OGT DAILY - Day Sixty Two - BALANCE

Notes from my meditation practice:   I always try to incorporate the yoga tree pose in my morning rituals.   These rituals consist of trying to get up by 7:30; stretching and yoga to help my lower back; meditation with reiki; and then if I am really good a walk as well.   Life isn't always that seamless as you know.

One way to see how balanced (or unbalanced) I am on any given day is to do that tree pose.
You know the one.  One leg up by the knee while the other one holds you up as your hands are held on prayer and generally are wobbling allover the place like a mast in high wind.

The tendency is to look around at everyone else to see if they are wobbling too which makes you fall and have green monster jealousy of those yogis who look as serene as this woman.   What you really need to do is just focus and it stops the wobbles and this takes practice.  But actually I've gotten pretty good at it.   The right side is stronger than the left, but I can hold both for several minutes and on a good morning it feels easy.     This practice has allowed me a view into balance in the emotional and physical body sense.  Some nights I just don't sleep.  Get up and can't stand in tree long enough to get heel on your thigh. Then I think to myself, "Well you were up till 1:00 watching Steven Colbert or Rachel Maddow worrying about the national tragi-comedy."   Other days the foot goes up and stays without effort.  The body stands lightly with no strain and barely pressure on the pad of the foot below.   This is when an inner force holds the body.   They say focus on the core and its true.  If you pull in the belly and straighten the posture, weight comes off the standing leg.   But I have also found there is a visual core, that I see.  I focus on the beam of wood in the window before me and nothing else.  I imagine the beam within me and then it becomes a light and then I'm not thinking about my standing leg at all.  My focus shifts internally and I have become the beam of light.  The hands go up into prayer and above the head and then out from the body.

Other times any distraction, a passing car or neighbor walking their dog draws my eye and down I come.   But the practice of the tree doesn't just inform me of my internal balance, it forms my inner balance.  The practicing of focussed balancing creates balance.  The more I do it the better I get at doing it and that can affect my entire day.

Small shifts in attentional focus - from the beam of wood, to the beam inside me, to the beam being light - transforms the practice so that it becomes transformative.   

This is true with sitting practice also.  Small mind is always poking at me: :"Oh my hip hurts.  Oh that paper cut I got yesterday is throbbing. Oh I have to worry about grading papers.  Have to go to the bank. Pay the bills."   You have your own list I'm sure.

Sometimes all it takes, though, is a small adjustment of posture; settling the shoulders back, lifting the chin and then the breath settles again.  Then I can breath into the achey hip and treat it with kind attention and maybe I visualize a dragon lion instead of pain. Another shift in posture and like the beam of light, and I become the dragon lion and meditation is transformed.   That will follow me all day.   Doesn't happen all the time, but it's worth practicing for.

Many years ago I worked with a young teen who struggled to find balance.  Every time her drug addicted mother came back into her life she was thrown into a tailspin.  She was tall and elegant and dreamed of being a model.  Her signature drawing was a girl standing in mini skirt with one leg tucked up under the skirt like the tree pose.  I real metaphor for the balancing act of what it meant for her to keep her life together.   When I think of her and wonder where she is now, I think of egrets or white cranes; elegant birds who so effortlessly stand in balance despite the prevailing winds.

Balance is one good thing.   A pronouncement of "boringly good health" at my annual physical is another!