A Life In Balance

Just this morning I got an email from another coach that said, “Become totally immersed in your subject and goal. Eat, drink sleep and live for this goal; think of it all the time.”

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like much of a life to me. I want to be able to be fully present to those I love and enjoy being with. I want to reach my goals, but I want to be able to relax and enjoy life also. The advice given may work, but at what price?

Eating, drinking and sleeping a goal in one area of your life, say your work, fifty weeks a year and then pretending to let go for two or three weeks of vacation a year is not a balanced life. Not to mention that if you’re that obsessed with work, you’re not going to be able to release and enjoy that vacation fully anyway.

Work can be great, especially if it’s meaningful work that really gets your juices going, but there’s a lot more to life. While the advice given may work to get a specific goal accomplished, a whole lot of important areas of life are going to be neglected. So whether you’re applying the “magnificent obsession” type of advice to work or any other area of your life, it can lead to a very one-dimensional, unbalanced life.

As a life coach, I work with my clients to help them achieve a complete life experience that is satisfying and meaningful to them.

So what does a “complete life experience” consist of? While there is a lot of overlap in the following categories, in the Cherokee way, we follow the medicine wheel, and we break life down into four broad categories.

1. Your spirit. This is your relationship to Spirit, God, the Universe, whatever you consider your spiritual life to be.
2. Your mind. Your intellect.
3. Your physical body. Includes your health, and whatever you do with and for your physical body.
4. Your relationship to all of creation, especially the earth and your place in it and relationship to it.

If you think of these four categories as spokes of a wheel, the idea is to stay in the center, at the hub of the wheel. Any movement out from the center in any direction that isn’t eventually matched by equal movement in the other three directions will throw the wheel – which is to say, your life – off balance.

You may notice that a number of the traditional life categories are aren’t listed, such as money, community, family life, and work. That’s because where these fall in any one person’s life can be very different than where they fall in someone else’s life. There’s a lot of room for individual variation here. There can also be many ways to think of any of these categories, and they will probably actually shift around throughout our lives. So rather than get so nit-picky and obsessed with too many small categories, it’s probably best to keep our eye on the larger picture.

The medicine wheel is a good visualization tool that you can use to check on your life form time to time. Take some time on a regular basis to evaluate your life from the perspective of the medicine wheel. It’s a simpler method than some others, yet it focuses on the big picture, giving you a lot of leeway to apply this in a way that makes the most sense in your life.

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You might also be interested in my blog: http://gentlehealingtouch.blogspot.com/