Deep Listening...The Path Toward Balance

 I was recently surfing the internet reading about Ayurveda, a subject I have studied before.  I have taken many hours of continuing education trying to learn to utilize this health system.  Ladies and gentlemen, "try" is the operative word here.  Again and again I move toward this intriguing system to try and understand it, yet time and time again so much of it feels elusive to me.  I know it is worthwhile, offers wisdom and guidance to help us maintain our health and balance in our daily lives, yet it is not a system that comes easily to me.  While Chinese medicine resonates a little bit more, I believe that is because my knowledge is more of a working knowledge.  

I have worked side by side with my Acupuncturist for about 13 years now.  I go in to see her, knowing how I feel, my symptoms, etc.  and she shares in her language what she sees.  She talks about my pulses, my organs, my meridians, and I am able to make connections between what is going on in my body and the language that she uses to describe it.  Working with her over the years has helped me to find wholeness within myself, wholeness in my self care, and wholeness in my healthcare.  I have been blessed to have such a relationship and support in process and my life.  And while this is not an article on gratitude, I am grateful.

My point here is in fact, about balance and the tools that are out there to help us attain it.  My relationship with my acupuncturist and the acupuncture treatments themselves were of great value to me.  But I also needed to find my own way and figure out for myself what what to do to maintain balance.  Acupuncture guided the way, enabling me to feel what balance was.  Then I was able to utilize meditation, breath, movement, and conscious energy management techniques along with loads of patience and awareness to help recreate, rebalance, and deepen what acupuncture started for me.

It doesn't matter which system(s) you embrace.  What matters is having the willingness to be in the process, to embrace support and help along the way, and to utilize your own inner tools to sense into what you can do for yourself in the moment to bring yourself toward your balance (still) point.  The body is always striving for balance, it knows no other way.  With just a little bit of reflectiveness and awareness, one can easily see what brings us toward balance and away.  Each day it may be something different.  A different food, a different movement, less stillness or more, more or less sleep.  The combinations of things we need and the proportions we need them in will never be the same, but with deep listening, we can come to hear the callings of the mind and body.  As we respond to these callings we open ourselves to an unfolding of self knowing and self healing that no doctor or text book could ever teach us.