What is Balance

    “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

- Albert Einstein

It's Astonishing really how common the misconception is, that balance is about not falling and keeping everything the same.

Whether we are thinking of physical balance within coordination, emotional regulation or maintaining a balance in our life. It is a common, often repeated mistake to assume there is a particular set of conditions that will deliver the ideal state – the perfect position, posture, career, number of hours worked... 

How often we fall in the trap of working to improve balance by helping someone sit or stand better and seeing if they can stay still. How often in our aim to have a happy calm child we work hard to prevent them becoming upset and experiencing frustration or disappointments.

Working this way, which im sure we all find ourselves doing sometimes, leads us repeating controling patterns of behaviours or movement's looking for the static mix of "perfect factors" that enable us not to change - in a world of constant change!

Once you land on the perfect combination, you need to lock it in, don't change. Stay as you are. Repeat what worked a moment ago, last session, last tantrum, last time you encountered this problem, last time you had success. 

It's like trying to stop a river from flowing - exhausting and impossible - restrictive. Furthermore it is preventing you being ready to respond and adjust to maintain your balance.

How can we do it differently?
how do we develop better balance? 

... What if we could slow the world down, quieten the noise we have to process, reduce the consequences of a loss of balance, a loss of control and focus. Scafffold the learning process to allow for trial and error. 

Rather than using precious time and energy to keep things, or circumstances the same, we can use our attention to be alert to what’s actually happening. 

Take time to notice, pause and breathe - respond when we need to, as much as we need to. Good enough is perfect. 

This way we get good at adapting to the ever-changing world rather than trying to enforce a fixed and rigid status quo.

This way we find perfect balance through experience, and we experience finding perfect balance.