Balance is a dirty word

To merge and become deeply entangled is far more inspiring than balance. It lets me delight in being totally involved, polarities can become energising. Beyond balance, far more is possible.

Balance is deceiving me, fooling me that I can’t have all my needs met. For example:

1. Who wants work-life balance as opposed to being immersed in aliveness?

2. Why would we balance economic activity against environmental damage? We know this is a path to destroying both.

3. Balance feminine and masculine instead of a far more healthy and sensual polarity? That seems flat.

Needs fully met

Someone challenges me to:

Take myself to a time where all my needs are fully met. What does it feel like they ask.

I immediately think, oh hell, that’s going to be hard. Then, quickly I have my first example. I’m a teenager volunteering in the Scottish Isles and the landowner is welcoming us into her croft with just-baked, hot scones, jam and cream!

I can still smell them and, after finding this one, many more abundant examples follow.

However, balance pushes us to think of scarcity:

1. Work-life balance argues us out of our world, one where there is enough for everyone and meaningful work wins: purposeful and life-giving work.¹

2. Going beyond economic and environmental balance is a redesign and reconceptualisation struggle. Solutions to having both, alongside much better global qualities of life, have existed for decades.²

3. Feminine and masculine polarity: There are very logical aspirations to recover from abuses of power, centuries of patriarchy and often toxic masculinity. However, we don’t need to balance it out into blandness, a modern male malaise of inaction, nor through stifling feminine warm chaos energy, the creative life-force of all beings. Instead as a woman, you have become the all of his desire. As a man, you have become the spine of her surrender.³ Divine is alive in your smiles.

Try abundance

We don’t have a resource problem, we have a resource distribution problem.
Neale Donald Walsch

What does it take to feel abundant? To act in our world from this place?

This moment of meditation is an invitation to extract our attention out of our current conditions, considerations of balancing one need against another or pushing to do something.

If you would like to turn within. You can close your outer eyes and listen to the audio above starting at the 2:45 mark.⁴

Take a long breath in and, as you release it, as you release that inhalation, let yourself be in a moment. It does not matter what’s before or after this moment, just begin to contemplate a moment where you felt in your life that you had more than enough, that you were living in a full state of prosperity, emotionally buoyant, bodily supported, deeply connected, a place where all of your needs were met.

• Take your time.

It doesn't matter what your chronological age was at the time. It could have been where you were 5 years young or 13 or 15 or 35 but just come into a moment where you feel this.

Let yourself feel the cords of your memory, the resonances in you and surrounding you, a feeling tone of abundance, of all needs met.

Place your attention here. We're going to meditate on this feeling tone of all needs met.

• Be with yourself in that moment of abundance, the one where all of your needs are met.

• Gift yourself this moment, being with the feeling, that feeling when all of your needs were met, the feeling of living in abundance.

Now take a pure inhalation. Sustain it at the Apex. Take a little bit more air in. Sustain it right there

Abundance. All needs met. Sense into the feeling tone being amplified. Release with the sound of an ah. Ahhhh…

Now all I would invite you to do is pay attention to that feeling tone of abundance, harmonising prosperity in the tonal quality of all needs met.

If the mind tries to take over and paint pictures of worst case scenarios demanding less or, reminding you that you don't have enough in the visible world, bring your mind back, take your mind back, take your attention back, and come right now to the feeling: the feeling that all of your your needs are met.

The feeling will provide the healing, relieving. The feeling will provide the healing and then the revealing of the truth. You're being attentive to the feeling that all of your needs are met, that you are living in abundance. This is your heart-set. This is your mind-set.

Allow yourself to feel a deep sense of gratitude that all of your needs are met. Allow yourself to feel that expand in your self, a feeling becoming a new frequency in you, a frequency in your life, a frequency always with you.

Mentally say to yourself “my needs fully met. All the time I'm so grateful that I'm in alignment with the timeline of my life where I'm deeply fulfilled, all of my needs are met. I live in abundance and harmonizing prosperity, it's happening”

• Now feel into that

• And let it be

Feel that radiance of abundance, that feeling, extending your smile, as you gently open your eyes.

Be with this, extremely grateful that you have felt new into your life. And so it is. Make it so.

B**ger balance: inspiring outer worlds

Allow ourselves an aliveness that forsakes all efforts to limit… to change as rapidly as the swift winds that blow through us when we are free.
Holly Woods⁵

I like to think about these moves as three distinct levels. Level A where we were in the old structure, working to survive and for other people’s profit. Level B for balance such as ‘let’s moderate the impact of economic growth on environmental resources’. However, let’s not think too much about that and it’s failure to address fundamental imperatives, being beyond our planetary resource and waste boundaries and accelerating deep inequalities.

Level C for being in abundance. That’s like copying and pasting the feelings of having all of your needs met, such as from the moment of meditation above, into other areas of our life. It lets us more readily wire such states and fire similar experiences, bridging into our physical realities. For example:

1. We have all had times when we are entangled, alive with passion while working. I’ve done it walking into a full conference room and totally flipping the mood from hostile and angry to onside and cooperative.⁶ I’m sure you have created the extraordinary too. How did it go? What does it take to have more?

2. This is true around economics with environment too. Imagine into a time when you are totally involved with creating something. What’s it like when you bring the felt sense of abundance into that situation, feeling you can have everything? What changes?

3. In more feminine and masculine polarity (when it is responsible to have this) think what would be there if you add more by consciously breathing.
   
   Male (or person in masculine role): Be fully connected and create from your breath. “Your inhales should feel like they are drawing energy down the front of your body, filling your belly and genital region. Your exhales should feel like they are moving energy from your pelvic floor, up your spine, into your head.” Breathe with that circle, holding her with your breath and sensing her deeply, responsive to her desire.
   
   Female (or person in feminine role): When he looks into your eyes he feels your heart yearning, feels you opening so he may claim your heart, as you allow yourself to breathe together, gazing into his eyes… “loving the waves of emotional energy that move through both of you while opening your heart to feel his… open so you can breathe with him, breath as a one breathing two-bodied being of love”. ⁷

B**ger it, let’s not settle for the bland B. It always annoyed me. Work life balance?!  Balance the Economy and Environment? Really is that the best we can do! Hell, give me lust for life, not balance, particularly for relationships.

Here is to us all C-ing, seeing unbalanced joy abound. Give me a level C whenever I can and that aliveness shifting us, our days and what’s possible.

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Photos: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Music: Coniferous forest

1. Evidence we’re already in this cycle, looking for meaning and purpose, includes:
a. Forbes, 2022. Meaningful Work: Why your people are quiet quitting and what to do about it. Wes Adams
b. Harvard Business School, 2023. Do people want to work anymore? James Heskett
c. McKinsey, 2021. “Meaningful work matters. Research has found that when employees find their work to be meaningful, their performance improves by 33 percent, they are 75 percent more committed to their organization, and are 49 percent less likely to leave.” Making work meaningful from the C-suite to the frontline. Timothy Bromley, Taylor Lauricella & Bill Schaninger

2. Some great starting points:
a. Winning the Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins and Kyle Data published 2005 is an “independent, peer-reviewed synthesis for American business and military leaders charts a roadmap for getting the United States completely, attractively, and profitably off oil.”
b. In A climate for change, 2014. I cover the many environmentally profitable paradoxes, abundant low risk opportunities we ignore, that have existed for decades alongside inner development and mindset shifts to get past this.

3. “Many of us have experienced “old-style” intimacies based on roles of male control and female giving, and have found such relationships to result in unhealthy dependence and pain. Many have then grown into “modern-style” intimacies based on independence and fairness. What has been the result? Have our well-intentioned efforts toward internal balance and self-responsibility inadvertently eroded the attractive power in our intimate relationships?

Is there actually another step to take, beyond even personal independence and healthy self-esteem, by which we can finally let down our guard in intimate love and relax deeply into our natural sexual core? How do we take this next step toward heartfelt passion and spiritual vitality in modern intimacy—beyond male domination, beyond idealistic feminism, and beyond safe but lukewarm “50/50 partnerships”—without losing the ground we have gained?”

Deida, David. Intimate Communion: Awakening your sexual essence. Amazon and public library

4. This is an edited version of Dr Michael Beckwith’s meditation here>

5. How We Can Re-Enchant Our World here>

6. I’ll tell this story in a substack soon. It involves one very angry Russian cargo ship captain, the entire Manila press core and a death threat: “You touch my ship I kill you!”

7. David Deida. The Way of the Superior Man: a spiritual guide to mastering the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire, Amazon and public library & Dear Lover: a woman's guide to men, sex and love's deepest bliss, Amazon and public library.