A Balanced Life?

How do you know if you’re living a balanced life? And do you care? Bernie developed a tool for checking your balance, his version of The Five Buddha Families, a variant on a Tibetan teaching. Bernie’s aspects of life were spiritual practice, study, livelihood, social action, and community.

Jishu showed me how to use it. Take a week-at-a-glance calendar with each day divided into hours, half hours might be even better. For two weeks, keep track of your activities, fill in your calendar. At the end of the two weeks, you sit down with your calendar pages and five highlighters of different colors, and you go through the week, coloring in the blocks. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which Buddha family an activity falls in. What do I do with my gym times? I decided that they were somehow part of livelihood: they were as important as earning a living to keeping me going. Sometimes, an activity seemed to fall into two boxes. What do I do with spiritual study. I colored the box in stripes. When you’ve colored in your two weeks, you hold up the pages. It’s easy to see what your dominant colors are. It’s easy to see the neglected aspects of your life.

What do you do about the imbalances? You can make changes, but you don’t have to. Unequal doesn’t necessarily mean unbalanced. In some phases of our lives, one aspect may predominate. Things change. The first time I did this exercise, livelihood colored my life. I had only begun to recognize what a workaholic I was. I was just beginning to stick my toe into spiritual practice. I decided that I wanted to stop being a livelihood hero. I stopped taking work on vacations, and then I stopped bringing work home. The heavy briefcase was no longer a source of pride.  When, six months later, I redid the calendar trick, livelihood still predominated; work still dominated my week, but there were more of other colors, more time with family and friends (community).  

As useful as Bernie’s tool was, I’ve realized over the years that there were neglected aspects. Bernie didn’t pay enough attention to his health, not just the cigar smoking, he didn’t get much exercise either. I added Wellness as a sixth Buddha family, and then in retirement, as I dove into fiction writing, I realized that art practice was an aspect of my life that I’d almost totally neglected. So now there are seven aspects of a balanced life.

I scan again. In retirement, livelihood is now limited to shopping and cooking, doing the dishes and doing the laundry. Wellness practice has become much more consuming. Not only am I spending more time in doctors’ offices, I’m making time most days for my steps. My art practice is showing up. I’m striping my blogging blocks, a combination of art and spiritual practice. I’m working on my stories.

Jishu’s colored pictures don’t balance your life for you. That’s still up to you. But it gives you a chance to see what’s going on. When you see that wellness is a neglected aspect of your life, you see that you have a problem. You can’t deny it. When you see that you are spending almost no time with family and friends, you may have a bigger problem. What do you think? I'd love it if you share this blog with friends who might find it helpful.