my training, my readings, my personal practice, that I think I was forgetting how important it was to equal that intensity out with some normal routine and some silly fun every now and then. I didn’t need to shut myself out from the rest of my world just because I was entering a new chapter in my life, and I didn’t need to cut out other things just because I was bringing in something new.

Balance in general is hard, for everyone!  When people start new jobs they have trouble balancing work with pleasure. When people enter relationships they have trouble balancing time with their friends and their significant others.  And when people like me begin focusing on a new passion, a new hobby, a new activity, they have trouble balancing that with EVERYTHING else.

So last week I focused on this exact theme.  I practiced yoga and I went to a concert with my friends.  Instead of only reading my yoga philosophy books, I also read my silly Chelsea Handler book.  And instead of holing myself up in my room after a practice, I went out to a friend’s birthday party and had a few drinks.  Just because I am so focused, and of course I do want and need to be, it doesn’t mean I need to exclude everything else in my life that makes me happy. Because as I learned, albeit the hard way, when your scale is tipping too much in one direction, everything else becomes out of whack.  And guess what, last night I was able to hold tree pose without wobbling at all!

“The key to keeping your balance is knowing when you’ve lost it”

This post is dedicated to my pal Rebecca, who has the honour of sitting next to me every day and the even greater privilege of listening to me whine on a daily basis about this exact topic J