[[Note to readers; this is final installment of my Ceremony, Ritual, Fear, Loss, Peace, Power, Confidence, Compassion, Balance, Being, Existence and Selling at the Holistic Health Expo thread. Part 1 which focused on Ceremony and Ritual, Part 2 dealt with perceptions of fear and loss and Part 3 considered Power, Peace, Confidence and Compassion. This entry concludes the thread with Balance, Being, Existence and Selling.
Enjoy!]]
Balance, Being and Existence
All of Power, Peace, Confidence and Compassion can be summed up as “Being and Existence”. Is your being, is the you that is the true and truest you, one of power, peace, confidence and compassion? I’m not sure you can have only a few of these with the absence of the others or if you can be missing any one and still have the other three.
The reason for this is balance as in Four-Body balance. What I’ve been taught (you can find this concept in systems as diverse as Norse, Sami, Hellenic, Bifu, Odic, Jivaro, Ennu, Navajo, Sambic, … traditions) is that we have four bodies, not one, and that these bodies must be in balance if we are to live happy, healthy lives.
Power, Peace, Confidence and Compassion speak to those four bodies. We exist at the balance point of those four bodies, not necessarily in their center, and this is where problems can arise. If any one body exerts dominance over any of the others, we are pulled off center. When we’re no longer centered, we compensate (usually without knowing it) so that, even though off center, we can be in balance. Think of a mobile and you get the idea. Using an elementary physics explanation, an object’s center of mass is its balance point but its balance point might not be where the object’s center is.
We exist in the balance point of Four Bodies
The person who is highly emotional compensates by being overtly spiritual, for example, or the person with no spiritual beliefs compensates by being highly logical. Perhaps the person with a weak physical body compensates by getting a highly advanced education. Like the mobile in the image, one part of the system takes on so much mass that the rest of the system grows distant or clusters together to compensate.
It’s an interesting way to live and I doubt it’s a healthy one. The person who neglects their physical body does so at their peril, the person who never exercises their mind leaves themself open to dementia and depression. Western society tends to create a strong axis between the body and the brain, downplaying things of the spirit and heart, and our air is becoming unbreathable, our water undrinkable, people are starving and animals are going extinct because of it (again, my opinion. Feel free to disagree).
Want to know if you’re centered? Easy. Look around yourself. What do you find?
The only way to be in balance, in my opinion, is that your being and your existence are one in the same. It’s the start anyway. A modern phrasing of this is “Walk your talk.” Your being is who you are on the inside, your existence is that being projected into the world. If you are centered in your being, your existence will be centered. Want to know if your being is centered? Easy, look at what you have around you, those things you’ve brought into your existence. Are there unnecessary abundances? Are there obvious lacks or complete omissions? The person who’s lived in a house for years and is still living out of their moving boxes is not a centered self. The person who’s lived in a house for years and still has nothing on the walls is not a centered self. The person who develops their body at the expense of their intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth is living out of balance. The person who fills their home with books and has no or extremely few friends is living their life out of balance.
Balance, being and existence. I looked for them at the expo. I truly wanted to find them there. As I wrote regarding fear, loss and the attendees as a whole, people were off balance, seeking things externally because they didn’t know how to find them within. When there is a hole inside us, we compensate by drawing all manner of things to us, we become sinks instead of sources. Ever been around a person who is needy and tiring to be around? Congratulations, you know someone who is a sink, not a source, someone with a hole they don’t know how to fill hence will fill it with anything and everything you give them…whether you want to give something to them or not.
In short, our beings create our existence whether we recognize it or not.
and Selling
What I did see in abundance was selling. There was an amazing amount of selling going on.
And as I wrote previously, everybody needs to make a living. I get that.
But if you’re willing to sell what you don’t have to people who don’t know what they want, who is fooling who? And when what you’ve sold them doesn’t work and they’ve purchased promise after promise after promise and experienced failure after failure after failure, who can refuse them the right to run over their daughter’s stereo at close to forty knots?
But all that means is that you need to play that stereo louder.
And so it begins again.
Hi Joseph, your post made me wonder – do people need to be in balance, at least for a moment, to recognize they are out of balance? Or will the Soviet fleet only slow down and pay attention when they run over a much, much, much louder stereo? (or perhaps an AC/DC Concert would do the trick)
When people are so used to living out of balance, what allows them to recognize it?
That’s a great question, thanks for asking.
I’m not sure people need to be in balance (even if only for a moment) to realize they’re out of balance. I’m more comfortable with “people need to recognize things can be different”. This is especially true if the individual has never been introduced to the concept of “balance”.
I think it has more to do with a recognition that one is unsatisfied with their current state and begins exploring. Sometimes, yes, getting that recognition involves encountering a much louder “stereo”. Someone being told they need to change their lifestyle or will die, for example, is an example of a much louder stereo, me thinks.
Hope that helps.
I was also at this expo and I agree with Joseph’s assessment. I agree that everyone has to make a living so you need to sell. I also felt that the majority of the people attending wanted that “Magic Bullet” to cure what ailed them. Health is hard work and the sense I got from the attendees was that they wanted a quick fix. What everyone has to remember is that their, and myself included, condition didn’t spring up over night. It probably took years. Nothing is going to fix it immediately. The best you can hope for is to get the tools that you can use when you leave the expo. Sure a massage feels great…and what caused the underlying imbalance? Unless these issues are dealt with the imbalance will reoccur.