Life is a High Wire...Are you Out of Balance?

Life is a High Wire...Are you Out of Balance?

Are you confused? Are you having difficulty making a choice? Does your life look like you want it to? Is there too much or too little of something or everything?

Are you floating away with your fantasies or collapsing under the weight of your daily drudgery?

Do you lean towards things, people, activities or pull back? Are your relationships too intense or too distant?  Do you work too hard or not enough or love too hard or not enough? There are lots and lots of out-of-balance questions.  You probably ask your self these questions all the time or just declare and bemoan your lack of balance.

Your life is out of balance!

Don’t go negative around this statement.

1.  Almost everyone is out of balance in some way.  
2. What were you ever taught about balance?  
3. It is very advanced work to learn what feels balanced to you (it is not about what looks balanced to everyone, its about what feels balanced to YOU.) 
4. Balance is a true mystery and life is a high wire.

What needs to be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided to get you to that equal sign?

I want you to worry about balance so that you pay attention to it, question it, discover it, define it, maintain it, challenge it. Get an education in balance.  Grasp and wrestle with the essential elements of creative balance. Balance is not tame, easy, or compliant. It takes focus, core confidence and practice, practice, practice.  And lots of tipping over, spinning around and course correcting. Just ask Phillipe Petit.

THE HIGH WIRE

To walk or dance on the High Wire of Life, you need to be knowledgeable about the wire, choose your balancing pole, know your body, be confident, feel your strong feet and align your head with your heart. You can discover your inner balance needs by taking the Inner Year Balance program beginning next weekend. I urge you to watch, at least a hundred times, the brilliant documentary on Philllipe Petit, MAN ON A WIRE.  Here is the wikipedia link to this master of the mysteries of balance on so many levels. 

HOW OUT OF BALANCE ARE YOU?

Are your balance points where you want them to be to be content and creative?

Balance of tension and relaxation?
Balance of activity and rest?
Balance of attention and diversion?
Balance of self and other?
Balance of work and play?
Balance of spirit and matter?
Balance of moving toward  and moving away?

The balance I am exploring in these questions is the balance of proportion. Is your life in the right proportion for you? Right proportion provides you with a core sense of self and an ability to stand strongly in the world without falling into confusion, doubt, anxiety or exhaustion.

Only you can determine and maintain your balance. 

Once you find balance, you find yourself. Life nourishes, restores, creates, takes off, makes meaning, feels good when you have your sense of balance. Best of all, you laugh a lot more at yourself, the world and the gods.


At the same time, I want you to consider the mysteries of being off balance.  Being consciously off balance will not create dizziness or other disturbing feelings because you know how to restore balance. Its an art and requires knowledge, skill and practice. It is a science that requires research, experimentation and proof. And it is the sense of the divine majesty of your selfhood which requires imagination, inspiration and intuition.

To move we go off balance consciously, moving our weight from one foot to the other.
We leave the security and stability of balance when we take risk and do, think or feel differently. Having the wisdom of choosing to be off center, also brings more laughter.

I feel it is so important to understand the concept and perception of balance. With attention, balance becomes a personal art form providing the firm standpoint  for inner truth, beauty and goodness. For you, the true sense of self,  that allows you to stand strongly in the world.

TAKE THE INNER YEAR COURSE ON BALANCE

Take the Inner Year Balance program.  Sign up now - HERE. 

The SATURDAY sessions begin next weekend, AUGUST 21.   The THURSDAY evening sessions begin the following week, AUGUST 25.  The course is recorded and you can download any session you need to miss.  Learn more here.

This course will not balance your life.  It will give you a way to work with the mysteries of balance.  It is a schooling of the meaning, purpose and possibilities of creative personal balance.  It will empower you to create balance in your inner life and outer life - not a magic wand, but a clearing of the way. And enjoy the blessing and fun found in the confidence of standing at the edge of startling cliffs and feeling off balance before you start to fly.

You will arrive at the Autumn Equinox with a new sense of creative equanimity - an inner Equinox.

SIGN UP HERE!!

The Summer Flow of Self

On a hot summer day, the thought of diving into a secret shaded cooling pool of water feels so freeing as the still summer heat fights the flow of life and discourages inner and outer activity and vitality.

Sometimes I feel like my inner life is hot, sticky, breathless and unmoving.  I need thoughts that cool me down and bath my soul with flowing waters. Sometimes meditating on a word that is beautiful and inspiring offers a flow of inspiration to my lazy, hazy summer soul.

Today I meditated on “fluency.” I love saying this onomatopoetic word.  Flu - en - cy has such flow to its sounds. Flu sounds like a graceful stream that never ends. En seems to create a soft containment for the stream.  Cy creates an image of a waiting sea.

Rooted in the Latin word for flow, fluency in the Imagine Self context becomes the quality of self-fluency.  Certainly the graceful stream of self-imagination never ends. The core of being human offers soft guidance to the flowing awareness of self. We each need to hold the image of the welcoming destination of becoming I.

I invite you to cool your summer soul with a creative swim toward the sea of self-fluency.

Self-fluency

The dictionary offers  several sensitive meanings for fluency that can guide you to the sense of self that you long for:

• a skill at speaking a language with ease and familiarity and nuance.
• to speak articulately and accurately
• to move with grace
• the degree of flow

Let’s look at each of these meanings in relationship to personal meaning.

• a skill at speaking a language with ease and familiarity and nuance

Imagine having at the tip of your tongue the language of your own being that speaks the truth of who you are in the moment.  Imagine knowing yourself so well that the slightest fluctuation or undulation of self immediately finds  imaginative expression.


There is an exercise I love bringing when I work with groups.  I ask everyone to come up with seven words.  Three nouns, three verbs, and one preposition.  I encourage them to choose creatively such as

banana, song, star

laugh, twist, knit

within.

I write these words down on a flip chart as everyone takes their turn.  Then I explain that the nouns represent how they think, the verbs how they act, and the preposition how they relate.

It is amazing how accurately the self-chosen vocabulary of self reveals the individual.  give this exercise a try either alone or with someone who knows you well. 

• to speak articulately and accurately

Imagine being clear, well-formed and on the mark about each of the myriad aspects of yourself. If you could speak fluently about yourself, people could “get” you! You could “get” you. You would be received and understood because every expression would be the truth and without error.

More and more often, I find myself questioning myself.  Is this truly what I meant? what I feel? what I want?  Or am I being lazy in my self-expression by relying on old identities, expectations or habits. Are my perceptions, thoughts and feelings about myself complete, beautiful and transparent?


How articulate are you in expressing yourself?  How accurate are the expressions?

• to move with grace

Imagine moving gracefully through your inner world? If you are not graceful inwardly, you will never be graceful outwardly. Just think of how water flows. It is always graceful, even when as fierce as class 5 whitewater.

Water responds to its environment as it moves over, under, through, around. How graceful are you as you move through your life and your imagination?

• the degree of flow

Just how fluent are you about yourself? What is the degree of self-knowledge you possess as you move through life? The more you know about  being human, the more you can become fluent in being I.

What is your fluency in the qualities of successfully being human? Are you fluent in the language of selfhood? Are you flowing gracefully to a purer image of your true self?

Fluency and Balance

The summer of the soul is about standing strongly (fluently) in the world and in yourself.  Balance is the source of this powerful fluency.

How articulate and accurate are you in the meaning of balance in your sense of self?
If you became more familiar in the nuanced language of balance (and imbalance) could you move with more grace through your life? Could you increase the degree of flow in the center of your being?

How could your fluency of balance change your life?

• Spiritually? 
• Emotionally? 
• Economically? 

Would you like to have more balance in

• Your relationships? 
• Your energy? 
• Your creativity? 
• Your choices?

I am offering the Inner Summer Becoming I program on Balance later this month. Here is the description and all the fluent information you need to participate in this rich and enriching program. http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2011/08/inner-balance-webinar.html

The Inner Balance Webinar

The Soul's Focus for Inner Summer

INNER BALANCE

Standing Strongly 

in Yourself & in the World

“ Lynn Jericho's seminars are so very worthwhile. They are engaging, revealing, insightful, and deeply satisfying. Lynn brings great wisdom, humor and kindness as well as a gift for being present with the group and to the needs of individuals.
Working with Lynn has brought clarity of thinking, awareness of feeling and certainty in action to my life. I am grateful to Lynn for offering these seminars and look forward to her future offerings. ” Lisa Boisvert MacKensie. Editor  of The Wonder of Childhood

Inner Balance

In the course of the Inner Year, late August and early September is the time of year when we feel the pull back into our inner realities.  Late Spring and Summer drew us out to our consciousness of our relationships to others and the world. Now as we feel the increase of darkness in nature, our souls need to renew our attention to the inner experience of equilibrium, feeling centered, clear-headed, upright, integrated, and free to evolve to a greater gesture of confident self-expression.

In the four 90 minute sessions we will work with the following questions:

What is inner balance? Did you ever ask yourself this question? Is now the time?
What is dynamic balance and how do you live well through creative chaos?
What are the three questions that allow you to compose your life?

How do you experience vertigo? Do you feel that you or the world are spinning out of control?  Do you feel light-headed, unable to focus, like you are losing consciousness? Do you feel like you are swaying back and forth, side to side, wondering how to establish new footing and a solid standpoint?

Which of the seven types of soul/spiritual vertigo do you struggle with?  Just identifying the type(s) will give you a new ground of self-awareness on which to balance your thoughts, feeling, time, energy.  How would life feel if you found a new core equilibrium?

What are the four aspects of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics that applied to your inner life will allow your sense of self and your self-expression to soar into the sun and sail through rough seas?  (This is truly spiritually and practically of enormous value.)

With each session other questions will be asked leading to new possibilities for all participants. 

Summer is the time of year when your soul is most open to the mysteries of balance and standing strongly.

The Intensive will bring new understanding to the imbalances of your life, why they have caused you so much struggle and why you can now move beyond them with courageous creativity.  Like all the Inner Year programs, the Balance Intensive will make sense of your inner experiences and guide you into a truly creative and grounded imagination of your future.

If you are a student of the work of Rudolf Steiner, you will find truly personal applications for his wisdom.

Please share this with your friends and colleagues.


Benefits

You will ...

• develop compassionate control of your inner and outer life
• name and transform the threats and obstacles to your sense of inner harmony
• feel a core strength and uprightness
• learn how to make responsible and creative choices that make sense for you
• feel more spiritually awake

Is this for YOU???

• You are on a quest for self-knowledge. 

• You are in crisis. Life is overwhelming your sense of self. This may be a sudden disruption from a change in relationship, job, or health. Or it can be a chronic sense of feeling you don’t know who you are.

• You are at a threshold of your life. It is thresholds that demand balance from you so that you don’t fall backward or forward but stand strongly as you step into your future. Here are some of the major thresholds of living.

• You are at a seven year threshold.  Every seven years we evolve into a new phase of development. 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, 63, 70, 77.  These thresholds can be rocky as we feel the demands of a new maturity.

• You are 37 or  56 and experiencing the the emotional development of a natal moon node. This can be a powerful shift in how you veiw your self and your relationships.

• You are 42 or 63.  These are the extraordinary thresholds of 21 year cycles.  Your “I am,” your core Being, incarnates into a new gesture in the world and within your soul.

• You are in crisis. Life is overwhelming your sense of self. This may be a sudden disruption from a change in relationship, job, or health. Or it can be a chronic sense of feeling you don’t know who you are.

• 
  

Am I addicted to your classes?   That's one story....
I do know that your presence, through your classes, emails, and telephone consults keeps alive in me the striving toward an ideal, a soul consciousness, that easily becomes dimmed by the demands, conflicts and even the celebrations, of "life on the surface".  You keep re-minding us of a whole other plane of being and meaning.   For that, and for you, I am grateful,    Marilyn Dixon

Course Description

Session One - Shaping a Balanced Life

• Defining Balance
• The Three Discoveries of Balance - a neuro-spiritual understanding
• The Three Anxieties and Balance
• The Four Functions of Balance in Your Life
• Creating Your Wall of Balance

Session Two - Understanding Imbalance

• The Three Feelings of Imbalance - Vertigo, Malaise, Disequilibrium
• The Three Sensory Experiences of Balance
• How These Impact Your Thinking & Feeling
• The Significant Role of Object Relations

Session Three - Vertigo & The Void

• Spinning, Overwhelm, Swaying To & Fro
• Balance and Sense of Identity
• Spiritual Balance - The 70/30 Wisdom
• Neurobiology and Balance
• The Abyss and Filling the Void

Session Four - Developing Spiritual Balance

• The Wisdom of Proportion
• Establishing the Right Share
• Seeking Results
• Spiritual Aerodynamics
• The Spiritual Elements of Balance
• Managing  Ever-present Ambivalence

"Blessings to you for speaking to my inner experiences.
Your ability to understand and articulate and SHARE how to navigate these natural patterns is a life boat for me." Sally Nurney

Process

We meet as a group via the internet or phone for 90 minutes each week for 4 weeks.
There is a slide presentation on your desktop and you hear Lynn and each other on the computer via Skype or on your phone. Directions for connecting are sent in an email - it is simple. These sessions are recorded and can be downloaded for relistening.

We have personal conversations with partners from the course…
Everyone is assigned a partner from the group for  a 30-60+ minute conversation on the weekly topics. These are remarkable and deeply sacred conversations.  When each partner is working with the same set of archetypal questions, rich dialogue emerges to nurture and clarify the biographical insights of each.  This is awesome, thrilling and by far the most transformative aspect of the program.

We each create personal binders/notebook ...
Participants are encouraged to create their own binder to fill with the handouts and the selfwork for each session. The handouts include descriptions of the key elements found in our biographies and sets of questions for each topic.  Your binder contains all your biography work and your personal biographical reflections - in this case, the story of your first seven years. The binder gives you a place to continue your reflections beyond the time frame of the program.

There is a personal conversation with Lynn...
During the course, you will schedule a 20 minute private conversation with Lynn on any personal question you have.  These are powerful conversations. Lynn brings her intuitive listening and her creative and compassionate wisdom to the conversation.

Logistics

    4 - 90 minute webinars

    SATURDAYS, August 20, 27,September 10, 17   No session Labor Day Weekend 
    11AM - 12:30PM Eastern
    8AM - 9:30AM Pacific
    4PM - 5:30PM BDT

    OR

    Thursdays, August 25, September 1, 8,15
    8:00PM - 9:30 PM Eastern
    5:00PM - 6:30 PM Pacific
    10:00PM - 11:30PM BDT

Because this course is a webinar, people from all over the world are able to attend. Please check you timezone. I have had people attend from five continents.  Email me, if you have questions.

Location: Your computer and/or your phone. Directions for this internet process are sent to you.  It is relatively simple even for the technically challenged and insecure.

Cost: $147USD 
You register on my online store and can pay via debit card, credit card or PayPal.  If you need to pay by personal check, please email me.  Discounts and payment plans are available.

REGISTER HERE
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/BALANCE-IYBAL11.htm

Facilitator

Lynn Jericho has been leading inner development courses for 20 years. She is the developer and designer of the Imagine Self   programs: Inner Christmas, Inner Year, & Inner Life.  Learn more about Lynn at www.lynn jericho.com