Just Enough, but Not Too Much.

This piece of wisdom, which I heard over the summer from both Donna Farhi and Kim Schwartz, flowed beautifully with my previous years’ work on Polyvagal Theory. To sustain our energetic and creative flow, we need a balance of structure and ease.

Our culture resides in extremes, taking our daily lives along with it. Work in a super busy, super stressful environment all day long and then collapse onto the couch in a self-soothing fog of television, alcohol, and/or food when you get home. Drive the children to after-school activities and appointments while simultaneously providing them with snacks AND parental advice AND sneaking in errands, and realize there’s no energy left to cook the nutritious meal you had planned. . . or to be tender to your kids, your partner, your pets. Never mind yourself.

Or the opposite model: spend your day-to-day in dreariness, denying your needs, and then party hard on the weekend or on vacation, trying to reclaim the joy missing from “getting done what needs to get done” every day. You feel like a zombie. Trapped, hopeless, maybe even angry at everything and everyone because there is no joy to be found. Hanging on for those rare moments when you can let go—lose yourself in some distraction for a brief breath of joy before you dive back into the dark.

If you have to lose yourself to find relief, what really is the point of living how you’re living?

One of the inevitable results of either of these models is that they slowly, progressively, insidiously worm their way into our nervous systems and become our norm. Over time, we veer ever more in the direction of hyperactivity/overbusy/anxious or lethargic/unmotivated/depressed. Very likely, we were raised in environments and by people who also veered in one direction or the other, deeply seeding these tendencies—and the beliefs that support them—into our subconscious minds.

Unsustainable action necessarily has consequences. For example, you may find yourself

• putting on weight from overeating to self-soothe

• developing an unhealthy relationship with alcohol to numb your stress and displeasure

• losing yourself in a book/websurfing/gaming so much that you’ve lost opportunities to be productive or meet other needs

• damaging  your relationships because you don’t have the energy to invest in them

• having trouble sitting still or relaxing for too long

• slowly sinking into a dark place, with increasingly hopeless or negative thoughts

When you observe such undesirable consequences blooming into your life, it can be a gift. You can recognize them as a waving red flag that something in your life is unsustainable and needs attention.

Renunciation follows awareness like a shadow.

Observe the consequences of your lifestyle, and just by becoming aware of them, they are already correcting.

Very commonly, we have areas of our lives where we are hyperactivated and others where we collapse. Work way too much so there’s no energy for exercise. Spend all of your time in your head and none in your body. To lead a life that sustains joy and creative flow—and supports health and change when needed—we are well served to break this cycle.

Sustainable action has a balance of discipline and ease, work and pleasure. You must move to create energy—sit too much and you wind up exhausted because no energy is generated. But care must be taken in how you use that energy, lest you fritter it away, dissipating in overactivity . . . and wind up exhausted once more.

So we seek balance. Keep our legs engaged in a squat or a Warrior, enough so we don’t dump undue force into our joints but not so much that we can’t walk later from fatigue or muscle soreness. Work hard, but keep a finger on our precious beating hearts so that we know when to take a break, eat, connect with other humans. Set a timer when we’ve been sitting too long and take 10 minutes for a change of scenery, companionship, a little physicality. THEN we have a chance to arrive at the end of the day with enough energy to function in our personal lives as well.

It isn’t the on/off that we seek. It’s the both/and. A fine blend of simultaneous effort and ease that sustains creative flow.

Action + containment = abundant life force.

It’s not nearly as exciting as the highs and lows, but it is freeing. And for those of us who seek self-improvement, that balance provides the fuel we need to achieve our goals. One step at a time.