Living in Balance: A Mindful Guide for Thriving in a Complex World

By Joel Levey and Michelle Levey

THE QUINTESSENTIAL MANUAL FOR LIVING IN HARMONY AND BALANCE. Living in Balance is a timely, powerful, inspiring, and profoundly practical guide for everyone seeking to realize greater wisdom, compassion, resilience, creativity, well-being, and health in their lives. Drawing insights from nearly 50 years of field-tested experien

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wisdom at Work
• Release date: Mar 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736754788

Book preview

Authors’ Preface to the New Edition

This book that you hold in your hands is a weaving together of many streams of energy, information, and inspiration. Distilled within are wisdom teachings we have received from many respected teachers from around the world…who received them from their teachers… who received them from their teachers…. This newly revised and expanded edition comes to you with a vision and dedication to bringing Living in Balance to readers around the globe in response to the emerging challenges and opportunities of these profoundly evolutionary times.

"We clasp the hands of those who go before us,

and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers

whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures,

passing in and out of life,

who move also in a dance,

to a music so subtle and vast

that no one hears it except in fragments."

—Wendell Berry, Healing

The theme of Living in Balance is a universal theme with deep roots in verified evidence-based science, the ancient wisdom traditions, and indigenous cultures throughout the world. As our world becomes ever more complex and stressful, developing our capacity for dynamic balance in our lives, work, and relationships becomes ever more vital to understand and embody in our own lives and to model for others whose lives we influence.

What does living in balance look like in the digital age? Is such a thing even possible during this time of unrelenting complexity, accelerating demands and pressures on our resources and energy, genetically modified and engineered foods, acidification of the oceans, species extinction, and other unbalancing changes in our climate and ecosystem? How do we learn to recognize early warning signs that we are moving away from balance and what can we do at these times to move back in the direction of harmony and wholeness? What kinds of enhancing pings and alerts can we create and discover to help us wake up, shift gears, and recalibrate?

These are some of the challenges, strategies, and tools we invite you to explore and bring to life as you read this new edition. Some of these challenges and methods are evergreen and universally relevant to being in a human body on planet Earth, and some of them are unique to this particular period of rapid change, global interconnectivity, and uncertainty.

It is the worst of times because it feels as though the very earth is being stolen from us, by us; the land and air poisoned, the water polluted, the animals disappeared, humans degraded and misguided…. It is the best of times because we have entered a period, if we can bring ourselves to pay attention, of great clarity as to cause and effect. Because we can now see into every crevice of the globe and because we are free to explore previously unexplored crevices in our own hearts and minds, it is inevitable that everything we have needed to comprehend in order to survive, everything that we have needed to understand in the most basic of ways, will be illuminated now.

—Alice Walker

As you read this book, remember that we are not teaching that there is a state of static, enduring balance to be realized and maintained—but rather that moment to moment and day to day, you have the capacity to be mindful if you are moving towards harmony and balance or away from harmony and balance, and that through this awareness you have the capacity to make a conscious choice to continue on the path you are on—or—to change your attitude and direction as you so choose. The real key to this is to remember: Choice follows Awareness! Mindfulness is truly the portal to living in balance!

As many-dimensional human beings, there are a myriad of principles and practices offered for your consideration and experimentation in this book. As you read Living in Balance we encourage you to be mindful of which ideas are most resonant and meaningful for you, and then to experiment with weaving these into your life as practices that you actually embody and bring to life.

We live in what many global leaders refer to as VUCA times—times of unprecedented change and upheaval characterized by global Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. These VUCA times offer both great chaos and uncertainty in our lives and world, as well as a great upwelling of emergent new expressions of creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and innovative life-affirming, grass roots, community, corporate, and global initiatives to encourage more sustainable ways of living in harmony and balance together in our world. Such times bring out the best and the worst of people resulting in stresses, strains, and emerging opportunities that stretch our limits and call us to develop our extraordinary capacities for living in harmony and balance—and helping others to do the same.

Living in Balance is written to help you to develop the wisdom, compassion, creativity, resilience, and discernment necessary to become ever more Visionary, Understanding, Confident, and Adaptable in response to these VUCA times. Interestingly, in the Zulu language, the word vuca means to wake up—a practice that is essential for learning, wisdom, compassion, and creative adaptation to cope with VUCA consequences!

Living in Balance is a book that offers inspiration and practical advice for people from all walks of life.

For leaders, Living in Balance is a guide to developing the wisdom and methods required to develop the capacity of people and organizations to thrive and be sustainably successful and adaptable in rapidly changing times.

For young people, it is a primer to develop personal life-skills needed to enjoy a long, healthy, fulfilling, and meaningful life, and to helping many others along the way.

We are in the midst of an awakening. At no time in history has Mother Earth needed her children to care more than at the present. Ancient prophecies from every culture around the world warn of dramatic global change. It’s time to believe we can make a difference. If we have hope, there is potential for extraordinary change. The Elders teach us if we return to harmony in our lives, melting the ice in our hearts, reconnecting with one another, we will survive.

—Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Big Ice Wisdom Keeper, Greenland

For skeptics, it offers a variety of experiments to run in the laboratory of your own lives to offer proof that it truly is possible to be successful at creating more balance and wellness.

For spiritual seekers, Living in Balance offers a wealth of inspirations, affirmations, and contemplations to inspire your journey of Awakening.

For parents and family members, Living in Balance provides insights and inspirations for developing greater harmony, deeper connections, and more meaningful relations with loved ones.

Our hope is that each person who reads Living in Balance will discover his or her own unique mix, or play list of meaningful insights, practices, and ways of living to awaken to greater harmony, wholeness, wisdom, and balance. As each of us comes to live more in balance, we will become less of a troublemaker sharing our confusion and stress with others, and we will become a more tuned-in, empathic, wise, helpful, compassionate, and inspiring presence in the lives of all we touch along The Way.

We offer our deepest gratitude to the many people whose love, vision, leadership, and dedicated work have inspired this new edition in coming into being, and we hope that you will take these teachings on living in balance to heart in ways that bring blessings to your life and to the lives of others.

“The New Pioneers.” © 2010. Used by permission, Mark Henson...

The New Pioneers. © 2010. Used by permission, Mark Henson, www.MarkHensonArt.com

In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success. There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.

—Vimala Thakar

Staying Centered in Challenging Times

THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF WRITING THIS BOOK WE HAVE BEEN BRINGING the question of what it means to live in balance in today’s world into our every day, in our work and travels, and into our meditations and our dreams at night. What we have discovered is that no realm of experience exists outside of this theme of balance! In fact, dynamic balance seems to be a central organizing principle of every living system in the universe. Is it any wonder, then, that as our lives become more complex, with increasing demands and less time to meet those demands, that the challenge and value of balance is looming large in our collective psyche? From boardrooms to bedrooms, in health care, education, and global forums, people are seeking to bring more of this elusive quality into their lives.

In our own lives, as a husband-and-wife consulting team to a wide spectrum of organizations, we witness, on a daily basis, the escalating longing for greater balance emanating from people everywhere. Feeling this need resonating within ourselves as well, we wanted to respond to this general malaise of our time, to reach out to people’s feelings of being overwhelmed and out-of-balance within themselves and with others. From our own experience, we have found many strategies and perspectives that can help restore and maintain a sense of inner and outer balance—even if you can’t simplify your lifestyle, quit your job, or run away from home! We want to share this essential wisdom with you, and to offer you the knowledge and reassurance that balance can be cultivated and enjoyed.

Rather than try to write the definitive, exhaustive (and exhausting!) book about balance, we decided that the wisest course would be to acknowledge the immensity of the issue up front, and then focus on providing you with some practical, easy-to-integrate techniques to bring the living reality of balance and inner peace more alive for you, and for all whose lives you touch. We’ve been deeply inspired to see that the practices we ourselves use to keep balanced on the waves of our own busy lives work as reliably for the folks we’ve introduced them to. Those who have taken our approaches to heart and integrated them into their day-to-day lives have shown us that applying the wisdom of balance can truly save your health, your sanity, your relationships, your job, the quality of your life, and even your life itself!

Courage is contagious. If you take a courageous step as an individual, you will literally change the world because you will affect all sorts of people in your immediate vicinity, who will then affect others and then affect others. You should never doubt your ability to change the world.

—Glenn Greenwald

Pause for a moment now to appreciate where you are in the journey of your life, and to wonder at the miracle of your being. Some decades ago, through the merging of two cells in perfect harmony and balance, a doorway into life was opened to you. Myriad experiences, lessons, breakdowns, and breakthroughs later, you find yourself sitting here with this book in your hands, questioning, yearning, and wondering.

This book comes to you likely at just the right time and at an appropriate stage of your pondering of your life with all its opportunities and challenges. In that spirit, we invite you to take the ideas and methods that you find here to heart. Listen deeply to the many voices that will speak to you through these pages; look for the value, meaning, and practical applications of what you discover here for enhancing the quality of your life and your influence in the lives of others. Much of what you find here will be new, and much will remind you again of things you once knew, but may have forgotten. Please take from these pages the inspiration you need to nourish and sustain yourself at this time in your journey.

"There are those who are trying

to set fire to the world

We are in danger.

There is time only to work slowly,

There is no time not to love.

—Deena Metzger

LIVING IN BALANCE—NOW MORE THAN EVER

In decades past, when living-in-balance practices like mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and healthy living first began to emerge in popular culture, they were generally regarded as optional, though highly recommended, practices for easing stress, offering peace of mind, enhancing well-being, or becoming enlightened.

But in today’s complex, fast-paced, insanely stressful and overloaded times, for any sensible person who is aware of what is going on, and what is likely coming, who has an interest in personal and global sustainability, staying healthy, being successful, raising a healthy family, making wise decisions, or making a meaningful difference in the world without crashing and burning out, these principles, practices, and disciplines for living in balance are no longer optional—they are essential. The quality of our lives and world depends on our learning these lessons now more than ever.

Never has the theme of living in balance been so universally relevant in our world. Wherever we turn we find individuals, couples, families, organizations, communities, cities, societies, and our global civilization seeking for ways to thrive in today’s world and be well, stay strong, and become more resilient in embracing what the future may bring.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

—Mary Oliver

Different forces inspire and compel us to take an interest in living in balance. On one hand, we live at a truly unique and pivotal moment in human history, when a perfect storm of complex circumstances and global crises are emerging and converging to sweep away many established social structures, institutions, norms, ways of life, and cherished yet increasingly irrelevant misconceptions that billions of people have relied upon for meaning and direction for many generations. With global climate conditions becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable, crops and water supplies are failing, sea levels are rising, inequity and injustice are extreme, economies are crashing, and the dreams so many have of the future are increasingly uncertain and unsettling.

Yet, at the same time, a myriad of profoundly sensible, sustainable and life-affirming new sciences, technologies, health practices, lifestyles, alternative economies, building practices, energy sources, and wiser and more compassionate ways of living are also emerging that offer great promise and potential for people, families, organizations, communities, and cities around the globe.

We have crossed the threshold now where we have a virtual mother-lode of compelling evidence-based research extolling and confirming the profound value and practical advantages for individuals, teams, and whole organizations of adopting ways of living and working that promote greater harmony and balance as core success strategies. This is truly a golden moment of opportunity to invest ourselves in deepening our personal and collective wisdom, becoming more resilient, and developing our most extraordinary capacities in order to ride through the big changes and challenges on the horizon.

These are indeed the best and worst of times. What is at stake is no less than the present and future quality of life for humanity and the integrity of every life-support system of our precious and fragile planet—the only place in our known universe that will be our home for generations to come.

All this systems stuff has no meaning without understanding that we’re part of something larger than ourselves… If our work has an impact, it will bring us back into the natural order of things.

—Peter Senge

A GREAT TURNING

This is both an exciting and terrifying time to be alive as things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster, in more and more places around the globe. It takes great courage and capacity to stay open to the torrents of information that each new day, text, tweet, email, or download streams our way.

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us.

—Chris Hedges

This age is being called the Anthropocene—the age when human influence is irreversibly altering the critical feedback loops of the self-regulating life-support systems of the whole planet, affecting the lives of virtually all beings living now or ever to come. For the most part, humanity’s collective influence on the life-sustaining and balancing forces of our world is rife with unintended consequences—each of which gives rise to a host of complex and interrelated global crises that reflect a lack of wisdom, care, or political will to make decisions necessary to maintain healthy balances in our world.

For example, fracking for natural gas to free America from reliance on foreign oil poisons aquifers and people, and releases immense amounts of methane into the atmosphere accelerating global warming. Mismanaged nuclear power plants intended to free Japan from dependence on importing fossil fuels led to meltdowns that contaminated their country, much of the Pacific Ocean, and a legacy of nuclear fallout across the northern hemisphere. No one planned for this, no one really knows how to manage for this, and the impacts will endure for millennia.

This is also fittingly called the time of The Great Turning—a time when the industrial growth society that has flourished by exploiting natural and human resources for the past three hundred years is now so depleted, mismanaged, and corrupt that it is rapidly disintegrating due to a lack of capacity (or willingness) to wisely evolve, balance, govern, and transform its powerful influence in our lives and world for the good of all. The resulting upheavals and imbalances in global economies, climate, and societies are leading humanity to make a great turn toward remembering, discovering, and establishing more sustainable, life-affirming, and just ways of living, guided by deeper wisdom, compassion, and alignment with the laws of nature.

Coincident with this Great Turning toward more sustainable ways of living is the Great Unraveling of a myriad of outdated and increasingly irrelevant social systems and structures, institutions, and belief systems that have long served as enduring pillars or norms of our civilization. The daily news offers a litany of stories of how these overstretched, destabilized systems and structures are imploding, and the host of challenges and opportunities that are emerging as a result.

The breakdown of the established social and political order over the last few years presents, ironically, an extraordinary opportunity to actualize the radical changes we all know must take place. If the cycles of conditioned violence and counter-violence can be avoided—or—we may enter an age of responsibility and love for all beings.

—Richard Gere

It’s been nearly fifty years since the Apollo 8 mission when William Anders snapped his epic earthrise photo of our home planet, which gave humanity its first look in the mirror of its unity and fragility as a single spaceship we call Earth floating in space. It’s profound to remember that we live in the first generation of global connectivity where we can reach out to be instantly seen and heard, friended or liked" by people in vast social networks that encompass the globe. For the first time in history, we can witness and reflect upon global events real-time as they are unfolding, and activate our local and non-local networks to respond.

"When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness.

Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful

as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other."

—Margaret Wheatley

We witnessed this firsthand on March 11, 2011, when we received a phone call from Civil Defense informing us of a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and activating us as Community Emergency Response Team members in our rural community on the northern tip of the Island of Hawaii. We logged on to Twitter and the web and watched with amazement as more and more people around the globe tuned in and began to respond to what was unfolding in Japan. With a sense of awe, we monitored both of our laptops as a few posts appeared, then dozens, hundreds, and thousands followed, in a rapidly growing tsunami of tweets, posts, videos of the destruction, prayers, and humanitarian responses flooding into cyberspace from and through hearts and minds broken open and bearing witness around the globe.

Turning toward each other, individuals, families, organizations, and communities around the globe are now able to connect, to question and reflect on their ways of life, explore options, and reorient toward ways of living that embody deeper wisdom, compassion, resiliency of spirit, and balance. Living in Balance is a handbook for bringing this Great Turning to life.

"It is time to be insane together! It is time to violate consensus reality…

We are all holding each other in an emerging story

that will restore and regenerate our hurting world."

—Charles Eisenstein

There is a general consensus in the global networks of solutions seekers and facilitators of which we are a part, that while we really do not know for certain what the future will bring, we are likely in for a turbulent ride through many decades and generations to come. From our travels, time with global leaders, researchers, and wisdom teachers, what is clear is that developing our personal and collective wisdom, compassion, resilience, and balance is absolutely the most wise and timely investment and commitment that any of us can make in these times.

Working in medicine, hospice, palliative care, and meditation training, we often have people call us, saying, I’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Can you teach me how to meditate? We usually reply of course, and we also comment to each other, How sad that they didn’t seek out this kind of learning earlier in their lives so that when they really needed this kind of inner strength, wisdom, clarity, and peace of mind, they would already have that empowering wisdom, confidence, and skill set fully loaded and online for them. The same applies to many people, organizations, and situations in this day and age, where we look at each other and say, Oh, that they would have learned and practiced these methods for years, so they’d have the confidence, skills, neural integrity, and depth of presence in place to surf the waves of change that come sweeping through their lives.

We live in a moment of disruption, death, and rebirth. What’s dying is an old civilization and mindset of ‘me.’ What is being born is less clear but in no way less significant… It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level of our humanity, of who we really are, and who we want o be as a society. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of me to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including myself.

—Otto Scharmer

Another world is possible, this very moment when we choose to live it. It begins with our very next breath. As more and more of us choose an uncompromising life, a life that is truly lived, the more attainable that world is for everyone else. The field of possibility expands exponentially each time one of us chooses to step up to the plate and shine.

—Velcrow Ripper

In this spirit, we have written this updated and revised edition of Living in Balance as a timely and mindful guide for curious, courageous, and committed people seeking to awaken and live in greater harmony and balance, to thrive and help others thrive too, in these VUCA times.

As we’ve lived through the changing cycles of the seasons over the course of writing this book and contemplating deeply the profound permutations, awesome implications, and vast dimensions of this mystery called balance, our lives have been blessed and transformed. Through this deep immersion into the world of balance, we’ve seen that the lessons of balance abound everywhere when we begin to look for them. Writing together as co-authors, our shared creativity has shown us the balance between structure and emergence, and the balance of our unique styles. Through it all, we have grown in our appreciation and love for each other, and for this we are most grateful.

May the words on these pages help bring balance alive for you in new and meaningful ways, and may the turning of the seasons remind you that it is always the season for balance.

"Another world is not only possible,

she is on her way.

On a quiet day, if you listen carefully,

you can hear her breathing."

—Arundhati Roy

"Humanity is taking its final examination.

We have come to an extraordinary moment

when it doesn’t have to be you or me.

There is enough for all.

We need not operate competitively any longer.

If we succeed, it will be because of youth, truth and love."

—Buckminster Fuller

section one

An Inside-Out Approach to Balanced Living

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.

—LOUIS PASTEUR

IT’S EASY TO SEE THAT MANY OF US ARE LIVING OUT OF BALANCE. PEOPLE ARE working more and enjoying it less, and the effects of such an unbalanced work/life are manifesting everywhere. For example, numerous studies indicate that the majority of Americans are suffering from a severe sleep deficit and are currently getting 60 to 90 minutes less sleep per night than is necessary for optimal health and performance. Many of us have no choice about where we spend our time—or at least we feel we don’t. As one young father said to us recently, Either I can spend time with my family or I can support them—not both.

If you are reading this book, obviously you are feeling the need to examine this issue in your own life. So take a few minutes right now to consider these questions:

•What indications are there in your life that you are living more or less in balance?

•What indications are there in your life that your life is out of balance?

•What beliefs, values, and assumptions led you to your answers?

There will be time to examine your answers to these questions later. Right now, just hold onto what you learned as we look at some ways to begin thinking about balance itself.

"If you look for the truth outside yourself,

it gets farther and farther away.

Today, walking alone,

I meet him everywhere I step.

He is the same as me,

yet I am not him.

Only if you understand it in this way

will you merge with the way things are."

—Tung Shan

The story of balance in our personal lives unfolds within a larger context of wholeness, but it begins from the inside out. That’s why, in Section One of Living in Balance, we begin by building the foundation for understanding this bigger picture. Here you will learn the number one skill for cultivating a balanced way of living. This indispensible skill is an inner awareness called mindfulness. Developing mindfulness gives you an internal guidance system that helps you know when you’re heading off the course of balance, so you can self-correct and find your way back on track. It’s like having an inner compass or radar, advising you of your present reality and the direction you’re heading in, then lighting your way home. With this foundation to guide and support you, you are ready to begin the journey of turning toward balance—the most crucial journey of our time.

"Only she who is ready to question,

to think for herself, will find the truth.

To understand the currents of the river,

he who wishes to know the truth

must enter the water."

—Nisargadatta

chapter one

It’s All About Balance

A human being is part of the whole called by us the Universe. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures, and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

THOUGH OUR YEARNING FOR BALANCE IS A DEEPLY PERSONAL QUEST, IT is truly a journey of universal proportions. While at an individual level, we may be feeling overwhelmed with trying to juggle our jobs, family, and social engagements, it is helpful to remember that every thing at every level and dimension of the universe is constantly in search for balance. Indeed, it is the yearning for balance that keeps everything in our universe in motion, while the motion itself provides balance for the dimensions of reality that dwell in stillness.

Science and spiritual teachings have converged to remind us that, in truth, nothing is separate. Nothing can be sensibly studied in isolation from its environment. Within seamless wholeness, the fields and flows of energy that we label as living beings or natural resources or mysterious forces all interact in perfect balance and harmony. In the dance of life, the currents of oppositely charged particles flow. Electrical, biochemical, chemical, and mind fields all interact and weave together. To truly understand anything, you must see it as a point of perfect balance, a reflection of everything else in the universe that converges in that moment and place to support the involvement of you, the observer and the observed. In the natural world, pressures build and are released, balance flows within natural limits that define the game of life. The earth spins, ever so steadily, moving through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, yet nothing shakes apart and no one falls off!

"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive,

and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair.

To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.

To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch.

To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."

—Arundhati Roy

In our own lives, balance emerges through the dynamic interplay of inner and outer forces. In order to get a feel for it, sense or imagine yourself sitting here now at the center of your universe, like an endless ocean of information and inspiration. Within you and around you myriad strong and subtle forces dance together in a movement of constant change to maintain the dynamic balance that weaves the amazing fabric of your life. Within you, each pulsing cell and organ maintains its integrity, form, and function by finding an active balance of energy and information flow within and across the permeable membranes that define the realms of inner and outer. With the inhale and exhale of each breath, we affirm the life-giving flow of inside to outside and outside to inside. Breathing consciously with awareness, we begin to sense the flow and change that is at the heart of our experience of life, and in each moment, each interaction, each day well lived, we learn that balance is to be found in the flow of life.

As you approach this inquiry into the theme of balance in your life, you may discover, as we did, that everything will become a teacher for you. You will find lessons of balance in the rhythms of your breath and pulse, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the turning of the seasons, in the cycles of change that weave birth and death, activity and rest, work and play, and alone time and time with others into the wholeness of your existence. Viewed in this way, your whole life will become a wonder-land in which the ongoing inquiry into the nature of balance unfolds.

By learning to be more fully present and aware of this process, your learning will increase and you will recognize many more possibilities and choices. As your insight deepens, you will see more clearly what paths in your life lead you toward and away from the balance you yearn for.

THE WAVES AND THE OCEAN

Balance can also be sensed in terms of the waves and of the ocean. Just as waves have a beginning, development, culmination, disintegration, and end, balance in our life is found in the flow of periods of activity and rest, paying attention to others and to ourselves, work and play, wakefulness and sleep.

Yet at a deeper level, the changing tides of such waves are balanced by the profound reality of an unchanging ocean within you. Just as the ocean is the water that forms all waves, the ocean within you is the universal reality or essence that dwells within all beings. Its presence is so deep, clear, and transparent that, like a fish in the sea, your whole life may go by without your ever really noticing it. Yet if for a moment you discover it, your life will never be quite the same. Discovering this ocean is vitally important for the discovery of balance because it provides a place of peace for you to return home to despite all the chaos of the day. You can discover the ocean within you right now.

Sit up and feel your feet touching the floor. As you breathe in, know you are breathing in. As you breathe out, know that you are breathing out. Just do that for one minute. Smile to yourself. Awareness of the Self is as simple as that. Just as waves rise out of and dissolve back into the water of the ocean, awareness pervades the changing flow of forms that weave the ever-unfolding patterns of your life. And the smile of balance keeps you from trying too hard, or getting too self-critical, or taking this marvelous discovery of yourself too seriously.

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day and dances in rhythmic measure. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth into the numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of flowers.

—Rabindanath Tagor

WALKING THE TIGHTROPE OF DAILY LIFE

We find it helpful to view our journey through life as a walk on a tightrope stretched across the vastness of space. Life, in this sense, is a learning laboratory in which to learn how to walk in balance. Believing in a responsive, compassionate, and often playful universe, we notice that the width or narrowness of the rope appears to be adjusted to help each walker optimize his or her learning. For a real beginner, it might be 10 feet wide with handrails. As your skill and confidence grow, the rope narrows and becomes more challenging to walk. Ideally it is still just wide enough to keep you in the upper end of your learning zone rather than moving off into danger.

In thinking about balance in this way, there are a few helpful things to keep in mind:

•There are two primary states of being. One is walking in balance, i.e., staying on the rope. The other state is tumbling, i.e., mindless, fearful, and out of control. We are always either walking mindfully and fully present on our rope or we are to some degree mindlessly tumbling.

•The moment you are mindful that you are tumbling, you are already moving back toward balance and you land back on the rope. Boing! People who have yet to learn this, tumble—and because they are tumbling, they get more stressed about being distressed, or become more anxious when they notice they are anxious, ad infinitum. These strategies, however, only lead to becoming more dangerously out of balance and feeling out of control.

•It’s as important to know when you are tumbling, or about to tumble, as to know when you are in balance. That is, the real accomplishment—the deeper balance—is having the presence of mind to recognize when you are in balance and when you are not.

•The more you struggle to stay in control or in balance, the less you are. Real control, real balance, emerges as a state of naturalness. For people who play stringed instruments, this is easily understood by the analogy of a well-tuned instrument. For the richest, most beautiful, most harmonious sounds, the strings must be neither too tight nor too loose. Learning to listen for when you are in or out of such a state of optimal tuning is in itself a fine art.

•Remember, it is all about learning, not about being perfect. The key is not to tumble about having tumbled, or to get more mindless about being mindless.

"Be patient with everyone,

but above all with yourself.

I mean do not be disheartened by your imperfections,

but always rise up with fresh courage.

How are we to be patient in dealing with our neighbor’s faults

if we are impatient in dealing with our own?

He who is fretted by his own failings will not correct them.

All profitable correction comes from a calm, peaceful mind."

—St. Francis de Sales

When we developed and instructed the once-secret Ultimate Warrior (aka Jedi Warrior) program for the U.S. Army Special Forces troops prior to deployment, one of our primary axioms was Choice follows awareness. In corporate settings we sometimes express this as You can only manage what you monitor. Either way, it is only when you know that you are moving out of balance that you can take the necessary steps to move more toward balance—and remember, the recognition is in itself the first step of a return toward balance!

It’s also important to recognize that walking on the rope means being more or less in balance. There are some of us who walk in a very tight, controlled way. These are the folks who are paranoid of falling, so afraid of the forces that might challenge them that they are easily knocked off balance. When they fall, they tumble for a long time, snarled in the net of frustration and blame. Though they tend to be very critical of others, they are especially hard on themselves. This attitude keeps them tumbling most of the time.

Sometimes you reach a point of being so coordinated, so completely balanced, that you feel you can do anything—anything at all. At times like this I find I can run up to the front of the board and stand on the nose when pushing out through a broken wave; I can goof around, put myself in an impossible position and then pull out of it, simply because I feel happy. An extra bit of confidence like that can carry you through, and you can do things that are just about impossible.

—Midget Farrelly, champion surfer

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Through awareness and practice, your confidence can grow to a point where your terror of falling fades away. For people in this league, the obstacles they encounter are viewed as welcome opportunities to further develop their skills and strengths. In those moments when they do fall, they pay more attention to how gracefully they can fall, and even learn how to glide through space with grace and ease. For these folks, falling ceases to be a failure and tumbling becomes an exercise in creative gliding."

You can learn to walk the tightrope of life this way. And the better you get, the more you will discover that walking and gliding become the same. As the tightrope gets finer and finer in response to your increasing skills, the more your walking begins to resemble flying. Each moment, each step, becomes one of joy, wonder, discovery, or creative expression. Are you ready to hop on the rope together now, and explore this balancing adventure further? Here we go!

chapter two

Glimpses of Wholeness

We are part of the earth and it is part of us…

The perfumed flowers are our sisters;

the deer, the horse, the great eagle,

these are our brothers.

The rocky crests, the juices of the meadows,

the body heat of the pony, and human beings

all belong to the same family…

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water

but the blood of our ancestors…

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst…

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the

same breath—

the animal, the tree, the human, they all share the same breath…

The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that

gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh…

What are people without animals?

If all the animals were gone, humans would die from a great

loneliness of spirit.

For whatever happens to the animals soon happens to the people.

All things are connected. This we know.

The earth does not belong to human beings;

human beings belong to the earth. This we know.

All things are connected

like the blood which unites one family.

All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth

befalls the children of the earth.

We do not weave the web of life,

we are merely a strand in it.

Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

—ATTRIBUTED TO CHIEF SEALTH

LESSONS FROM ALOHALAND ON LIVING IN BALANCE

Over many decades we have lived at least part-time in Hawaii. Through these years we have been very fortunate to work and study closely with many beloved Kumus, or keepers of the Hawaiian wisdom traditions. The Hawaiians have a unique view of living in balance that is rooted in thousands of years of an oceanic voyaging culture. Through its deep wisdom, ingenuity, intuition, and high valuing of sustainable living and resource management, it spread across the Pacific Ocean and populated a geographical area far vaster than any other civilization on planet earth.

"Zugunruhe, ‘migratory restlessness,’ is a term we first learned from Janine Benyus, author of the best-selling book, Biomimicry. Within a society of animals on the move, Zugunruhe always begins with those who are most attuned and environmentally aware. When animals enter Zugunruhe they become agitated and alter their habits, gathering and conserving energy leading up to the big journey to come. In these times of the Great Turning, Zugunruhe is being used to describe the restlessness and activation of those of us who are seeking to transform our lives and our society to be more in harmony and balance with our natural world."

—Joel and Michelle Levey

There is an ancient saying from the island voyaging tradition that means: "My canoe (wa’a) is my island (moku), and my island (moku) is my canoe (wa’a)." The voyaging people deeply understood that they would need to cherish and care for (malama) their resources if they were to survive. Setting off on journeys of discovery across vast oceans, they carried with them on their small boats all the resources, plants, animals, and supplies that they would need to settle and sustain themselves on a new island if they were fortunate enough to read the subtle signs of the seas and find new lands. Once they did find and settle a new island home, these few precious resources they had cared for at sea in their canoes would now need to be nurtured and cared for as they developed their new home so that the plants and animals they brought with them would propagate to provide food, fiber, shelter, and sustenance for their people and for generations to come.

When Captain Cook and the first Westerners arrived in Hawaii in 1778 they noted in their journals that in all their travels around the world they had never seen a culture that was able to so bountifully provide for and sustain themselves. They marveled at the deep wisdom and attunement to managing and caring for their natural world that allowed these people to live in harmony and balance with the streams of natural resources that were available to them on their islands.

Our Hawaiian teachers remind us that our earth is both our island and our canoe, and that if we are to survive, we must learn to better nurture and care for the precious and limited resources that we steward here together. In the voyaging tradition the vital bond between people who journey together is regarded as a sacred trust and each person has a kuliana—a sense of responsibility to the community (ohana) at large—and each is regarded with respect for their roles within the community. Such wisdom is echoed in the teachings of countless First Nations peoples in indigenous cultures around the globe who sustained themselves for millennia with traditions rooted in living in harmony and balance with their natural world.

The true state of affairs in the material world is wholeness. If we are fragmented, we must blame it ourselves.

—David Bohm

THE LOKAHI TRIANGLE

Centered at the heart of Hawaiian teachings for living in balance is the core value of Lokahi—the seamless unity and interconnectedness that embraces and gives rise to all things and all beings. As a practice for daily life, you orient yourself to living within the Lokahi Triangle, whose three points of reference and reverence attune you to continually checking in on your relationship to Nature, Community, and Spirit. One uses the Lokahi Triangle as a navigational aid or inner compass for charting one’s course through life in harmony and balance with all creation.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

Taking this practice to heart as a way of life cultivates a quality of continuous mindfulness regarding the vital resources that sustain your life, and encourages you to closely monitor and carefully manage the quality of relationship you have to each of these dimensions of experience. One frequently pauses to reflect and assess:

1.What is the quality of my relationship to my natural world, the biosphere, and the land (aina) that sustains me? Am I "pono" (i.e., living in harmony and balance) with my natural world? If so, how can I deepen into this quality of balance? If not, then how can I most skillfully return to a pono relationship with the land and natural world?

2.What is the quality