The Universal Law of Balance + Why It Applies To You

Heyya Superstar,

Yesterday I was deep in the trenches with a client who had had a terrible week: her rent had been increased by the landlord, she'd been struck with an unaccounted for bill, and everything had seemed to go wrong... she had started to spiral and started asking how she could 'get rid' of her problems so that life would feel smoother.

We've all been there. Sometimes life feels HARD and nothing ever seems good enough. We start to worry about the future and everything that might go wrong, even though rationally we know that it's two years away and anything could happen between now and then!

The problem is that we often think that a smooth life = a happy life, but I'm yet to find anybody who thinks they have had a 'smooth life'. You only have to listen to celebrities and other rich moguls who still have a litany of complaints to deal with, to realise that it's inevitable for things to go wrong in our lives. It's part of being human.

It's not our ability to create a smooth and easy life that counts, it's our ability to create inner calm and self- confidence so that no matter what happens in our life, we know we can handle it.

It's this ability to accept the lesson for what it is, rather than get attached to it or create meaning from it, that is the true path towards happiness. Most people see something going wrong and they tell themselves a story about it and make it mean something... they attach feelings like guilt, shame, fear, or resentment to the story and then they run this pattern on repeat through their mind.

This is the downward spiral. Becoming aware of these patterns is the first step. The second step takes a leaf from meditation: observe the thought and the feelings that try to rise with it. Why is the thought there? Is there any truth to it or is it subjective? Where do you feel the feelings in your body?

This takes time and patience. It's hard to correct every negative thought that you have, and when you start becoming aware of your thoughts, you'll be mortified by just how many of them induce negative feelings in you.

This is where the law of balance comes in. The universal law is like a giant balancing scale, so for every 'negative' thought that you have, there is an equally 'positive' thought that you are capable of experiencing. You might be wildly out of balance right now, teetering hard on the negative side of the scale, but if you focus on adding more positive thoughts to your life, then your scale will eventually balance out.

The advice I gave to my client yesterday, was to expand her capacity to handle the bad stuff, rather than continually trying to 'eliminate' it. Eliminating our problems means that we're actually focussing even more of our attention on them, amplifying the feelings of shame, guilt, fear etc.

What you need to do instead seems counter-intuitive, but when you learn how to accept and surrender to the inevitability of life going wrong, then you learn how to cultivate a sense of inner calm that nobody else can disturb. The unexpected oft forgotten perk, is that expanding our capacity to hold the bad stuff, also means that we expand our capacity to hold the good stuff...

Yesterday, I had another water pump issue in the morning, and I also went snorkelling all day with friends out at Turquoise Bay near Exmouth. My day started with a problem, and yet I was still able to finish with sun baking on the sand, feel-good client calls, and pizza and cocktails at the Whalebone brewery last night in what has been one of my favourite days to date. In fact, every single day in the last week has just been getting better and better.

I kept saying to everyone, is this real life? Am I dreaming? I watched the sunset last night as I drove the van back into town, singing and dancing and jamming out on my own, the headlights of the other cars behind me. We were all sandy and salty and sunburnt and tired, but all so happy and grateful that we took that leap at the beginning of the year to travel and take a chance on a different kind of life this year.

To be clear, 12 months ago, I was incapable of feeling this happy. It's not just the circumstances that have caused this joy... it's been my increased capacity to handle it. When I started working on surrendering and accepting life in the present moment, all the good and all the bad, and I started learning how to create inner confidence to handle everything that came my way, that's when I was took back my power as a human being and started living life to the fullest.

And the water pump...? Booked in to be fixed (again) tomorrow morning. I've had to shuffle my bookings around and spend a couple extra nights in Exmouth... but there's worse places I could be and who knows, maybe the universe was sending me a sign to relax and take life a little more slowly 😉

Haley 🤍