Do you ever feel like your inner world and outer world are out of alignment? Do you have dreams that you can’t seem to manifest? Do you feel like you are stuck in an unfulfilling pattern of behavior and long to get out of it?
Finding and maintaining balance may be a challenge for many of us, yet through it we find inner peace. Balance brings realignment, curbing our addictions to unfulfilling habits. Balance helps us manifest our inner desires.
As you seek balance in your life, here are some ideas that may inspire you.
1. The elements of the universe are within you.
Noted astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, “We’re made of star stuff.” He was referring to the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other atoms in our bodies that were created in stars billions of years ago. All of these elements aligned in perfect balance to create all the unique manifestations of life on Earth, including you.
2. Your emotions can influence your perspective.
When we feel intense emotions, like anger or fear, we tend to focus our attention more narrowly than when we feel more relaxed. This can be a useful response in certain situations, such as when we are physically threatened and need to focus on details that will help us fight back or escape. However, it can push us out of balance when anger or fear dominates and leads us to develop tunnel vision and narrow-mindedness. Taking care of our emotions helps us keep sight of the bigger picture.
3. Helping others promotes good health.
To many, doing good deeds for others is a virtue that supports our moral or spiritual development. As it turns out, it also supports our physical bodies. Studies show that helping others can have multiple health benefits and contribute to an overall sense of well-being. People who regularly donate their time, talents and/or money are happier and less stressed. These positive feelings contribute to reduced incidences of hypertension, depression, and other illnesses.
4. We are all related.
Many human traditions echo the sentiment that we should treat each other well because we are one big family wonderfully connected to a common source. Applying this concept genealogically, each generation opens up an exponential number of ancestors (two parents come from four grandparents who come from eight great-grandparents, and so on), until we reach a point when we have more ancestors than the whole human population. Since this isn’t possible, we can reasonably theorize that some of those ancestors are the same people, possibly the result of inadvertent unions between distant cousins. Using genetics to test this theory, researchers have found lengths of shared DNA segments across entire populations, indicating that all people living in one vast region are descended from the same ancestors. Their studies support the more expansive idea that all human beings are related.