Is There Really Such a Thing as Balance?

In this week’s interview with Nikki Petersen, we talk about finding balance as an intense, gifted, passionate woman. We use the term “work-life balance” all of the time in our vastly overscheduled culture. Add to that the intense pursuit of our interests and the tendency to get so abshorbed we miss out on the basics of life and finding balance seems even more elusive. But is balance even possible?

Something really stuck with me when I read The On-Purpose Person by Kevin McCarthy. He said, “Balance is a myth. Forget aobut it. Instead, integrate your life through your purpose so you’re on-purpose.”

But what exactly is integration? Kazimierz Dabrowski has a theory called Positive Disintegration, which asserts that before you can integrate at a higher level you must first disintegrate by dismantling your exising internal structure. This process eventually brings us to our conscious self, or a state of harmonious wholeness.

Nikki puts it quite eloquently in her blog post called Dabrowski’s Sweater. She describes the process of knitting a sweater with yarn our parents gave us and built on patterns from our parents and the enviornment around us. When we disintegrate, we unravel the sweater and then we integrate by using the same yarn and shaping it into a pattern of our own.

To me, the word balance brings to mind a perfectly even scale, or a waiter perfectly balancing plates or trays. It conveys the idea of symetry or perfect equality of all the important parts in life.

Perfect balance is not only almost impossible to maintain, it can also be quite boring!

Imagine a sweater with perfectly even and symetrical blocks of color, or a piece of music with the same consistent rythm and balance of notes throughout. Not very compelling right? Definitely not very intense.

I still use the word balance sometimes because that is what people relate to who are trying to find some way to integrate their lives, but the word that rings more true for me is harmony. Merriam-Webster defines harmony as a “pleasing or congruent arrangement of parts.”

When we have a sense of purpose and greater understanding of ourselves, we can make decisions that foster harmony rather than discord.

Part of my purpose is to help passionate gifted women find harmony by prioritizing things in their lives that are in line with their purpose and bring energy so that they can share their gifts with the world! Contact me if you would like to set up a free 1 hour session to move into the new year with a greater sense of direction and energy!

Comment (1)

  1. good read..i also think that many times empaths are expected/forced toward perfect balance and it’s painful because we’re not wired that way. Purpose does drive us and sometimes we need to spend more (or less) time inside others, appropriate for us, but abnormal in the eyes of society

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