This is the talk Dr. Dittrich gave at the Napa Fresh Aire Festival  at the Westin Hotel in August.  The first part introduces her concept of “Balanced Abundance” as a way of living our lives productively and with less stress and fear of scarcity in these challenging times.

The second part is a guided meditation that you can do at home to consider how you might balance out the abundance in your life.

Joan ‘Joni’ Dittrich Ph.D.
As Presented at the Napa Fresh Aire Festival
August 29, 2009

Much of what I intend to speak about today will, I believe, be rather straightforward, simple, and make good common sense to you.

Most “ah-ha” experiences occur when we hear something that we have already conceptualized or already know, but is subsequently articulated for us in a fresh new way, bringing in some “Fresh Aire” if you will.  What I am talking about this morning should be straightforward and clear  to you because it is about bringing balance back into your life and the lives of all of us.  Although I will be introducing a concept whose name may be new to you, “Balanced Abundance”, I think that you will experience balanced abundance as something you have known before, even if you have not practiced it deliberately. And I will offer you an experience in the form of a guided visualization that will hopefully bring you closer to the sense of balance and abundance in your own everyday life.

We all know we are in challenging times financially and otherwise.  We all know about the challenges of the economy, global warming, our safe food sources, our water supplies, war, cultural violence … Need I go on?  Clearly our world and our society are out of balance, out of alignments.

We can most likely all agree on at least some of the causes for these imbalances, these misalignments.  Narrow self-serving interests (profit before the environment; me-first, my school, my state, my nation first) and Greed, to name just a few sources of this global imbalance.

There are many who agree that our financial crisis is the result of short-sightedness and greed on the part of both banking institutions and individuals.  Many agree that the current recession is a necessary if painful self-correction of the system. But hasn’t this moved us to an imbalance in the other direction?  On a more individual, personal level we see how our own lives have gotten out of balance.  How with our personal finances as well as our businesses, there is often more going out each month than comes in.   How our relationships struggle under the stress.  How fear can quickly turn to anger.  How our health is compromised especially when we cease to take care of ourselves because of fear of scarcity. How as individuals we may also be in need of a figurative, if not a literal chiropractic adjustment.

We also watch ourselves consuming our natural resources in spite of understanding that they are not unlimited.  Individuals continue to buy gas at higher prices because we “need” to get places and we don’t see any other alternatives.  How we use (but at least recycle) tons of paper and plastic products that we justify in service of our on-the-go lives. (I need only to look at my own office recycle bin at the end of the week, filled with paper cups because I don’t take time to wash mugs.)  How most of us continue to eat meat out of convenience and taste preference and don’t take time to learn other ways of food preparation, in spite of how the food industry robs the world of needed grains and adds deadly chemicals into our environment.  (Not to mention how the violent treatment of animals contributes on an energetic level to aggressive human behavior.)

In terms of our own activities, we work so hard during the day that at night we are too tired to cook healthy food; we drink too many glasses of wine to relax; some of us fall asleep in front of the TV; some of us are up to midnight catching up with the household chores that the demands of work and kids give us no other time to complete.  Either way, there is no time to read that thoughtful book we have on the bedside table, or to meditate, or to simply sit quietly to gain perspective and re-establish our priorities.

Emotionally and psychologically, we are out of balance, too.  We are perhaps frustrated, angry, fearful, lonely.  Or perhaps we are in denial of these and other emotions.  Perhaps we are too constrained in our expression of our feelings, not asking for what we really need, or not saying those words “I love you” or “I am here for you” even though we feel it inside.  Or perhaps we are too loose with our emotions, prone to outbursts or unable to establish healthy boundaries in unhealthy situations.   We have perhaps lost our center, our groundedness, our stability, our true north.  We are so overwhelmed by daily life that we may feel we have nothing left to give, so we wear blinders for anything beyond our immediate concerns and we take without giving, or we give too much, and self-destructive behavior patterns become more engrained.

In short as individuals and as a society, we are stressed out!

So, how do we bring it all back into balance?  (Or perhaps the question should be, how do we bring it into balance at all, since we don’t necessarily want to romanticize the way it was!)  You have probably all heard a hundred or perhaps a thousand ways to “manage stress”, all of which have been proven through one study or another to be very effective.    Truth is, that when we are really stressed, even the best stress management techniques can seem like “yet-one-more-thing-to do”, one more pressure in our already too-busy lives.  So if I tell you to practice yoga and meditate every day to relieve your stress, my well-intentioned suggestions may actually cause your blood pressure to rise rather than go in the other direction!

So, today I am not going to give you a list of stress-management techniques (those are on one of the handouts you should have received when you walked in!)   Instead I am talking with you about a concept I call “balanced abundance.”

So what is balanced abundance?  It is about having enough of what we truly need and yearn for, and minimizing what we actually have too much of.  For example, perhaps you realize that you have lots of love in your life, but yearn for more hugs and more time for hugging the people that you love.  Or, perhaps you realize that you have so much e-mail correspondence that the quantity of your responses is compromising the quality of your communications.  And taking up precious energy you could be using to interact with people in live time.  Balanced abundance is about recognizing what is good in our life and not obscuring it through too many obligations, things, or busyness.  It is finding a middle ground that gives us a sense of balance, of centeredness, of being fully human and alive in the present moment.

I am sure you all remember that during the late nineties and even up until this recession hit a year plus ago there was a lot of buzz about abundance.  It was as if “Abundance” was a predominate theme in people’s psyches.  The positive side of this Abundance thinking was the understanding that simply through mindful intention we could increase the positive qualities in life, like love, self-care, and family time.  But there seems to also have been a shadow side to this abundance mentality that was related to the material realm.  There was a sense that we should be able to have  whatever we wanted, as much money, as many cars, as much entertainment as we would like, with little actual concern about the resources it might take to maintain these things.  The dark underbelly of abundance thinking was greed and selfishness.

There is also the whole notion of “manifesting” what we want. Whereas in recent years we have begun to understand the power of intention, there seems to be a popular over-simplification of this notion which reads like,  “If I wish for something hard enough it will appear.”  For some there appears to be a kind of “magical thinking” about money and success.  As if anyone who wishes it enough could have exactly what they wanted, and there would be always be more to go around.  As if money grew on trees and trees themselves were endlessly abundant.

Do you remember the guy in the movie “The Secret” who put the image of a million dollars, I think it was, above his bed, and visualized that money into existence?  I often wondered about all the people who lost money as his gain came rolling in.  The philosophy that everything is just energy and is constantly expanding and re-creating itself may be true in a very esoteric sense, but in our everyday lives there are limitations and boundaries that we naturally come up against, and we have to operate within these natural laws.  The philosophy of ever-expanding material abundance reflects a skewed sense of the balance of things.

That kind of thinking is to my mind what spurred our inflationary economy.  And now we are paying for it, big time, with major re-adjustments.  I wish that we could simply visualize new jobs for the 12% unemployed here in California or for the 20% in my home state of Michigan.

(A little caveat here.  In actuality I believe that mindful intention and visualizing new possibilities is exactly what will get us started in developing a new economy where there will be better and more earth-friendly jobs in the future.  It’s just that we won’t get there through magical thinking.)

In order to bring something that is out of alignment back into balance, we have to think about both sides of the scale – - what do we have too much of and what do we have too little of?  Can we maximize one while we minimize the other?

In the nineties and the first 7 or 8 years of this decade, it was as if we could only think, more, more, more!  This was unbalanced abundance thinking and it led to greed.  That kind of thinking produced selfishness and over-consumption of needed resources.  And as a result of that thinking in recent years the scales have tipped.  To the point that in the past year and half we have moved into scarcity thinking, fear mode.  Many of us more fortunate in the world, seem to have forgotten that we still have food on the table and a warm place to live, even if our paper savings have dwindled.  We feel this scarcity fear in the atmosphere when we talk to friends, business associates, even perhaps here at this venue today.  It hangs like a heavy cloud over us in spite of new indicators of the recession receding.  For some of us fear makes us work harder and faster, for some of us it is stultifying.  For any of us, scarcity erodes our self-esteem and explodes blood pressure. Scarcity thinking can exacerbate depression and at the extreme lead to suicide and rage.

As both a psychologist and a teacher of yoga and meditation, “balance” is one of the most important themes in my work.  When the emotions are out of balance, behavior and daily functioning are compromised.  Imbalances can lead to excesses or depletion.  On the side of the excesses are the disorders around addictions, including substances, food, sex and addiction to recreational activities such as TV, computer gaming, and even work.  Often there is ‘addiction’ to personal crises or dramas that overwhelm or cover up a deeper sense of emptiness or imbalance. On the side of depletion-imbalances are depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, social anxiety, withdrawal from pleasure, fear of success, and general hopelessness. These imbalances can lead to relationship problems, despair and rage.  Through psychotherapy and counseling, people can learn to make better choices and re-build a sense of a balance in order to enjoy their relationships and life activities.

In learning a new yoga pose, as in life, we seek good alignment.  We start with a firm foundational stance, an affirmation of our own being, a saying “yes” to the asana or pose.  Next we engage our muscles.  We become aware of which muscles are required to extend and which to contract in the particular asana.  As we come into alignment in the pose we open up to something greater, letting the balanced asana connect us to the greater good, to our higher selves.

Take a moment right now to come into your own foundation, your own centeredness as you sit on your chair.  Close your eyes . . . breath in and out slowly and evenly through your nose . . . root in, ground down . . . feel how your spine wants to rise taller. . . be aware of how the muscles, often not noticed at all, around your lower back gently hug into your spine, providing it the support to be more erect . . .feel how the base of your spine begins to connect with the crown of your head . . .watch the energy flow. . . now think about how you felt,  how you were breathing just before this guided meditation began. . . and how you feel now . . . how as you found your stability and your muscles supported your back, your energy was freed and connected throughout your being . . .how simply by focusing on the breath and the foundation, there is an increased sense of well-being. . .
Very good … feel free to gently open your eyes as I continue. . .

The practice of yoga can be a wonderful metaphor for attaining the balance we all seek in life.  Yoga postures are all about the balance between contraction and expansion, between strength and flexibility, between personal effort and universal Grace, or what psychologists like to call “flow.”

Often strong people, especially athletes, come to yoga because they know they need greater flexibility.  You see this in the legs of bicyclists for example.  Their hamstrings and quads are so tight that they cannot bend over and touch their toes.  They have to tie their wonderful expensive athletic shoes sitting down!  Other people come to yoga with the double-jointed flexibility of Gumby, so they can fold as flat as a pancake but don’t have the complimentary muscular strength to support and protect the ligaments in their flexible joints and limbs.

So in yoga, we practice balance.  We look at, what does the student have in over-abundance (flexibility, strength) and where in the body is there an imbalance.  Perhaps the biceps are strong but the triceps are weak so they are prone to shoulder injury in Adho Mukha Svanasana, down dog.

In yoga there are three Sanskrit words that speak to the degree of balance in a person’s life as well as in their yoga poses.  Known as the three “gunas”, there is Rajas, which is the fiery active nature, symbolized here as a lightning bolt.  There is Tamas, which is the inert, lethargic nature, symbolize here by the flat line.  And there is Sattva, which is the balanced, calm and peaceful nature, symbolized here by the lovely curving line like the hilltops of our beautiful Napa Valley.  All of us display all three of these qualities from time to time and each has its usefulness.  But if Rajas, the fiery energy predominates, we can burn out too easily, we can miss subtleties by being in too great a hurry.  If Tamas, the lethargic energy,  predominates, life can roll on by us and we just roll over as it does.

We look for balance, for equilibrium, for the Sattvic energy.  There is perhaps no higher compliment in the yogic world than to be considered a “sattvic” person.  The root of this word, “Sat,” means higher consciousness or knowing truth.  So the balanced Sattvic person is wise, at peace, calm.  But the wise person is never in denial and knows when to employ strength of will and when to be flexible, when to employ fiery Rajas strategies or when it is best to employ less active Tamasic strategies and wait out a storm.

So bringing balance into our lives requires wisdom, Sattva.  To paraphrase the Serenity Prayer . . . to know what I can and what I cannot change and have the courage to do what I can.

So how do we know what we can change in our lives to create greater balance, to create a sense of balanced abundance?  To know what we have too much of and to understand how that too-muchness is obscuring our ability to realize and to savor what we already have that is good. For example, if we spend all of our time on the computer we won’t see the leaves shimmering in the breeze.  To know how too much of one thing can prevent us from actualizing the things or situations which we really want in our lives? For example, if we are always in the garden we can’t be in the kitchen preparing what we have grown.  If we are always anxious, we miss what it truly means to lay on a hammock in the shade of a beautiful tree, or to recognize when our child’s complaints about being bored really means that they want to simply sit on your lap and feel how much you love them.

In order to help you begin to develop balanced abundance in your life, I would like you to gain not just an intellectual understanding of the concept of “balanced abundance,” but to get what I call a “felt sense” of it.  To know what balanced abundance might mean for you personally, to experience it from the inside.  As I intimated before, I could give you a whole list of things to do to manage your stress, or I could give you a bunch of ways to bring balanced abundance into your life.  But those would be my ways, and not necessarily yours.  So I would like to guide you through a visualization in which you experience balanced abundance for yourself.

Before we begin this visualization, please notice the piece of paper with the likeness of a scale on it.  At some point during the visualization I will ask you to open your eyes and jot a few things down, first in the “too much” column, then in the “too little” column, and finally in the “balanced abundance column.” Please wait to write your lists until I ask you to. When the visualization is complete, we will have time for questions and discussion.  You might like to take a moment now to think of any questions or comments you have so far, and perhaps to make a note to yourself about them.

We will open the “Balanced Abundance Visualization” with a brief breath meditation.  Breath meditation, by the way, is a very effective stress management technique, one of the best, most available, and cheapest you will ever find.

So, please make yourself comfortable in your seat and gently allow your eyes to close. .  .(Breath Meditation.)

Guided Visualization on Balanced Abundance

CONCLUSION
I have presented to you my own vision of how as a society and as individuals we have gotten out of balance.  How in the matter of a few short months or perhaps years we have gone from an unrealistic expectation of abundance at every turn to a state of scarcity fear.  And how by coming back into our own core, our own center, we can find a balance that works for us.  As we begin to understand this concept of balanced abundance in our personal lives then we will begin to see how to apply it in a more universal sense, in our community and in our world. And that is how we can manage stress in difficult times.  Of course as a psychologist and a teacher of yoga and meditation I would still like to prescribe counseling, yoga  and meditation as some of the best and most effective stress-reducing strategies.  But an even simpler prescription is, through sattvic contemplation, to gain a more balance perspective of who we are and what is most important to us, and to live accordingly.
And, oh yes, to rely on the simplest, most elegant remedy of all, our own connection to the life force, the breath.