Balance in Movement
Exploring the torus energies of the 2023 Libra Full Moon
Balance & Harmony.
We like to chase the idea of them.
Yet, more often then not they seem to be just out of reach. Almost like trying to grasp at a cloud.
We are often out of balance in many aspects of our lives.
We are running around either physically or on the internet, jumping from one thing to another. Trying to catchup to our never ending to-do lists and attempting to quench our insatiable wants and desires. What we want far exceeds what we have. With that as a dangled carrot, we are ever in pursuit of that which we feel we do not have.
Truthfully, I don’t think this is a bad or negative thing. It can be a beautiful part of our growth, our change and our learning as Humans. But if it all we do, it can also be our down-fall.
So here, we may have to dive into what we believe Balance and Harmony to be. We may need to find out what the energy of Balance is and what it truly looks and feels like for us.
When I first started learning Yoga, balance postures that involved standing on one foot, or holding most of my body weight on one hand was difficult.
Not because I didn’t have the muscle-tone, but because I was afraid of falling and looking stupid in class. My mind was far from calm and I was in emotional turmoil as I forced my body into a shape that my thoughts and feelings were not in. I moved through many balances postures experiencing judgement, embarrassment and I willed myself failingly into the pose.
I was fixated on the Instagram model image of a perfectly still person standing in Vrksasana (Tree Pose), yet my experience was the opposite of that as I bumbled and stumbled through class.
I didn’t know why I struggled this much, until I realized the nature of my imbalance.
I saw an image that embodied something I wanted - peace, calm, oneness, harmony, stability, strength and the likes. Not knowing how to authentically reach that place, I forced myself to look that way, so that I could feel ‘good at yoga’.
I’m sure there were classes where I got it ‘right’, but this was not balance. This was pretence.
This wasn’t just about Yoga though, as I soon realized that this imbalance existed off-the-mat as well.
My ideas of balance when it came to my diet, lifestyle, relationships, work and play all resonated in this frequency, where I wanted to look a certain way quite opposite from how I felt and how I actually was.
In this time of my life, I say balance as a static thing to achieve. When I missed the mark, it was a failure to achieve. We are often victims of our own cruelty, and this was a great lesson for me.
The interesting thing about our bodies is that they learn differently from the mind. Wobbling through a pose activates our stabilizer muscles. We start becoming aware of smaller parts of us like the area around our little toe. We can eventually tell that we are about to fall and we learn to gracefully shift weight around the soles of our feet. Maybe we stay standing or maybe we fall out, but learning has already occurred in the body.
This theme of Balance comes up for me again with this Full Moon in Libra that falls around April 6th 2023.
Illuminating the skies, two weeks after the New Moon in Aries - that evoked a sense of Spring, newness and change within us - this Libra Full Moon is about how that inner newness shows up in the outer world, balancing both what is within and what is around us.
This is different that the idea of compromise that some of us hold, especially when we relate to other people and their needs versus ours.
A new relationship between us and the changes we evoke are now available. This deeply shifts how we change from the inside-out and the outside-in. It is about our perspectives, beliefs and approach to change, as a continual living process.
Sometimes we think change means to choose something different.
This is so, but only in the material and tangible understanding of it.
Change is constant flux and movement. And so, Balance is also not a static concept. To come to Balance when you realize that you are constantly in ecstatic motion in every area of your life, all the time, is the teaching of this week.
To me, in this time, understanding and evoking inner Balance, is a tenet of dictating what changes I will make and how I make them.
Since so much of our life experience is a mystery, we can never truly know the full consequence, long and short-term of our change. This can be terrifying.
And so, if we can work with our polarity, our opposites, our push and our pull, maybe we can come to balance in movement. This is different that working against what we consider opposite, like I did when I resisted falling out of a posture only to fall dramatically.
When we work with our attractions and repulsions together, we can come to a place of neutral center. Neutral center does not mean we have to meditate for 10 hours. Nor does it mean that we have no desire what-so-ever. To me, a neutral center is that place within us that is not tethered to a specific outcome or goal.
It is empty and clear.
It looks a little like a torus field, where there is incredible movement and energy flowing in and out; yet our centre is stable, still and neutral.
This to me, is the nature of Balance available to us in the coming days.
It is Balance that comes from accepting what feels like an opposite and including both poles of energy. This way of knowing Balance allows us to appreciate a moment of peace within tremendous chaos; a moment of stillness during great movement; a quiet whisper amidst noise.
For me, in Vkrasana, the learning came when I embraced my fear of falling and held the perspective of learning through the wobbles.
To feel balanced in a posture, regardless of whether you hold it perfectly, or fall out of it perfectly is a place of deep joy and harmony. It took me a very long time to come to this in an embodied way.
Off the mat, I’ve come to learn that chasing the notion of Balance is a stressful and frustrating path that many of us are used to running on.
Instead, we are learning to see the dances.
Between our inner world and outer world,
Between the needs of Self and requirements of Others,
Between who we truly are and who we pretend or wish to be,
Between movement and stillness,
Between known and unknown.
Instead of giving our energy and our focus to either one or the other. We are learning a new way of perceiving and living Balance. This is the way of both - and.
All those years ago Vrksasana taught me that to stand tall, I have to root down through my feet. It taught me that if my mind is focused on an expectation, I am unaware of how subtle energy moves within and around me. It helped me laugh when I fell and eventually I learned to fall gracefully. It showed me that Balance isn’t something we achieve, it is something that already exists that we uncover.
So, whatever is shifting for you in this time, may you mine yourself deeply and find that powerful center within the Self that is already in perfect harmonic balance and alignment. From there, all the universe becomes possible.
Great piece. I'd never thought of balance as a torus but it makes so much sense!