Day 24: Stop Balancing. Become The Fulcrum.

16:43

16:43

Day 24: Stop Balancing. Become The Fulcrum.

by Jocelyn Bates

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4

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

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Everyone

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1

For four and a half years after losing both parents, I reached for one word: balance. What I discovered is that balance was never the destination — it was the distraction. In this session, we explore the difference between scrambling across the seesaw of life and becoming the steady fulcrum at its center. Through a grounding practice and seesaw visualization, you'll feel the difference in your body between trying to manage everything externally and finding the internal ground that makes everything else possible. You are not meant to balance on top of your life. You were always meant to be what it rests on. Please note: This session touches on grief and loss, and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. This is a live replay.

Balance Grounding Visualization Grief Support Mind Body Connection Breathing Intention Intention Setting Grounding Technique Visualization Technique

Meet your Teacher

Morristown, NJ 07960, USA

Meet your Teacher

Morristown, NJ 07960, USA

Transcript

Welcome, I'm Jocelyn, And this is day 24 of my 30-day journey through my soul art process, Opening up different insights and letting you in to the whole process of a soul art journey. It's really not that different than when you have, Say, An intention that you're working on, Something you're working towards, That we create that intention, And then until we take that inspired action and finish it, The whole journey is here for us. It informs us, It expands with us, Right? And our higher self, Our spirit teams are all here guiding us. This is about me sitting with awareness and consciousness in this soul art journey. My intention is I am showing up for myself. So what I'm going to talk about today is a conversation that I had with a friend. Sometimes the things that are happening in my soul art journey are really big and dramatic and ah-ha, Right? But this one was really just a conversation I had with a friend. It was around a word that I had been using in my meditations, In intentions, In my visualizations since my parents died four and a half years ago. And that word is balance. And it really surprised me what came up. After I kind of rode into it, I was like, Well, That's not surprising at all. So before we start, Let's just ground. Let's just, Wherever you are. Just sit there. Maybe close your eyes or even soften your gaze. And bring your awareness into your body. Bring your awareness into your feet. Maybe your feet are on the ground. Maybe you can feel the soles of your feet, The bottoms of your feet. Supported on the ground. Can you feel your spine? Straight, Lifted, Tall. Maybe you're leaning back. Against the back of a chair where you're laying down. And just breathe in through your nose. And on the exhale, Just let a cool stream of air out through your lips, Like you're blowing out a candle. Inhaling through your nose. And on that exhale, When you blow that candle out, That cool stream of air, Just imagine releasing, Letting go, Falling down and back. Falling into ease with your body. Let your belly soften. Let your jaw. Soften. Your shoulders drop just a little bit more. And notice that where you're sitting, However you're sitting or laying down, You don't have to work at balancing there. To be supported. You don't have to work. To be supported. You're not have to manage or use your muscles to stay supported with that thing that's underneath you. Just take notice of that just for a minute. Awesome. I was having a conversation with one of my friends, And I realized that I was using a word in my intentions. And I had been using it since my parents had died. So my parents died seven days apart, Four and a half years ago in 2021. The only way I can put it is my whole ground fell out from underneath me. I lost all that support. I didn't know what I was even standing on anymore. And what I reached for was balance, Right? I started to use that word balance. Balance. Balance. I need balance. Because when the ground disappeared, That was the one thing that seemed solid. If I could just balance. And I started reaching for it. I started using it all the time in my intentions, My meditations, My prayers. I balanced my work in my home. I needed to balance my schedule. I needed to balance my kids' schedules. And I needed to balance the car rides to and from where everyone had to be. And I needed to balance those so that I would have time to decompress when I came back home. I would balance my teaching with places I teach on. I would balance my personal journaling work with my art practice. Dinner with little quiet moments to myself before I'd go to the dinner table, Right? I would balance posting and reading and scrolling and all of that, Right? And I was trying to build balance in my life so that I could find these pockets where I wasn't feeling the need to do anything. That's kind of why I was doing it. I wanted to just create a schedule, Create a structure so that what I could do was find pockets of non-structure. Does that make sense? That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to work with balance and I was trying to put it into like a schedule I was trying to balance everything right which makes sense because my husband's a very scheduled person he deals really well on schedules if I just found balance the way he could find it then I would be able to finally oh deal with my grief and live my life and feel happiness and feel connected again if you think of the seesaw of life if I could just get it to stop going like this Right? And just balance. Maybe I could find calm. Maybe I could find peace. I would maybe just be okay, But my seesaw was going like this all day long. Right? There's nothing wrong with what I did. There's nothing wrong with what I did. What I did. Was I looked to something in a moment really four and a half years of trying to find something stable, Something grounding for myself, Right? And so I'm not shaming myself for doing this and I'm not shaming anyone else who uses this word. Reaching for it made total sense, Right? I was looking for something ground under my feet for a safety and if I could find that safety in a way to balance, Right, Then I could start to heal. But here's the thing, When you're working with intentions and prayers and all these things, You need to be specific. I just really focused on balance. That was my thing. Balance. I never really gave it any specificity. So what life did was pile on things for me to balance. In a time when I had no ground under my feet, I had 15, 000 things to balance, And I asked for it. I asked for balance. I asked to learn about balance, You know? And here I go. I'm balancing the food of myself, My husband and my kids. I'm balancing everyone's bedtime and waking time and the lawn and the garbage schedules and the routines, The sink, Cleaning it out before bed, The laundry, The feeding the dogs, The grief, My work. Like all of my social media, Part of my becoming, Friendships, Everything became something to balance. It was a lot, It still is. And here's the thing, This is something we are taught from all angles. It's not just a grief thing. We are taught collectively that if we just do these external routines, That we will get the results that were promised. For example, If I wake up every day at 5. 55, If my meal prep is done on Sunday, If my inbox is at zero, If my counter is clean before I go to sleep, Then I will be able to do what I need to do. Then I can rest. Then I can feel good. Then I can heal my grief. I just have to get it all balanced first, Right? This is something that we are taught collectively. It really is. Think about it. All the stuff you scroll through, All the social media that you see, All of that, These programs, They're do this, Do this, Do this. It's like checking the box, But it's not about the external balance. What I came to in this conversation was screw balance, Screw balance. That's what I said to my friend because I had been trying to balance everything externally, Like we are taught collectively. What I needed to work with was that idea of internal balance. Internal balance is not the reward from external, Right? It is the ground and the internal balance that we find that makes the external stuff work so much clearer. So here's an example. Before the end of the night, Just clean out all the dishes in the sink and put them in the dishwasher and run the dishwasher. So in the morning, When I'm making my coffee, I don't have to do the dishes. I can just relax. So I try this. Inevitably, Every night after I do this, People put tons of things in the sink while I'm sleeping. I would have to drag myself downstairs. Oh, I've got to do this now. And then right, But I'm so tired. I'm like slugging through this. And after this conversation, I was like, You know what? I'm not going to do that anymore. Let me tell you, These dishes get done so much faster in the morning when I'm ready. Randomly, Sometimes it's at night. Cause I'm like, I'm not really tired yet. I have like five minutes and I get it done. Well, Used to take me like maybe 30 minutes to actually get through it. Because I was so tired and I wasn't wanting to be there and I was internally struggling against it, Right? And now what I do is whenever I walk past it and I'm ready, I just do it. It gets done in five minutes because I am internally balanced. I am listening to myself. Let's just do a little practice. Let's work with this idea of the seesaw. So just close your eyes for a minute and let's go back to what we were doing in the beginning of this video. I want you to breathe in and out in your own time and space. You don't have to breathe deep or anything. And just begin to feel where the support beneath you is touching your skin. Feel your weight dropping into that support. And you might even feel your feet on the ground, Feel the ground beneath. Supporting, Holding. And notice again that you don't have to try to balance. On what's supporting you. You are just being supported. So just take a few breaths here. And might you imagine? An old school seesaw, The kind from the 90s playgrounds maybe. Old metal ones. That have that fulcrum in the center. And then the seesaw top is balancing on that tip of the fulcrum. Imagine that. And I want you to imagine that you're. Getting on to that seesaw, But right in the center. So you're standing on top of the seesaw in the center. Feel. How if you put your foot on one side of the center or the other, It becomes a bit unstable. And now imagine placing everything. That needs balance in your life on one side or the other. So maybe work on one side, Home on the other, Kids on one, Husband on the other, Or marriage or relationship, Your creative life on one side, And on the other side, Maybe it's the daily things that have to get done in the home. Start placing them on one side or the other of that seesaw. And as you see those things there, Start to feel how unstable it is to get everything done, To move from one side to the other, To work with the kids, To deal with your marriage or relationship, To move to the creative side or back to the things that have to be done at home or your work. Feel how if you want to take care of all of that, You're consistently running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. That franticness that can come up, Right? Feel how much your body works on this seesaw. And feel into the impossibility of ever actually getting it still. Can you feel it in your body? Sit with this image and being on this seesaw with all the things on either end. Where do you feel it in your body? Does your breath change? And now step off that seesaw for a minute. In my ear and your imagination. Place yourself underneath the seesaw where the fulcrum is. Become the fulcrum of the seesaw. You are the center. You are the fulcrum of your life. Feel your feet solid in the ground. Your spine lengthened. Spacious and straight. Put your arms out. As the sides of the seesaw. Allow your palms to be up, Not gripping, Not controlling, Receiving. And you are just here present. Daddy. You're not on top of the seesaw anymore. You are what all of those things you need to balance are. Rest on. And when you put some in one hand. . . And some, On the other hand, Notice. How much more stable everything becomes, Instead of relying on the seesaw. Start to notice that you can be the fulcrum. You can be that steady center. You don't have to run, You don't have to scramble, You don't have to get it perfectly level. You hold all the power in your own hands, Your own arms, Your own body. The more you ground. The more you find ease, The more you trust. The more things you can get done. So just for a second, Feel the difference between scrambling across the seesaw from one side to the other, One side to the other to keep it balanced. What it feels like when you are. The fulcrum with your arms out. This is internal balance. It was never about the seesaw, It was about becoming the fulcrum. Take one more breath. Place a hand on your belly. You are the center of your life. You can tend your own ground first. One more breath. And when you're ready. You can open your eyes. I'm going to give you a few questions. That you can think about, You don't have to. You can let them float right past or you can grab onto them. Where have you been using a word in your intentions or prayers that was too vague to land anywhere real? And what did you really actually mean? Where in your life are you scrambling across the seesaw right now? And what would it feel like to step off? Where has your body gone? Already been trying to tell you it needs the ground. You've been overriding it to keep the seesaw level. So yeah, So I hope maybe you relate to some of that. Maybe you can, Maybe you're using a different word or maybe you can relate to the way that I was trying to balance everything externally instead of working internally. But yeah, Yeah, So thank you so much for coming. This was day 24, 25 is next. And if you haven't caught any of the earlier ones, You can always go back on my teacher page on Insight Timer. I have all the days there. And we have about, Why, Six more days? I can't believe it. I hope you have a beautiful day. Thank you so much for coming. Namaste.