What is Balance?
“Often quite apart from the local improvement, a remarkable increase in general vitality can be observed in the student who has learned a more differentiated and varied use of his feet.”
Balance is a constantly changing state of potential energy.
How can we feel potential if we are always thrown off balance? Or if we are holding so much we are rigid and tense? We need some potential left to create the next action. We need to feel potential in our selves, in our lives, and in our future.
Just think: Standing upright or sitting nicely happens only for a microsecond. If you try to hold yourself in one position too long, there is no potential energy left. It's exhausted.
Balance is an idea, a feeling, you can't hold onto it. It's dynamic. What's balanced one moment is not balanced the next. This is why meditation is so hard for many people: they hold themselves too tightly and force themselves to stay upright and call it balance.
Balance is not a decision, it's a process.
One that involves knowing ourselves better. We begin to know ourselves when we change our spatial relationship in gravity and our brain tracks it. This is how we developed a self-image as we grew from babies into adults, but we stopped doing this at a young age when we got a so-called grip on where we are in space.
As adults we are sometimes invited, but more often forced, into growing and exploring our self-image again when we we're knocked off physical or emotional balance. How much do you want to hold onto this momentary experience of yourself? Or to place you are in life right now? Or to a painful habit of thought? Or stay in a single position in space?
Sometimes stability is good, sometimes it's too fixed. Sometimes mobility is freeing, sometimes it's too unstable. Balance is a continuum, always in flux, and it does not always feel like you expect it to feel. For example, it might be uncomfortable to find yourself in a different place because you have to let go of the previous place!
When we let go of holding and resistance, there is a void where the holding used to be. It's a loss of a familiar internal experience that we have identified with to varying degrees. But into that void comes a state of potential energy and possibility, a new balance.