Balance has never been my strongest skill. Asking me to walk a simple balance beam, low to the ground, would be like asking me to walk a tight rope 500 feet in the air. First my eyes would wander (or look down), next my body would wobble, then my mind would become anxious about wobbling and before I can get halfway across, I would have fallen off completely. So as you can probably imagine, I panicked when my yoga instructor began guiding our class through the Tree Pose, also called Vriksha-Asana in Sanskrit.
“Standing straight on the left leg, bend the right leg and place the right foot on the root of the left thigh. Stand thus like a tree on the ground. This is called Vriksha-asana”, say’s the Yoga Sutra’s.
I stood up straight. I used my left hand to place my right foot on my left thigh. Then I let go. Before I could bring my hands together in front of me, my body was swaying. Next came the anxiety about swaying. Then the falling. Like the many times before I conceded and retreated to the resting position. But in my mind, I was continuously falling.
Joel and Michelle Levey, authors of the book Living in Balance compares the journey of life to walking a tightrope, each of us trying to our best to keep from falling. There are many who feel that living in balance means being able to walk this tightrope effortlessly, with no swaying. And when we do sway, when we feel like we just can’t keep it all together, it is the stress and anxiety about swaying, not the swaying itself, that causes us to fall off the rope completely. Because the more we struggle to live in balance, the less we really are.
In truth, living in balance is not the ability to maintain a constant state of harmony, where we are always giving every area of our lives equal portions of our time and energy. And it’s not the ability to juggle our careers, our families, our friends, our health, our faith, and our dreams without ever dropping the ball. Instead, like a tree in the wind, we sway, having the presence of mind to do what needs to be done at that moment to stay on the rope. Sometimes working, sometimes playing, sometimes resting, sometimes giving, sometimes receiving, sometimes loving others, and sometimes loving ourselves.
Once again, I returned to yoga practice and the same challenge presented itself, as it often does when we fail to learn a lesson. “Stand thus like a tree on the ground”. I stood up straight. I placed my right foot on my left thigh. I breathed in, closed my eyes and imaged the leg on which I stood was the trunk of a tree, rooted and grounded. I breathed out. Then I let go. I did sway. But I didn’t fall. And I was ok with that.
