Why You Need To Balance Activity With Relaxation

If you are like most people, you’re always active, busy with work and relationships. You’re ‘on’ from the moment you wake up till you fall asleep, tackling many chores and errands on a regular basis. You go from one thing to another each and every day. This is the nature of your mind—always running, thinking, pushing…

As a young child, you absorbed the world like a sponge, through play and constant observation. Then, in school, you learned to verbalize it through concepts and ideas. You developed the mind by collecting information and using that information to gain understanding and knowledge. But how much attention was given to your physical well being and other, deeper aspects?

I’m going to guess not much to the former, unless you were part of a sports team, and none to the latter. So (hopefully) you learned to think and research and debate, and maybe you got to play a sport or remained active with extra-curricular activities, but there was not enough emphasis on body-mind balance or, God forbid, self-reflection.

You were going, going, going, and nobody guided you to turn the attention inwards to check how you felt, how your body was doing, or to take pause from all the mental and physical activity. Many parents give their kids ‘time-outs’ or ‘ground’ them when they act out. But such measures are only necessary if parents don’t know how to deal with their children, most likely because their parents didn’t know how to deal with them either.

There’s no room for dialogue or communication to understand what’s really going on. In any case, this leaves the imprint that slowing down or taking pause only happens as a punishment; that if you stop, life (the fun) passes you by. Furthermore, it reinforces the conditioning that suppressing your emotional energy is what’s acceptable in society, because nobody wants to hear what’s going on inside you—least of all, you!

The funny thing about emotional energy, though, is that it accumulates until it finds an escape valve. Unfortunately, this tends to be disruptive, because pressure also accumulates when you suppress how you feel. However, the ego-mind is quite a trickster and keeps you very busy, always focused on the outside to block your self-awareness, strengthening patterns of perception that disconnect you from yourself.

Taking Pause For Relaxation and Self-Awareness

The mind has a revolving quality that maintains these patterns in place, repeating similar situations in your life-movie, to keep hidden what really motivates you to act and react the way you do, in spite of any logical thinking, and unaware of who you are and what you want or what may bring you joy and fulfillment. This is how it keeps the control of your experiences while pushing the illusion that you must control your life.

In other words, it keeps your attention outwardly directed, and since your ego is essentially self-centered, it makes you believe that anything external should meet your needs. But when you try to control life in any way—rationalizing, arguing, imposing your views, or using your creative energy to destroy—you further disconnect from it. On a major scale, this is what humanity has been doing to Mother Earth; on a personal level, it’s what your ego-mind does to you.

It pressures and pushes until you either get sick or injured, or blow something you enjoy to smithereens (a project, a relationship, a job, etc.) without even knowing why. Like an internal bomb, all your accumulated, unresolved energy has to find a way out, and it often does it in destructive ways. The key is to release it in small doses, on an ongoing basis, with awareness and honesty.

If you just keep going, going, or doing one thing after another without relaxing and transitioning in a conscious way, not only will your own life-movie show you your imbalance in painful ways; it will feel heavy and exhausting due to the constant pressure and expectations of perfection of your ego-mind. You must create the space for Consciousness to emerge and take over by stepping back, reflecting, and surrendering while also remaining anchored in the present moment.

This is how you experience inner peace and engage with life in a more fulfilling manner. Furthermore, you will be much more productive if you’re balanced and connected to the flow of your life, but for this you need to carve time every day to pause and relax and reflect. Here are some actions that will help you once you turn them into habits:

• Take 5- or 10-minute breaks from any activity throughout the day to sit in silence.
• Take a few deep breaths to redirect your attention inwards.
• Recognize where you’re accumulating tension or stress (pressure) in your body. Breathe to relax.
• Check in to become aware of any pain, anger, fear or anxiety. Let them go as you recognize them.
• Don’t let the mind pull you outwards with thoughts, just stay present in the moment and embrace it all.
• There’s nothing to do or fix, just relax, drop any uncomfortable enegry and be with your self.

Do this on a regular basis until it becomes second nature. Then staying in touch with your inner voice is much easier, preventing unresolved energy from accumulating and disrupting your relationship with yourself and others. For other self-healing tools, check Office Desk Yoga, Rejuvenating Eye Exercises & Netra Basti and Why Self-Care Is Essential For Self-Growth.

To be fully present, you must relax and quiet the mind; and when you’re fully present, you experience the fulfillment of being engaged with the flow of life and love that is your essential nature. So contact me today to get started on your journey of self-exploration, to recognize and diminish the ego that blocks the happiness and emotional freedom you yearn for!

© 2019 Yol Swan. All rights reserved.