Finding balance

An Excerpt from Medium Mentor by MaryAnn DiMarco

Spiritual teachers and traditions frequently use the concept of balance to refer to a variety of things. When I write about balance, I’m referring to balancing our physical body, our spiritual body, our mental body, and our emotional body. Together, these form our total being. The goal is to assess the various aspects of our lives and find balance between them, thereby aligning our soul with its greatest potential.

This assessing-and-balancing technique is helpful because it’s the factor that allows us to remain completely connected to Spirit, accessing guidance when we need it throughout our day, while still living in the world. Sure, there are people who feel called to go spend the rest of their lives meditating in a cave, and if you are one of them, I encourage you to follow that guidance. But for the rest of us — the ones whose lives include taking kids to soccer practice every Tuesday, going to the office on weekdays from 9 to 5, gathering for family reunions, and volunteering at an animal shelter or doing whatever it is that brings us joy that isn’t specifically “psychic activity” — balance is essential. This is even (and perhaps especially) true for those who integrate their intuitive practice into their social and/or professional lives. As I deepened my intuitive work, launching myself as a working psychic medium, balance became even more important to me. The same is true for many of my students, regardless of whether they go pro: to reach their full intuitive potential, they have to find and maintain balance.

I like to think of getting balanced as tending to a large set of spinning plates on the ends of poles, like in a circus act. When someone is out of balance — or, more often than not, when that someone is me — I see one of the plates begin to wobble. Spinning a bunch of plates at once is an active, dynamic process. Balance isn’t something we achieve one time; we don’t just tick the “get balanced” box off our spiritual to-do list and call it good. Getting balanced means assessing and adjusting on an ongoing basis. It’s a constant motion, a regular negotiation between ourselves and the various aspects of our lives. It’s a learning process.

While we’re learning to spin numerous plates at once, it’s a given that some plates are going to drop. That’s part of learning. A dropped plate isn’t a failure but an inevitability. Our work, then, is to develop the resources to allow us to pick up the plate quickly and get it spinning again. We aren’t responsible for being flawless; instead, it’s up to us to do our best, to try to keep pace with our plates and respond effectively when they fall. Knowing this takes the pressure off. It allows us to focus on the endeavor of trying to keep the plates going without getting attached to perfection.

So what are the plates? In this analogy, the plates represent the different aspects of our lives. This includes the roles we play in relation to other people as well as the way we spend our days — the ideas and activities that engage us as we go through our lives. Work and career usually comprises one plate, parenthood another, romance and partnership another, and so forth. Our home life is its own plate, as is our actual home — the environment we have created to spend so much time in. Our relationship to the earth is as well. Our physical body includes its own set of small plates, like exercise, sleep, and nutrition. Friendship and recreation are plates. Quietude and creativity are, too.

Our balance can therefore be measured by the health of our relationship to each of these areas. Note here that I’m not referring to everything going right in each of these areas. I’m not referring to everything being easy or devoid of problems. This is a common misconception about balance: the idea that being in balance means everything goes our way. Instead, as I understand balance, it refers to our ability to attune to and address what we need in any given moment. When we’re in balance, we feel that we’re right with Spirit. We’re in alignment. We’re tending to what is important to us; we’re creating and maintaining a joyful existence. Our lives may not be perfect — in fact, it’s pretty likely they aren’t! — but our souls are fed. This is how it feels when our beautiful plates are spinning nice and flat, like we have healthy, meaningful relationships with the world around us.

Once we get all our plates spinning, our focus can shift to keeping them that way. It’s important to notice that this is, in essence, an impossible task. Balance is an ongoing pursuit. We’re here, we’re learning lessons, and sometimes we’re learning them the hard way. If we can stabilize ourselves enough to find balance, however, we can start to progress more steadily. We may be able to use our intuition to recognize a little bit sooner that one of our plates is beginning to wobble than we would have in the past — this is a huge victory! We can tap into our intuition, which tells us there is something important in our lives that needs tending and attention. We may even begin to rescue our plates, catching and righting them the second before they fall.

To do this, it helps to understand how and when plates fall. Often the thing that allows one plate to fall is focusing too much on another. We lean in, trying to get one plate spinning just right, not noticing that the plate behind us is terribly out of whack. It’s also common for us to intentionally look away from a wobbling plate; perhaps realizing that an area of our lives isn’t really working brings us too much anxiety, or maybe we just feel too exhausted to deal with it. We let the plate wobble and wobble, ignoring what’s happened, and we’re not really surprised to see it come crashing down — we just didn’t know what to do about it.

Sometimes, a plate falling can block our spiritual connection — not in a scary, long-term way but in a temporary, hey-wake-up sort of way. This is often actually our own guides trying to get our attention to tell us where and how we need to put in work.

Excerpted from the book from Medium Mentor: 10 Powerful Techniques to Awaken Divine Guidance for Yourself and Others. Copyright ©2022 by MaryAnn DiMarco. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.