Internal Balance (1)

James Drewe
8 hours ago
5 min read

The Meaning of 'Balance' in this Context

I'm using the word 'balance' to mean an 'internal balance' both in body and mind. This is homeostasis.

This is both an internal physical balance (from the point of view of bodily health), but is also an emotional balance. It is about how all parts of you work collectively, with no part of you working harder than any other part, and what you can do about it to make that happen.

Your ability to balance on one leg is the smallest part of your 'internal balance', and is almost a byproduct.

Balance & Illness

When you are unwell, your body is 'out of balance'.

Our bodies are designed to autocorrect when things go wrong in them, but sometimes, factors can make your body go a little too far out of kilter and the body produces a reaction in order to sort itself out.

External Physical Problems

Examples of this are: You trip and turn your ankle over. You rub it and think nothing of it, but the body, during that brief moment that it went into spasm, produced some 'side-effects' or reactions so that you are able to keep on functioning.

To stay with this simple analogy for a moment, it is quite likely that, following the ankle turn/trip, the autocorrections that your body made were to change the alignment of the of the lower leg bones (tibia/fibula) which then affects your knee joint. This, in turn, can then affect the hip joint, in particular the sacroiliac joints, which can then affect the spine, and, perhaps a day later, you end up with a slightly stiff neck, because the neck has to readjust to accommodate the new alignments that gravity has made necessary.

This example is not as extreme as you might think, and happens to everyone.

Most of the time, we get used to it; the soreness of the ankle gradually reduces, and the whole process slowly reverses. Because it's able to reverse, the problem is referred to as 'acute'. The main issue happens when something similar happens, before the reversal (or healing) process has happened, and you compound the problem. This then can become a 'chronic' problem.

Internal Physical Problems

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), they talk about various 'factors' that cause the internal equivalent of the damaged ankle, as above.

We all know about these. The weather is too cold, or hot, or damp, or dry, or windy etc., and for some people this can cause our internal balance to be disrupted.

In TCM these are called the 'Exogenous Factors'; they arise from OUTSIDE the body.

Then there are the 'Endogenous Factors' which arise from INSIDE the body: These include (briefly): Stagnation: Emotional blockages or excesses (see ** below) that lead to a variety of issues. Phlegm: In Chinese medicine, this means more than just mucus. It also relates to the body's fluids that keep the body 'flowing' internally, therefore allowing it to be adaptable and energetically flexible.

Blood Stasis: There is often pain fixed in one place and poor circulation involving 'pooling' of blood in an area. It is an internal imbalance, and a deficiency and stagnation of energy,

**Seven Emotions

The seven primary endogenous emotional factors in TCM are:

Joy: Can lead to over-excitement and affect the heart.
Anger: Often associated with liver dysfunction and can cause stagnation of qi.
Worry: Linked to the spleen, it can lead to digestive issues and fatigue.
Thought: Excessive thinking can impair the spleen and lead to mental fatigue.
Grief: Associated with lung health, it can weaken the body's defenses.
Fear: Impacts the kidneys and can lead to issues with vitality and energy.
Fright: Sudden fright can disturb the heart and lead to anxiety or panic.

All a bit alien to modern Western medicine perhaps, but this would not have been so alien to our model of medicine either in the 14th century or even up to 150 years ago...

What All of Us Would Like

In a perfect world, when faced with difficulties, whether external (what the planet throws at us) or internal (emotional), we would like to be able to stay internally harmonised, so that we are able to shrug off these problems easily.

How We are Constructed

We are built around a vertical axis, a centreline.

If we stand upright with the weight evenly distributed between our feet, this centreline passes through the crown of the head, through the perineum, and finishes level with the front of the ankles at the feet (unless you'd prefer to think of the line starting at the bottom and working upwards).

When we move sideways (without trying to step forward or backward), this line is always there and will move between the two feet. If we are walking, because the weight is on one foot during a step and alters during the step, the line will pass from heel to toe during the step, and will temporarily be aligned with that foot.

In Chinese, this line is called 'Zhong Ding' (中定) or your Central Equilibrium, and is crucial not only for your physical (external) balance, but also for the concept of your internal balance.

Staying Healthy

Using the idea of this central line, we want our bodies to equally surround it, so that, to use a very simplistic example, the amount of body tissue of various types, that you have surrounding it, is the same all round. You are like a spinning top where the central axis is literally 'central'. This way we are 'balanced', and it would be good if we could achieve this under all circumstances, both physical and emotional.

We're all familiar with the expression, 'I was thrown'... e.g. "It was such a surprise that I was completely thrown for a while".

But there are many other expressions in English also:

I was 'upset'

It really 'disturbed' me

It 'threw' me (off kilter)

I 'didn't know where I was' for a moment

I didn't know 'where to put myself'

After the unexpected news, I 'felt all at sixes and sevens'

I was 'neither here nor there'

I was 'all over the place'

.... and undoubtedly many more.

The next blog will look at an exercise to achieve this sense of balance.

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James Drewe teaches Tai Chi and Qigong in both London and in Kent and online.Details of weekly classes both live and online can be found on the website, and there are classes for 2-person Tai Chi on one Saturday a month.