Do you ever feel like you’re stuck on some maniacal teeter totter, trying to balance between life's demands and your own needs while the plank beneath you lurches up and down like a decrepit carnival ride?
On one side: our external lives, relationships and commitments. On the other side: ourselves.
Ideally, these are not in competition.
In reality, it's often a frantic chase. We run from one side of the plank to the other, fighting for balance. We slam to the ground one second and jerk upward the next. Our teeth bang together from the impact. Splinters gouge our skin. Necks snap painfully back.
Both sides lose and we are exhausted and empty. Balance is nowhere to be found.
There Is So Much to Prioritize
For simplicity, let’s dub these two ends of the teeter totter external and internal.
“External” is the life outside us. It can be the core parts of our lives (family, home, career, health, friends) to commitments (social plans, volunteering at your kid’s school book fair, letting your sister’s dog out while she’s at work) to functionally necessary (grocery shopping, flossing your teeth, vacuuming, getting your oil changed, putting air in your car tires, filling out forms) to fun things (play, travel, date nights). External also includes the pressures, expectations and socialization from outside influences.
“Internal” is our inner world, where our deepest selves reside. It includes our emotions, perspectives, desires, dreams, preferences, wants and needs. It is as varied as each individual.
Life is a balance between external and internal. We wouldn’t want only an inner life and forgo the “living” part of life (unless we want to be monks). Nor would we want only an external life of commitments and to-do lists because without a connection to ourselves, the “stuff” of life has little real meaning.
The external is the house. The internal is the light on within. No one wants to live in a perpetually dark house, nor do they want to try to find shelter by a mere light.
Out of balance
Picture an old school yard teeter totter, a child on each end, taking turns going up and down.
Now picture it with a young child and a teenage boy. Of course, the boy sinks to the ground and the young child is stranded mid-air.
But if two children of the same weight hold the plank steady and slowly mount it at the same time? They balance.
This is what most of us want, to experience the bigness of life but from a centered place within. We want the house with the light on inside.
So why is it so hard?
Because far too often we come after everything else. Which might be at the tattered end of a long day. Or after an intensive work project or the holidays or our kid’s demanding sports season.
Or “everything else” has no end and we keep postponing our inner wishes and needs.
As if we are repositories we can debt from.
As if it’s perfectly reasonable to put ourselves in the backseat of our own lives.
When we lose connection to our inner world, we tend to forget ourselves. We cruise on autopilot, stuck in the “on” position, existing on the surface of ourselves, oblivious to the depths below.
In this state, we are especially vulnerable to the onslaught of expectation and pressure from others which can further alienate us from ourselves.
Something is missing but we don’t know what. Something feels off, wrong. Maybe we feel caged or unfulfilled, melancholic or cranky. We may question ourselves, our path or the point of life in general. We may tell ourselves we want too much and should be more grateful.
But we don’t want too much. We want that essential heartbeat of our life, that one thing that we will always feel lost without: ourselves.
I often wonder if what we call depression is the perfectly reasonable feeling we have when we move around lives without ourselves.
Listen Within
Great! So let’s find ourselves.
Let's meditate more, do some Tik Tok morning routine to be “that” girl, buy new clothes and find our mojo.
Yeah…no.
This would be like wedging blocks under each end of the teeter totter and claiming balance.
We cannot hack self-connection.
This is how the teeter totter can trick us. With balance as our primary goal, we may be tempted to force balance through action. We do all the recommended things - exercising daily, meditating, eating five servings of fruits and vegetables, journaling, spending time in nature, flossing nightly! - and expect our inner world to flourish.
But intention and presence matter. Action without connection is just busyness.
Our inner self isn’t fed by “shoulds” or by heeding the advice of experts. She is fed when she can speak for herself and be heard.
We might be surprised by the earnest simplicity of her desires.
She might want a nap after work, eat popcorn for dinner or sit by the sea. She might want to walk barefoot on the grass, bake artisanal bread, roam around an antique store or putter in her woodshop. She might want to learn how to make stained-glass or shoot a gun or speak Italian. She might want to stargaze, drink a cup of tea, be hugged, dance around the kitchen or be left completely alone for an hour.
We can’t know until we ask and listen. And we want to know. I promise you this. Because a life lived from within is a life made for us by us. It’s a life of choice, a life of fulfillment and joy.
The Fear of Prioritizing Yourself
There isn’t time for such blatant non-productivity, our minds say. There is too much to do!
And there always will be. There will always be demands, expectations and judgements weighing down the external side of our teeter totter.
Societally, we value the external, on what we can see and measure. Productivity is prized. Slowing down, honoring ourselves and taking time is seen as weak or indulgent or privileged.
But we can choose differently. We can decide productivity is a trap we don’t want to be caught in and choose to create a new value system that has us at the center.
It’s one of the hardest, bravest choices we can make.
Perhaps we fear being selfish.
Perhaps we fear disappointing people and losing their approval and connection.
Perhaps we fear our repressed selves are insatiable and will devour our lives.
Perhaps we fear we are not worthy of such a bold choice.
Perhaps we fear that if we let ourselves do what feels good, we’ll become lazy or weak. Or that if we stop, we will never want to start again.
These fears feel real. In reality, they are just part of our conditioning, part of the untruths designed to separate us from ourselves, from our agency, from our power.
(It's not personal. Not really. Society just really benefits from women believing they need to do everything all the time.)
Dare to be a woman who insists on her right to spend her energy and time the way she wants.
Balance
The trick of the teeter totter is that balance can only be achieved with slight, subtle adjustments. The exaggerated movements caused by franticness and fear overcorrect, throwing us further off center.
But standing tall with our feet planted on either side of the fulcrum, we can micro-shift our weight, keeping both ends of the plank airborne. The slightest pressure on the bottom of one foot, then the other. Our heart inside our breath.
Balance isn't about effort but about gentleness and subtley. It cannot be rigid or perfect. It is not a fixed state but an evolving, fluid and organic becoming.
Balance isn’t a destination or and end-game. It IS the game. It’s us, moving through our ever changing selves and lives. Sometimes one side of the plank will need more. That is normal and expected. Our success is in how we compassionately allow the variance, how present we are for the nuance, how we empower ourselves to adjust.
The teeter totter is ours. What is on each end is, ultimately, a choice. Of all the circumstances we can't control in our lives, where we put our time and energy is one that we can.
For some, balance will mean lightening the load on the external side of the plank. Learning to say delegate or say no. Remembering it’s not our job to save, fix or rescue other people. Releasing the judgement that tells us we aren’t doing enough. Surrendering the need for other people’s approval.
For others, it will be adding more heft and attention to the internal world, cultivating connection to the inner self and generously giving to ourselves. Even if we have years of self-abandonment, it is never too late to come home to ourselves.
For most of us, it will be a little of both.
But before we can do any of that, we must know we are worthy of doing so. This can be the biggest barrier of all.
You are absolutely worth it. You are worth a life you love. You are worth prioritizing yourself.
You deserve to be the beating heart of your own life.
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