Keeping Your Balance

In 1967, I was in Bologna, Italy, performing with my ballet company. In the particular ballet we were doing that night, I emerged from the wings and took a step onto the stage on one toe, pirouetting and balancing and then letting my weight slowly settle until I was standing, both feet beneath me. It was difficult and scary. I never knew what would happen but my job was to have the courage to find that balance every night, no matter how I felt.

It took endless practice to finally understand that I had to find my inner balance first and then translate it to what I was doing on the outside. In my classes and rehearsals, I pictured what I wanted to do and I strengthened my resolve. Then I moved. As dancers, we learn to isolate every muscle in our bodies as we will them to do what we want them to. One day during my many years of dedication, I found a point in the center of my body that seemed to be the secret chord. I focused on that muscle and felt energy shooting upward and downward until I felt weightless. It was if something unseen was holding me up.

I used to train in a girl’s gymnastics gym. I wasn’t doing gymnastics but that was where my trainer worked. In between my exercises, I watched the young girls execute what seemed like the impossible and the dangerous. Some of them swung on the uneven bars and lost their grip. They ran across the room, practiced back flips and fell. Most daunting to me was the balance beam where they performed unthinkably difficult moves. I wondered, Why did a person have balance at certain times and not at others? It was all about the blending of mind and body.

One afternoon when the gymnasts had gone home, I told my trainer I wanted to get on the balance beam and see how it felt. He set up foam padding on either side of the beam and he hoisted me up four feet onto the four inch surface. I stood there, paralyzed. I wanted to get back down immediately. What a stupid idea, I thought, but I was there so I might as well try.

“Look at the end of the beam in front of you,” he told me. I tried but when I took one step forward, I fell sideways onto the foam. He hoisted me back up several times and I got the same result. My fear was overwhelming me. The next time I found myself standing there, I remembered my ballet training. It had seemed impossible to dance on my toes, to jump and twirl, but when I stopped thinking about what I couldn’t do and starting imagining that I could, I found my center. A place without fear. Once I got control of my mind, I began to slowly walk across the beam. The idea of doing backflips and pivoting around seemed impossible but I pulled my focus back. I took a few steps and I didn’t fall. When my trainer took my hand and helped me down, I had proven to myself that the key to outer balance started on the inside.

We all talk about living a balanced life. What we eat. How much we sleep. How much times we devote to play and to business. But balance comes and goes. Both outer and inner. That is its nature. The idea is to go inside and become aware of how we’re thinking and what we’re doing. Are we moving so fast, we’re falling over? Are we thinking so furiously, our minds are spinning out of control? Are we eating so much, we’re giving ourselves a stomach ache? When I lived in New York many years ago, I knew a woman who talked so fast, she choked herself. She moved around fast, with so little awareness, she tripped herself. She dropped everything because she wasn’t paying attention. She ate unconsciously and by the end of a day, she was exhausted but she was so revved up, she couldn’t sleep. She wasn’t having much fun.

Preparing for the future while we enjoy the present moment is what Buddhists call divine balance or the middle path. It’s about harmonizing our inner and outer experience of life. We try not to get overly excited or overly numb. We try to find moderation where we detach from yearning but stay connected to the people we love. We try to take care of other people but we also take care of ourselves. We try not to judge but we have discernment about what we allow into our lives. One of my spiritual teachers said, “You can let someone into your heart but you don’t have to let them into your house.”

I like to think about trees whose roots burrow as far into the ground as the treetops shoot high into the sky. The dark and the light. In order to emulate that kind of balance we have to accept the idea that we live in a world of duality. The symbol of yin and yang represents two opposing forces that are interconnected and always changing. As much as we try, we can’t have happiness without sadness. We can’t have light without darkness. We can’t have courage without fear. Trying to accept one and banish the other only causes pain. When we look around, we can see suffering in the world but we can also see joy.

Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, said, “The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”