Finding a balance – with love, and seeing the Dalai Lama

I recently coached a woman – I’ll call her Donna – who was doing pretty well managing her chronic illness. But she was having some troubling symptoms and was afraid they would get worse. At the same time, she was building a business, and like all of us, she needed to earn a living. She was torn between whether she should give her time, energy, and love to her health or to her business.

If you face a similar dilemma, you may want to consider what I said to Donna. I told her that I thought she should give her time, energy, and love to the part of herself that was torn and trying to decide what to give her time, energy, and love to. It was clear to me that that part of Donna had the biggest immediate need for those things, but was getting little if any of them. I knew that once she gave that part of herself the time, energy, and love it needed that she would be in a much better place to make decisions about finding the right balance in those other areas of her life.

On another note, today was a very special and memorable day because I got to see the Dalai Lama. Like many of you, I’ve admired him for a long time. So when tickets went on sale last December for a talk he was giving at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I immediately bought two. It was a good thing that I acted quickly, because they sold out in two hours.

The talk was at 9:30 this morning. We were supposed to be there two hours early, since everyone was going to be scanned before they were allowed into the arena. That meant getting up at 6:00 – a challenge for me, since I’m not an early riser. But it was definitely worth it. I really enjoyed hearing him talk. He spoke about the nature of the mind, a subject that I find fascinating. His wisdom, humor, and compassion were obvious, in spite of the fact that his English was sometimes hard to understand (he gave about half the talk in Tibetan, which an interpreter translated for us). As I said, it was a very special and memorable day.