We’ve all heard about work-life balance—prioritizing between “work” (career and ambition) and “lifestyle” (health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development/meditation)— but while a useful concept, this lifestyle choice also sets up an impractical duality.
Today, with access to more information and opportunity than at any other time in history, and the loss of traditional boundaries, we are mostly “working” all the time.
So we need to take time out to take care of our “Self,” our body and life, which needs to happen in the way athletes do it—all the time, just in time, for the right amount of time, in the ways we need, at the level we need as best as possible.
Knowing how to get all your needs met in the process of performing and serving in the world, not in retreat from it, becomes the new definition of “balance.”
And that art starts with being grounded in the unshakable absolute; the big Self, not our busy little energy-draining brains that can lead us to live caught up with so much going on we’re barely hanging in.
Live in that spiraling mind, and the experienced of “balance” is fleeting at best.
Meditation along with a lifestyle strategy that has all the essential skills to live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind, while achieving our goals, is vital.
So, how do we create a lifestyle that balances worldly achievement with the inner fortitude we all want to maintain? I think you’ll agree, a life that’s richly lived includes both.
To answer that question, it helps to embrace the new idea of whole life performance; where you’ve got the balanced integration of meditation and spiritual (not religious), or simply Self development with the lifestyle skills to navigate the world and from that authentic posture. This ultimate foundation makes resilient living possible as you gain the right relationship with your mind and the brain that directs it. Also, direct access to the unlimited source of renewable energy we depend on to stay both healthy and productive.
Meditation is not just one of those lifestyle skills; it’s the universal life practice that enables you to practice all others from the very best part of yourself.
Meditation clears your mind, sources the vital energy you need to function and perform well, even in the middle of a busy day, simply by being still, relaxing, paying attention and having no relationship to the content of consciousness—the stream of thoughts of any kind we can simply let go.
From this grounded place, we can also contemplate—and mindfully, with presence, choose to engage with thoughts and actions that make sense.
Meditation is the practice that immediately awakens you to the primary source of wellbeing and confidence we long for yet we’ve always had. We were never divorced from it, but for many of us, we’ve gotten separated.
Meditation may start for us as a spiritual or stress management practice; but if you give yourself enough time to awaken, it becomes your natural posture to life itself and the secret sauce maintaining a foundation for balance in your life.
The rest is both science and an art and it’s the result of not just one, but the array of lifestyle skills you’ll learn and connect the dots around in Performance Lifestyle training.
