With the stress of paying bills and trying to build a career, it is easy to get caught up in tasks that are important for your job at the expense of longer term goals and personal priorities. Rob Opie, a human brand specialist and author, highlights the importance of creating life balance. There are the obvious reasons, like avoiding fatigue, stress and health issues that accompany excessive work. Then there are the emotional sacrifices. As Rob reminds us here, there is always a price to pay for doing too much of something – whether it is overindulging in the bar or lifting weights in a gym for more hours than anyone else you know. He calls “life balance” the most powerful drug. – Jackie Cameron
By Rob Opie*
Many years back a rather catchy advertisement described the South African lifestyle as one of braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet. Well, things have certainly changed and undoubtedly the biggest game changer in the last decade has been technology.
One would therefore naturally assume that South Africa’s top 20 rich list is laden with technology players, but not so if one takes a closer look. A new parallel industry with explosive growth is changing the game, and few people are taking notice.
Five of South Africa’s top 20 rich are players linked to the pharmaceutical industry. Something is going humanly wrong and we need to collaboratively fix it.
One could go as far as saying that, as the world turns to technological tablets, so the world is turning to pharmaceutical tablets. What can we all learn from this?
We now live in the most technologically advanced society that mankind has ever known, but we remain steadfastly ignorant of most of the potent universal laws of life and health that govern our lives. It’s my view, from hundreds of interactive and interdisciplinary case studies completed, that greater human awareness levels will be key to our health and happiness.
Greater knowledge is therefore the required game-changer moving forward. First and foremost is an understanding that the most powerful drug available to human kind is one called “life balance”. It’s the No.1 driver of human vitality.
As technology increasingly impacts the world, “Life Balance 101″, is what is required to keep us firmly on the path to prosperity, which we all seek and desire. Human vitality will always remain an inside job, and it’s far more easily attained, by grasping onto a greater understanding of how the human body works in life and health. The human body is designed to function optimally, as a harmonious synchronized unit – when human mind, human body and human spirit are kept “in sync”. In sport it’s called “in form”.
Everything just seems to keep going right. Yes, life’s good when things go right, and vitality is the reward for creating and maintaining life balance in all three realms of mind, body and spirit.
However, what about when things go humanly wrong and a life of ease suddenly becomes a life of dis/ease? Technology has certainly led most of us to lead ‘time poor’ lives. The growth of the internet has been a phenomenal surge.
Smart phones are starting to consume our lives and it’s little wonder we have any time to focus on balancing our lifestyles. We therefore either unwittingly, habitually or decisively place “life stressors” on our own lives.
We create stress. And we tax ourselves when we fail to intuitively deal with life’s ongoing daily challenges. Over time these life challenges can easily become life constraints. If we then allow them to remain in play for too long, they can “turn toxic”.
This is when they begin to tax our health and happiness. What should we then know? Well, these toxins have an origin in one or more of the three realms of life and health, namely physical, chemical and/or emotional. Getting it humanly wrong can mean one has to face up to anything from minor ailments in life, right through to life threatening dis/eases such as cancer. The key to health and happiness therefore lies in the following “life balance equation”:
Ongoing states of imbalance lead to the onset of a state of dis/ease, as opposed to a state of ease. Indeed balance drives wellness, and indeed imbalance drives illness. Luckily, we are all pretty adept at balancing our lives in the physical and chemical realms, as we just instinctively know what is right and what is wrong in these two realms.
We heed the bodily messages that are sent to us. For instance, when we get a stern message when we humanly create a chemical imbalance.
An example that most of us have experienced is one called a hangover. It’s the human body’s way of sending out a message to us to restore life balance in the chemical realm.
However, where we are getting it humanly wrong is in the intuitive emotional realm. Most of us have little or no idea of how emotional toxins can tax the human body. We know too little about the “toxic effect”‘of the six emotional killers in life and health, namely: resentment, criticism, guilt, fear, hate and futility.
We pay scant regard to any message that the human body sends us from the emotional realm, sometimes with devastating consequences to our lives and health. Mostly, we’re far too quick to seek symptomatic relief at the pharmaceutical counter, but in reality, vitality remains an inside job, and it’s far cheaper, wiser, and easier to pay cognisance to creating and maintaining life balance.
As human beings, we do sometimes get it humanly wrong, so it’s important for us understand that the bodily symptom is never the problem. It’s only the human body’s way of doing its level best to tell us “to restore life balance.
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself “
Galileo Galilei
Finally, everyone of us has our own Everest to climb in life. With greater knowledge and awareness of the universal laws of life and health, the climb upward and forever upward is made far more enjoyable and easier, appropriately captured by Everest explorer George Mallory in his insightful quote:
“So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”
