Join me in finding a calmer, happier way of being. Each week you’ll get an email with one simple technique that you can incorporate into your day-to-day life.
If you’re like me and just want something simple that takes hardly any time but really works to change your outlook and perspective, this challenge is perfect for you!
You’re In!
You have successfully signed up for the “Be Balanced” Summer Challenge!
Check your email inbox for your first week’s assignment (don’t worry, it’s not hard)!
Make sure you check your spam or promotions tab if you don’t see an email.
I’m looking forward to our journey of becoming balanced
Summer is fast approaching and what a whirlwind of a year 2020 has been already. There has been so much going on, viruses, economic downturns, political uprisings, and to top it all off…murder hornets!
No matter who you are, I am sure you have been affected in some way. And it is healthy to feel the icky feelings, because they encourage us to take action and make changes.
With so much going on, it is also helpful to have some strategies to find some balance emotionally, mentally and physically, especially when so many impactful events occur in close succession.
That’s why I decided to challenge myself to be more balanced this summer. Will you join me?
Each week for three weeks, I am going to put some energy and awareness into being just a little more present and a bit more in my body.
But the key to making it work, for me anyway, is that it has to be super simple! Because if it’s an elaborate 20 minute process each day, I’m probably not going to do it.
What I need are some things that I can quickly do throughout my day. And, in my experience, the little things we do all day are much more impactful than doing a big chunk of something now and then.
It’s like learning a language…
Usually, when learning a new language, you spend a few hours several times a week in focused study. But you quickly forget what you learned in that hour chunk of time and have to keep coming back and reviewing. This way, you will learn the language, but it will be slow and hard to apply.
But what if you were suddenly living in a country where they only spoke the language you were trying to learn? Over three weeks, you would learn the language much faster and in a much more practical way than you would if you were studying a book or taking a class a few times a week.
You are immersed in it, so you get it better and faster.
That is what I hope to do with this challenge! Each technique, one per week, will be simple, quick, and applicable throughout your day. You’ll be doing little bits all the time – it’s a DIY balanced lifestyle immersion.
It’s never a bad idea to learn how to be more in your body, and more at peace with your world. Especially now, the world could use a few more people who are acting from a place of calm and groundedness.
So, will you join me?
Sign Up For the “Be Balanced” Summer Challenge!
Join me in finding a calmer, happier way of being. Each week you’ll get an email with one simple technique that you can incorporate into your day-to-day life.
If you’re like me and just want something simple that takes hardly any time but really works to change your outlook and perspective, this challenge is perfect for you!
You’re In!
You have successfully signed up for the “Be Balanced” Summer Challenge!
Check your email inbox for your first week’s assignment (don’t worry, it’s not hard)!
Make sure you check your spam or promotions tab if you don’t see an email.
I’m looking forward to our journey of becoming balanced
Last year I was dealing with some health issues, and I felt that working long days was contributing to my symptoms. After much deliberation, I reduced my hours in hopes of finding some relief and more time for rest. At first it was great. I had more time to nap, rest, and do other things that felt restorative to me.
But it wasn’t long before I started filling that free time with more “stuff.”
Before I knew it, I had eaten up all that time with classes, volunteer work, and self-imposed deadlines and projects. I was just as busy (if not more so!) than before I reduced my hours!
Bewildered, I asked myself, “how did this happen?”
It was as if part of me could not STAND having time to be quiet and relax. There was an inherent guilt to resting, to having time that wasn’t “productive.”
All over again, I ended up giving away all of myself, to the point where it wasn’t sustainable.
It wasn’t my job that was draining me, it was my own inability to save a little of my power for ME.
You could even say that I was opening my heart TOO MUCH.
My life was missing a natural oscillation that is present in all of nature, that play of intensity and calm, of effort and ease.
It was seeming to me that my whole life, and the messages I was getting from the society around me, was all about effort and opening; doing as much as you possibly can…
without the bit about quieting, softening, and going inward.
Peter Levine, an industry leader in studying and treating trauma, describes this process as “pendulation.”
He believes that rediscovering expansion and contraction is the key to living a full and abundant life, with the ultimate goal of living a more expanded life.
Too much contraction is undesirable, this is established. Thinking too much, worry, fear, over planning, narrow focus (staring at a computer)… this creates a contracted state.
You can feel that contraction in your body- your neck, shoulders, face and maybe lower back become tense.
On the other hand, expansion is always desirable, and always the goal. This happens when you consciously relax your body, get a wider view (look out a window for 30 seconds and notice how your body changes), and settling into the present moment by noticing your breath and bodily sensations.
However, there is a trap that I call “FAKE expansion,” which is also undesirable and can even be harmful.
So what is “fake expansion?”
Over filling your life with STUFF and convincing yourself that it’s REALLY important (cringe, yup, that’s me!) at the expense of your own wellbeing.
Fake expansion is “opening your heart” in a situation where you feel exhausted and unbalanced.
It’s saying yes to so many things that you don’t leave any room to take care of yourself. It’s giving more than you have to give.
We do this ALL THE TIME. Sorry ladies, but women do this more than men, but the guys definitely do their fair share.
And maybe instead of asking how you can open your heart more, you should be asking “can you make space inside your heart for YOU before opening it up to everyone else?”
A.k.a. how do you keep some of that loving care and attention for yourself, so that when you give to and care for others, you can do it from a place of love and joy instead of burnout and martyrdom?
One way you can make space for your own heart is by physically changing the shape of your body to encourage more space in the BACK of the heart area.
Interestingly, as we open the back of our hearts physically, our decisions tend to reflect this and become more in support of self nurturing instead of over reaching.
Breathe into your Back
Our bodies are so fascinating. The sympathetic nerve ganglia, which is a fancy way of describing the nerves that make you feel anxious, stressed, worried, angry…generally amped up…live between the vertebrae in your upper back spine. So, if you are always “opening your heart” by pushing your chest up and trying to stand or sit up really straight and never going the other way (rounding your back) you’re going to have a heck of a time getting your brain and body to relax.
Not to worry! You can do a simple exercise to expand the back of your heart. Here’s how to open your upper back:
Re-Establish Physical Boundaries:
Another way to encourage healthy expansion is by re-discovering the boundaries of your physical body, which reminds the mind to keep a little of that loving energy for yourself.
By re-establishing the boundaries of our bodies, we learn to expand. Here are some ways to develop and be aware of the boundaries in your body. This embodiment of where you end and the rest of the world begins teaches your nervous system how to create healthy boundaries in your life.
Here’s how to establish the boundaries of your body:
Are you are needing to create a little (or a lot) more space in your heart for you, so that you can give from a whole and rested place? Or do you need to remind your nervous system what it means to have meaningful boundaries? Or perhaps you’re like me, and you really needed both.
Whatever the case, the fact is that our society drives us to do more, push harder, be better, all the time. And that doesn’t honor the law of nature, it doesn’t honor pendulation.
Try introducing a little more space for you into your life, and see if that allows you to expand a little more. We not only deserve some space for ourselves, we need it to be sustainable.
We rely primarily on three systems to tell us where we are in space and in relation to gravity. Basically, they keep us from falling over!
Visual System
One of those systems is our vision. Have you ever been parked in your car and slammed on the brakes because the car next to you started to move? Nothing else changed except your visual perception, which made it appear you were moving. As a result, your body reacted. These reactions are constantly happening on a smaller, subconscious level as we negotiate our environment. Don’t believe me? Try balancing on one foot. Now, try that again, but close your eyes. Once we take away the visual input, balancing is much harder.
The visual system is one of the ways that we balance.
Somatosensory System
Another way we balance is with our somatosensory system. This system is the information we get from our body of where we are in space, primarily our feet. All of our joints have specialized nerves in them that tell our brain their position relative to a surface. There is a high density of these nerves in your ankles. To experience the somatosensory system in action, try again to balance on one foot. Notice how much harder your ankle is working, with little micro adjustments, to balance when you have only one foot on the floor instead of two. That’s because you’ve reduced your “somatosensory input” by reducing the amount of contact you have with the ground. Just like our vision, our somatosensory system is constantly sending signals to our brain and making micro adjustments based on where we are relative to a surface. This is happening whether we are standing, sitting, lying down, doing a handstand, walking or running.
We are able to balance with our somatosensory system, which uses our feet and ankles as reference centers to keep from falling over.
Vestibular System
The third system in our body that keeps us from falling over is our vestibular system. This system is usually the hardest to understand because we can’t see it, and we don’t notice that it is working. However, when it is not working, we really feel it.
The vestibular system is a small organ that lives deep to the ear, and you have one on each side. It is often referred to as the “inner ear” for its location, but you cannot get to it from your ear because it is separated by a membrane (the ear drum). It shares a nerve with the part of your body that manages hearing, called the cochlea.
The vestibular system or “inner ear,” shown above in blue, is located deep to the membrane of the ear drum.
The vestibular system consists of three semi-circular canals that are filled with fluid. When we move our head, this fluid is displaced. This displacement activates nerves within the vestibular organ and sends a signal to your brain with information about which direction your head is moving and how to adjust your eyes to account for this. This is a crucial function for daily activity. Think about walking. When we are walking, our head is constantly bobbing up and down with each step. However, we do not perceive this because of the vestibular system communicating with your eyes to account for this.
When Systems Fail
These three systems, visual, somatosensory, and vestibular, all have to work together. When they don’t, we can feel dizzy, off balance, or “not quite right.”
The system that is usually affected in feelings of dizziness is the vestibular system. A common cause of dizziness is called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or BPPV for short. This is when a small crystal of calcium-carbonate becomes displaced from another region of the vestibular organ and ends up in one of the fluid-filled, semicircular canals. Because the inertia of the crystal is greater than that of the fluid, the brain and eyes receive a signal that you head is still moving when actually it has stopped. Therefore, this type of dizziness usually occurs with head movements and creates a spinning sensation. It can be very uncomfortable, and is treated by a maneuver that positions the crystal back to its original location. Crystals can become dislodged during a head trauma. Also, as we age the crystals do not adhere as strongly to their original location and can come loose all on their own.
The vestibular system can also be damaged by a virus. Usually, someone who has this issue had a stomach virus or head cold up to two weeks before they started feeling dizzy. This person also gets dizzy with head movements due to the virus affecting the nerve that sends information from the semicircular canals to the brain, body and eyes.
Our sense of balance can be affected by an infection that makes its way to the nerve transmitting signals from the vestibular organ.
When our vestibular system is damaged or not functioning as well, we rely more heavily on other systems of balance, usually our vision. We usually don’t rely as much on our somatosensory system because in our day to day we are far more used to using our eyes to stabilize (computer work, driving, watching TV) than we are to using our somatosensory system (walking on uneven surfaces, balancing, crawling). This can make us feel dizzy when we are in an environment with lots of visual stimulus, or make us feel off balance or dizzy when we are in the dark or low light. After a while, we might notice that our neck becomes stiff, because we also avoid head movements that may make us feel dizzy.
Our bodies and brains are extremely good at compensating, but we can only compensate for so long. For individuals who have dizziness or imbalance and try to “just deal with it,” their problems often become worse as the compensations only grow stronger. This is because your body will always take the path of least resistance, which means it will always preferentially use the systems that are already strong (usually vision) and therefore the ones that are weak (vestibular and somatosensory) become weaker and weaker. This creates an imbalance that affects us negatively in many ways, because there are many moments in life we need all three systems to be working well and harmoniously.
So what to do if you suspect your balance systems are, well, out of balance? The best thing to do is to strengthen those that are weak. You can do this by performing balance activities with eyes closed, or incorporating head motion into your activities. This way you will stimulate the somatosensory and vestibular systems, and with eyes closed the visual system will not be able to take over.
