Emotional Balance and Spring Equinox

Hello dear reader! This is my first blog and quite a long one. If you find it enjoyable or useful then please leave a comment. Let’s get more dialogue going – especially in the Irish community – about everything to do with finding a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Here we are, Spring is coming and in Ireland we have a new government. Most of us are hoping like mad that our new leaders will be able to sort out the mess we’re in. Hoping that we and other people like us won’t have to lose our homes or watch anymore adult children leaving for faraway places that might provide a better life. With the death of the Celtic Tiger has come the shadow of debt and unemployment. Of course, Ireland has big economic problems and no government can solve them overnight. But there is a taste of Spring in the air – the time of renewal – and with hopes for a better future, my thoughts have turned to balance at the end of winter.

What is Emotional Balance?

Today I was chatting with a shop assistant about how lovely the weather was and she said, ‘just look at what’s going on in the middle-east, and the earthquake in New Zealand – there’s nothing extreme here – its wonderful.’ Perhaps ‘no extremes’ is one way to describe balance.

Suddenly I have an image of that French guy who strung a line between the two buildings of the World Trade Centre and walked across it. He held a long pole and would occasionally tilt scarily to one side, but then use the pole to regain his balance. So perhaps balance is being able to get back to equilibrium even when you have tilted a long way in one direction. One of my favourite symbols for balance is the yin/yang symbol, which not only expresses the balance of opposites, but also the way that each holds the seed of the other.

We all know how it feels to lose emotional balance, so how do we learn to recover our balance and live our lives from a grounded, calm, emotionally integrated centre? As with many other aspects of life – you have to work at knowing yourself. Look at the areas where you regularly find your feelings overwhelming you, or leading you to act in ways you regret. Different people are vulnerable in different ways:

• Do you get infuriated when someone behaves like an idiot on the road, and still feel enraged 20 kilometres later?
• Do you feel yourself close to tears if a colleague at work criticises you, and still feel upset when you get home?
• Do you feel the weight of the world pulling you into despair over the plight of desperate people on the news?
• Do you get through the day OK but if your child plays up in the evening you totally blow a fuse?

When my kids were small it was often their behaviour that would cause me to shout and rage, going red in the face and frightening them, and me, half to death. Even thinking about it now makes me ashamed. Gradually I have got to know myself and how to cool down before the pressure cooker explodes. And much of this skill is about tuning into your body.

Feeling it in the Body

All emotions start in our bodies. If you look inside when you are feeling a strong emotion you will be able to identify a mixture of sensations – rapid heart beat, dry mouth, a lump in the throat, a tingle in your scalp, tense muscles, an ache in the belly, shallow breathing – the particular sensations vary from feeling to feeling and person to person.

The very act of taking a moment to observe how your emotions are manifesting in your body can begin to change their power to unbalance you. For the calm observer within (sometimes called ‘the witness’) is allowing you to step back from your emotions and view them more clearly as a result.

I’m sure you probably know already all the things we’re supposed to do to stay physically healthy – exercise for 30 minutes 5 times a week, eat 5 portion of fruit and veg every day, get enough sleep, find enjoyable ways to relax. Well, trying to stay healthy physically helps us to stay emotionally balanced as well. Because the emotions begin in the body.

Sometimes just having something to eat or going for walk can help put things in perspective. And having perspective on the importance of any situation is another way to regain emotional balance. It might be infuriating for someone to point out that missing a goal in a game of football with your mates because a dog ran onto the pitch is nothing compared with the loss of your home or a friendship – still it’s true, and puts the game into focus.

What does Spring Equinox have to do with Emotional Balance?

There is something about the Spring Equinox – around 21st March every year – that makes it a very good time to work on balance in our lives. To begin with it’s just long enough after Paddy’s Day for the hangover to have cleared! And perhaps we’re more receptive to the idea of moderation.

Looking at the Wheel of the Year, Spring Equinox is halfway between Winter and Summer Solstice, when day and night grow equal in length, and therefore represents Balance. It’s a good time to let go of what is old and done with – such as old patterns of behaviour, and invite new ideas and actions into our lives.

There is something very powerful about symbolic action, and such personal rituals are great to perform on or around festivals like Spring Equinox:

• If you feel like you are too passive and need more energy and creative force in your life – light a candle, or better still, have a fire outside and invite the warmth and vibrancy of fire into your life.
• If you feel you are too fiery and need to calm down – go to the beach, or sit by a river and listen to the water, inviting it’s gentle rhythm into your life.
• If you are studying or just in need of clear thinking – choose a windy day to climb a hill and feel the tug of air – inviting the vision and clarity of high places into your life.
• If you find you are too disconnected, impractical or dreamy – get your hands into the earth and plant some seeds, or take off your shoes and walk barefoot, allowing yourself to reconnect with the earth and inviting that grounding, practical energy into your life.

There is no right way to invoke balance at Equinox – there’s lots of fun and learning in designing an exercise that can help you understand and accept your emotions, without them taking over.

This is not about suppressing what you feel. It’s about honestly looking at yourself, knowing where your emotions become overwhelming, and working to find ways to express them and move on. It’s also about becoming aware that we EXPERIENCE emotions but we ARE NOT those emotions.

Last week I watched the movie – Black Swan. The central character is a young dancer who is utterly dedicated to dancing, with little else in her life, obedient to teachers and to her dominant mother who keeps her like a little girl. This passive, intense and lopsided existence eventually gives way to a manifestation of it’s opposite – a mad, wild, deranged aspect of the girl that will no longer be denied and brings her to a terrible place. One way to read the story is as a warning against living an unbalanced emotional life.

Tarot and Balance

In the tarot there are 22 cards which are called the Major Arcana. These represent forces and experiences in life that are universal and archetypal. Two of the major cards deal specifically with human emotional balance.

Justice is usually represented by a woman holding a pair of scales that are in equilibrium. She has the ability to think clearly and develop a balanced mind, to weigh one thing against another and make an informed decision, to know what is right and fair. In justice we move towards a centre of balance, guided by truth. Although Justice is depicted as female, this kind of balance is very much about civilisation, the constraint of society and perhaps a masculine ideal.

Temperance is usually represented by an angel pouring water from one vessel to another. Whereas Justice is balance of the mind, Temperance is a balanced heart – kind and merciful. Her pouring water is the constantly changing flow of emotions: blending, modifying and healing. There is a sense in this card of all things being constantly adjusted to maintain the balance, and of learning through trial and error how to do this. It is a more nurturing and feeling way of balance.

The Scales of Ma’at

This concept appears in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ma’at (Truth) is a goddess who presides over a set of scales. When a person dies they are brought to Ma’at who places their heart on one side of the scales and a feather on the other. Only those whose heart weighs no more than the feather can continue onto the next life, those whose heart is heavier than the feather are devoured by a monster.

Perhaps the goal then of all this emotional balance - of self-knowledge and of looking within with the eyes of the witness – is to enable us to eventually let go of all troubles. To allow emotions to come and go, not clinging to happiness, sorrow or anger, but allowing them to pass through our lives in such a way that our hearts remain free, and light as a feather.

Wishing you wisdom and joy
Rachel