Ever feel overwhelmed? Spread too thin? Exhausted and drained? These are all clues of life feeling not quite in balance. Balance can be seen as a relationship with energy. Because energy is a wave – moving up and down, balance is also fluid – it changes from day to day – and our actions change along with it. How do we choose actions that help restore balance? One approach is to consider the Lesson of Mastery and Lesson of Life:
If we can think of our selves and our care about our selves in four layers:
- Spirit – the energetic realm
- Mental – what we think, what we believe
- Emotional – what we feel
- Physical – our bodies and physical relationship with the world
The lesson of mastery is bringing energy down from the spirit through the mental and emotional layers and into the physical for the purpose of creating a foundation. It includes things like focusing on personal health and fitness, or making money, or building relationships. All of these things take energy to create.
The lesson of life is sending energy back UP the chain into the spiritual layer for the pursuit of one’s purpose. This is the work of connecting to spirituality or empowerment through personal growth and development. It is creative and generative. It’s stuff like going to school or growing a new business. It takes an investment (or a withdrawal) from the foundation and therefore it takes a strong foundation to be able to send energy back up.
Where the lesson of life is about learning, the lesson of mastery is about the application of those learnings so these lessons are tied together – we move through them cyclically. Balance is about recognizing the relationship between energy and foundation in order to focus our work on either moving down the chain or up.
Balance relates to where your focus needs to be at a particular time – building foundation or pursuing purpose. Ultimately, trying to work on pursuing purpose at a time when the foundation is a bit crumbled makes the effort to pursue purpose somewhat fruitless and we feel out of whack. At the same time, we can’t build a foundation without sufficient energy from which to draw.
Practice
- What are you feeling drawn to – building foundation, or creating energy?
- What’s on your plate? What work are you doing that is in service of foundation building? What work are you doing that is in service of creating energy and living your life’s purpose?
- When you are drawn to working on building your foundation, what can you focus on from that list? What can you deprioritize from the other? KNOW that once your foundation feels firmer you can refocus on the acts on the other side…
- When you are drawn to creating energy, what can you focus on, what can you deprioritize that pulls away from? KNOW that the hard work you put in building a strong foundation was important and valuable. Honor that work by sending the energy back up.
Enjoy!