The Book of Wisdom – 101 Posts for the All-Around Balanced Life

Posted on Balanced Lifestyle | February 23, 2010 | 34 Comments

This post was written by Anastasiya. Follow me on Twitter or StumbleUpon and keep your life balanced!

Image by Lori Greig

Our lives are different and it takes different steps for each of us to reach our life balance. Life balance in return is the ultimate state at which you can feel that you are happy with your life. Your life does not need to be perfect but you must have just enough positive points that will help you offset any negative situations or problems that you might encounter. Of course it is great to strive for the best and all-around perfect life but we all know that this goal is unreachable.

For over a year now I have been writing about different aspects of balance and I know that I have not covered even half of them yet. Because there is SOOOO much to cover. Every day I learn a lot and face challenges that make me come up with new strategies for my own life balance.

In my last week post I wrote about the only way you can finally bring your life into balance and I promised to give you my own Book of Wisdom – a collection of posts from all over the web that can help you do so. Here they are, 101 posts to a balanced life. Take your time and savor each of them because they are all worth your time. Balance it more »

The Only Way to Bring Your Life into Balance Right Now

Posted on Balanced Lifestyle, Balanced Mind and Soul | February 16, 2010 | 24 Comments

This post was written by Anastasiya. Follow me on Twitter or StumbleUpon and keep your life balanced!

Image by I Am Ming

Life balance is a topic that we’ve been discussing a lot here and now I am getting ready to give you the most important advice that will help you reach your life balance right here and right now. This advice is very easy to follow so please stick around for a few more paragraphs to hear what I am going to say.

If you are reading this blog then you probably belong to one of the three categories of readers:

Group 1.
Readers who are truly interested in making their lives better and reaching life balance that we’ve been chasing around for a while now. (You guys are the best, you are my favorite and most treasured readers!)
Group 2.
Readers who read these posts in order to leave a comment hoping that I will leave a comment on their blogs in return (that I will most likely do because I am trying to be generous in any possible way) or so that they will get some of my traffic. (I love you guys too because you are still my readers and you make those Feedburner stats look better day after day! I also love having conversations with you here on Balance In Me or on your blogs.)
Group 3.
My husband who reads all my posts before anyone else does and makes sure that I do not make any silly mistakes (ok, I am being very partial here but he is my most favorite reader ).

Readers in the first group are more likely to benefit from what they read here and turn their lives into a balanced direction but the second group is not hopeless either. If you are still reading this blog (or any other personal development blog) then there is still room for improvement in your life and you want to make changes that will bring more happiness into your everyday life. However, no matter how much you read you still do not see anything happening or changing. You still feel stressed out or depressed occasionally, you still have some bad habits and your happiness level does not improve as it is supposed to. Why? Because you do not use any advice that you read on numerous blogs.

I know that you will say that just yesterday you read a great post about healthy living or meditation and you fixed a healthy meal or meditated for 10 minutes. However tomorrow you will already forget about that post and you will resort to your old routines.

Blogs (including Balance In Me of course) give you priceless advice on almost any aspect of your life however you still do not use it. If you read multiple personal development blogs then you have an entire encyclopedia of information in your own hands (it’s better to say in front of your eyes) buy you do not see it. The most important advice that I can give you is Balance it more »

How to Make the Most out of Your Valentine’s Day Whether You Are Single or Not

Posted on Balanced Relationship | February 9, 2010 | 14 Comments

This post was written by Anastasiya. Follow me on Twitter or StumbleUpon and keep your life balanced!

Image by Caro Wallis

Valentine’s Day is the most controversial holiday of the year in my opinion. It brings happiness, warmth and love to some people and at the same time it brings sadness and feelings of loneliness to the others. It is THAT time of the year when the entire world splits into three different groups. I am pretty sure that each of us has been a member of one of these three groups at a certain point in life. Each group deserves its own plan for Valentine’s Day and I am going to show you how to make the most out of your V day. Just pick the group that you belong to and see what I have in the box for you this holiday

The first group is people who are happy with their partners. Their biggest problem now is how to come up with the most romantic plan for V Day or how to buy the best present. It is even more likely that they do not even have this problem because they match each other so perfectly that they have already planned the most amazing day of the year. They love each other and they do not need any artificial and material signs that will prove their feelings for each other. They are happy in their present state and they are drunk with the fumes of love and passion.

This first group does not need any advice or help so I will just let them enjoy each other and won’t take any of their precious time together away. Have a great holiday and treasure every minute together!

The second group is couples who have lost the spark. Valentine’s Day for them is the day that brings a lot of headaches. They are together but at the same time they are not really together. They have lost the initial spark that brought them together and now they are just two people living with each other. V Day is an occasion for them to apologize or to try to patch up their relationship. A lot of times this day brings only more misunderstandings because he forgot to buy flowers, she has a headache and is not in the mood for that (you know what I mean), he didn’t make reservations and all the restaurants have at least a 2-hour wait now. These couples need some help and creativity to make their Valentine’s Day a happy day.

Here are my suggestions for the couples who have lost their spark but still want to be together. Balance it more »

A Simple and Fast Guide to Patience for Impatient People

Posted on Balanced Lifestyle, Balanced Mind and Soul | February 3, 2010 | 29 Comments

This post was written by Anastasiya. Follow me on Twitter or StumbleUpon and keep your life balanced!

Image by ilyas c.

Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.
Titus Maccius Plautus

You probably know those situations when you stand in line in a grocery store and there is a person (usually an old lady) in front of you who buys a ton of things and then gets about 100 coupons out of her pocket book. The girl (or a guy) at the cash register has to manually type in each of these coupon codes, figure out why about half of them do not work and explain to the lady why her bill is 10 cents higher than what she thought it would be. Oh, and don’t forget that she wants to write a check to pay for her groceries but she can’t find her glasses so you spend another 10 minutes standing in line and thinking of all possible torture that she deserves. Before you know it (actually you do know it because you look at the clock about every 2 seconds) you have wasted 20 minutes of your valuable time and now you are late, angry and infuriated.

Even the most patient people in the world would probably lose it in situations like this one. However, you do not have to. There are many more situations in our lives that require profound patience and I know it probably better than anybody else.

Last year was nothing but a test of patience for me and my husband. Besides from raising two toddlers (a task that requires enormous amounts of patience), we were waiting for an answer about the house that we’d put a bid on. We were ready to move on with our lives but we were stuck living with my in-laws and not knowing what future held for us. It wasn’t until 2010 that we finally got the house (actually the house that we bought is not the one that we’d placed a bid on.) I am very grateful for everything that happened in 2009 because it taught me the most important skill of all – PATIENCE.

There is more than one reason why you need patience. Of course you do not want to get mad in situations like the one I’ve described above or when you are stuck in traffic. You also want to take the most of your life and not spend all your time being frustrated and mad at situations that you cannot change. You also want to see results from your endeavors whether it is starting a new business, a blog or losing weight.

Patience is a skill that will pay off greatly because you will be able to find balance, happiness and success in your life. Actually I do not know how you can find these things without patience

Our world is fast-paced and time is one of our most valuable resources. However, the next time that you want to see things going faster remember that the only fast thing in our life is failing because of an impatient decision. Climbing to the top always requires time and a lot of patience.
If you are ready to change yourself and learn patience then look through these tips that I have learned while looking for life balance: Balance it more »

10 Ways to Practice Mindfulness and Reach Life Balance

Posted on Balanced Lifestyle, Balanced Mind and Soul | January 21, 2010 | 14 Comments

This post was written by Anastasiya. Follow me on Twitter or StumbleUpon and keep your life balanced!

Image by El Fotopakismo

Being a mindful person is probably the best way to find life balance. When you are mindful you live in the present moment and you can enjoy your life right now, not some time in the future and not some time in the past.

Right now I am sitting in front of a glass door that opens to a terrific view of the ocean, waves breaking on the beach, blue sky and white fluffy clouds that form the most amazing shapes in the sky. My girls are playing with my husband on the balcony and I can see their little faces with huge smiles and sparkling eyes. I am mindful and I feel completely in balance at this moment. There is nothing else that I could wish for in life.

Mindfulness is the first step to finding balance and happiness in life. I know that a lot of times we are too busy to stop and think, to be mindful of the present moment and what it means to us. From our earliest years we hear that we need to think about the future all the time. We need to plan for the future every minute of our life. We are not taught to live in the present and to enjoy the very moment that we are in right now (actually living in the present and not thinking about the future is reproached in any possible way.)

When we are not thinking about the future we are usually thinking about the past. It would have been nice if we were thinking only about pleasant moments of the past, our emotions and memories of the happiest days of our life. However, most of the time we think about something that we should have done but we forgot to. We think about some situation when we didn’t feel at our best and how we could have changed it if we had said or done something differently. We think about people and opportunities we’ve lost. We remember stressful situations that bring only negative emotions and thoughts. And again the present moment is lost in the stream of our past.

You can’t be in balance when you miss so many moments of your life. Life balance is about being in peace and harmony with your inner world and with the world around you. You need time to be able to enjoy this peace of mind and to be present in the present.

I believe that it is great time to start your search for life balance through becoming a mindful person right now. Mindfulness is associated mostly with meditation but there are other ways how you can embrace mindfulness while performing your every day tasks. I started trying meditation only a couple of weeks ago and I must confess that I do not spend more than 10 minutes a couple of times a week doing it. However, I improve my mindfulness day after day without any effort. Here is how I do it (and you can too): Balance it more »