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The Balance of Being and Doing

18 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by AjmaniK in Uncategorized

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Tags

balance, being, doing, spirituality

This week’s #SpiritChat conversation idea, cover-post (below) and questions come to us from my good friend on twitter, Panteli Tritchew. Some of you may know him as an energetic participant in many chats, including #SpiritChat. Panteli will co-host this week’s chat for us. Please read his very well-thought post on the topic. Thank you.

The Balance of Being and Doing – Panteli Tritchew

It has been said that we are human beings, not human doings. But what does that mean exactly? Why is it that Being and Doing seem mutually exclusive? What is the duality? What are the tensions? And why is finding a balance so difficult?

We know that we are spiritual beings (or consciousness’s) that reside in physical bodies. So right from the womb, we are faced with a duality and a built-in tension. As spiritual Beings, we seek To Be. At the same time, as physical beings, we need To Do, to earn our daily bread, to have shelter, to survive. We can say that this duality or tension is hard-wired, and we face the tension between Being and Doing daily. Trying to balance these tensions, we find ourselves pushed and pulled by friends, family, colleagues, supervisors, employees, the media and by world events. Sometimes we push-back. Forces and vectors collide. The tension between competing desires is nurtured, renewed, and invigorated, even if we are not. We have a name for this internal cacophony. Stress.

Many of us are caught between the duality of Being and Doing, some of us daily, some of us hourly. Do I go for a walk, or do I check my email? Do I go to yoga or do I tackle the next item on the To-Do List? We all keep To-do lists of various kinds. Submit performance evaluation. Check. Meet with client. Check. Prepare and submit agenda for meeting. Check. Live consciously in the moment and be purposeful. Hmmm… The “check” doesn’t flow quite as easily. Why is it that we keep To-Do lists and not To-Be lists?

When overwhelmed by our daily responsibilities, we often seek solace in silence and solitude, whether it is walking through the woods or meditation or yoga practice. Many of us schedule down-time, a time to do nothing, a time to recharge. Suddenly, magically, mysteriously, our time to do nothing, our Time To-Be becomes a Thing To-Do. Living the simple life is immensely complicated, it seems. One struggles to miss the irony.

When we speak of tension or stress, we refer to mental or emotional strain. In physics, tension is defined as the act of stretching or the state or degree of being stretched, and is usually taught using a string or a rope as an example. Like a rope, when we are under too much duress or too much tension, we can “snap,” or reach our “breaking point.”

When we speak of balance, we refer to mental, emotional or spiritual stability. In physics, balance refers to an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady. When we are under too much duress or too much tension, we become “unbalanced.”

Trying to balance our spiritual and our material life, our Being and our Doing is like trying to balance the old double-pan balance scales, with Being on one pan and Doing on the other pan, as they see-saw back and forth over the pivot point in the center.

In physics, a system is in equilibrium (at rest) when the sum of all forces is zero. That is completely different from there being no forces (or no stress). Unfortunately, many people seem to equate balance as the absence of stress or tension. First of all, that isn’t balance, that’s a vacuum. Secondly, living a life free of stress is a chimera, an illusion.

The key to balance, it seems, is our ability to maintain and sustain tension between the competing forces in our lives, our inner desires, wants, and needs, and the constant push and pull from the outer material world, from family and friends, from colleagues and community.

We live in uniquely challenging times, and we are bombarded with more data, more information and more choices more quickly and more frequently than ever before. In the midst of this noise and turbulence, and the challenges of our everyday crucible, what are some of the strategies and techniques we can share to resolve the duality and tensions between Being and Doing?

Panteli Tritchew

Panteli Tritchew on Twitter
Panteli Tritchew on LinkedIn
Panteli is a “Communications & Entrepreneurial Leadership Faculty, Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Venn Thinker: Communications, Innovation, Leadership, Creativity, Learning”, and resides in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He is “passionate about writing, teaching and communications: an experienced educator and communications professional, equally at ease in the classroom or the boardroom.”

Please join us Sunday, October 19th at 9amET / 1pm UTC in #SpiritChat on twitter, and share your thoughts on this wonderful topic. I am very excited and energized about the fact that Panteli Tritchew will co-host the conversation. Thank you, Panteli!

The Lighter Side of Spirituality

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by AjmaniK in Uncategorized

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Tags

being, humor, lightness, spirituality

“Seriously, Dad?”

Those two words always bring my thoughts to a halt. It usually means that I have made some inter-generational, cultural faux-pas and that there is a ‘lesson’ coming my way. It makes me smile, because I am a big fan of pausing, being awoken from my reverie of thoughts, being made aware of my need to learn something new. It makes me smile, because I know that I will walk away from this conversation with a new perspective on something that I thought I understood very well.

And all that smiling momentarily “lightens” my mental load, puts me in a better frame of mind. A “lighter” mental load can lead to better clarity, and better clarity can lead to creativity and innovation. What wonderful mental benefits to lightening our mental load, don’t you agree? However, the benefits aren’t just in our mind. There is the old adage that “we exercise a lot more muscles to frown than to smile”, and hence it is good for us to smile more. Or is it the other way round? Some scientists are doing more research! But, it doesn’t matter. Either way, my hypothesis is that those smiles, which lighten our burdens, are always a better idea than frowning. And I intend to prove it to you…

I don’t know if science can precisely quantify the effect that outward smiling has on our inner being. It is perhaps hard to genuinely smile, that deep smile of joy and contentment, without affecting our heart and spirit in a positive way. Every genuine expression of joy will relieve a little bit of our inner stress, help us shed some of the “burdens” that we carry around. Every genuine act of giving, of helping will help us lighten our “load”, and propel us higher on our journey. Every random act of kindness, particularly one that makes the other person smile, tends to make us smile too, doesn’t it? But wait, there is more.

It is when we smile, that we invite others to smile with us. It is a gentle way of injecting a sense of humor into a life situation. It is when we have a sense of humor, a lightness of being, that we attain great power of heart, body, mind and spirit. Where does this great power come from? Here is a quote that I recently read, that says it best:

“Our sense of humor, our lightness of being, gives us the armor which protects us from being humiliated. When we refuse to be humiliated, we become invincible” – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Art of Stress-Free Living

So, there it is. Ample proof of our invincibility, if we choose a sense of humor and get in touch with the lighter side of our Spirituality. How will you use your sense of humor in the weeks to come?

Kumud

P.S. If you are still not convinced about the value of “lightness”, cue up a clip of the MAVEN rocket launch. You will get the idea – no transition to “lightness”, no going into orbit 🙂 Join us for our weekly twitter chat Sunday, November 24th at 9amET in #SpiritChat for more lightness…

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