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Harmony vs Balance


Are you feeling tired of trying to balance life? Does it feel like you are standing on a teeter totter and constantly shifting and moving to bring all the things into alignment? Does this feel manageable? Does it feel like a way of being that you can always implement and engage with? Much like a new eating plan, if it isn’t sustainable, perhaps it isn’t going to work.


The idea of finding harmony in life isn’t necessarily new. However, the book “The Science of Enlightenment” by Shenzin Young really made me ponder how much more powerful it is for me to seek harmony. Balance to me implies that I must do, shift, and adjust to make things work together. It feels busy to my body and tiring to my mind to constantly juggle doing less of one thing and more of another to make myself feel better.


Finding harmony with life, though, feels soul shifting, spacious, less doing, more feeling, more noticing, more allowing. I imagine this beautiful messy life as an orchestra. I am going along in life and seeing myself play the viola (because it’s an instrument with a unique clef), then hearing an oboe join me, maybe some timpani, or even a kazoo. Perhaps a choir will join, or a soloist. There’s this magical music being made in my life, and I don’t have to control how someone else is playing their instrument, only to notice it. Perhaps if I want to create a different harmony, I will change my tune in response to theirs. But I don’t have to. I can break away and continue to play the way I choose. Here’s the thing, I really want the harmony of my life to sound beautiful, to show up in all its glory. Therefore, when faced with a choice of how I might make that happen, I need to choose consciously what I want my particular orchestra to sound like.


Your harmony may sound like a 5th grade middle school band right now. You and those around you have picked your instruments, you're learning how to hold them, possibly how to blow into them, tune them, how to hold your fingers. It’s going to take practice, and more practice, and more practice to play together. You have to work on your skills every day to be your best and make this music the best that you can. When we each do that day after day, year after year, we turn into an orchestra. We consciously choose to show up to practice, we learn how to tune our instruments, how to play with the people around us. We learn how to take cues from the conductor (in this case I’m referring to the great and vast wisdom of the Universe). Yet, no matter if we miss a practice, or put our instrument down for a minute we still understand the flow of the music around us, and how we can interact with it to find the beauty in it, and not just the work.


I wonder where in your life you are feeling harmony right now? Where do you need a little more practice? What instruments are you missing in your life that you may want to add in, which voices? Perhaps you are overwhelmed by the cacophony of sounds coming at you and need to maybe thin out some of the things going on in your environment that are overwhelming the feeling of the harmony you desire? What choices can you make for yourself to feel the flow of life around you, to move with it, instead of resisting it?

My wish for you is that you are consciously creating the harmony in your life.

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