We are all looking to balance our lives. The key dimension is not really the work-life balance but more balancing our inner and our outer lives. Mindfulness practice focuses on developing our inner life – our clear seeing of who we are and what is going on in our lives each moment. Balancing these worlds – our being with our doing, our need for solitude and our need for connection, our energies that lead us outside ourselves and those which touch into our self-awareness and purpose – is what leads to real peace.
It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world.
If we become addicted to the externals our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Many people think that meditation is something strange or esoteric, demanding a special kind of person.
