Finding Your Balance

Managing everyday life so you lead a balanced life can be a bit of a juggling act when you have too much to do and too little time to do it. This was especially so for us when we lived in the city. Most of the time it was a case of commute to work, then come home to sleep, then wake up and do it all over again. Since our sea change, we have tried to lead a more balanced life by prioritising what is important and discarding the rest....getting rid of all the clutter. It actually works, and frees you up so you no longer worry whether you should be following the latest trends, or doing what everyone else is doing. Another helpful source of information for us was when we attended The Australian School of Meditation and Yoga's; A Balanced Life Retreat. Spending a day out in the country, in a beautiful natural setting, getting a few insights into how you can change your life and slow it down. I went to my first retreat a few years back, and enjoyed it so much, I have been helping out at the retreats ever since.

We have found that by making our life simpler and more balanced, change has come naturally. It does take a bit of work, but it does eventually happen.

Keep it Simple

What we have found is that you really don't need that much to live a fairly comfortable life. In fact this is something we have noticed more since we downsized our lifestyle. Everywhere you look these days, advertisers and marketing people are trying to sell you new products and technology that they say you must have to supposedly make your life happier and easier. Although some of these products are obviously useful, we don't want our whole life taken up pursuing them. The funny thing is that many of these products actually make your life more complicated. Always having to worry about them, if something will go wrong, or if someone will try and steal them, or having to update them to get all the latest features to make them bigger, better and faster.

Believe it or not, we still don't own a mobile phone, an ipod, or a plasma TV - and we are still alive, connected, and well informed, so that proves you actually can live without all these things. We obviously do have a computer, but we only need a basic model, not the one that is five times better and 10 times faster than everyone else's.

We try hard not to buy anything we don't really need, I know it sounds very practical and boring, but it works for us. And it frees up more time to do the things we think are more important and fun in life.

Something we are also aware of is that every product uses up more of the world's resources in one form or another. Now that environmental payback time has arrived, in the form of global warming, we feel good doing our bit to minimise our impact on this planet, by keeping life simple, and only buying the things we really need......not the things the manufacturers, marketers and merchants say we need, so that they can make even bigger profits and use them to buy a whole lot of things that they also don't really need.

Food for thought

Six years ago we decided to leave the chaos and confusion of the big city behind, pack up our life and exchange it for a more peaceful, simple existence in a small coastal village on the NSW north coast. We now have the best of both worlds, peace, quiet and a beautiful natural environment, and still a convenient drive away from a big city, just in case we need some of what it provides.

One factor that helped us make the decision to change our lifestyle was what we had learnt from attending the programs of The Australian School of Meditation and Yoga when we lived in the city. Not only did The Australian School of Meditation and Yoga programs teach us about the practices of meditation and yoga, they also taught us how the yoga lifestyle embraces all aspects of life. The yoga teachings actually recommend that you should try and live in a simple and natural way as one of the first steps in enhancing the way you both look at, and lead your life. So that is what we decided to do.

So we would like to start our blog with a subject that interests us all.... food.

Food, and how it is produced, has a major impact on both our lives, and the health of the planet. These days, farmers have to produce food quickly and at the cheapest possible price. This means farmers must use any means available to produce a particular crop, including using pesticides and chemical fertilisers, so that the food will grow quickly and look perfect, because that is what we have been trained to expect. Farming has in fact, due to economic necessity, become another Fast Food industry.

Many people around the world, including us, are starting to rebel against this idea of food production because they don't like having big companies and the fast food industry not only dictating what they eat, but also helping to destroy the environment in which they and their families have to live. There is even a Slow Food movement that has sprung up whose aims are to educate people about commercial agribusiness and factory farms, and promote more organic food production. They lobby against the over use of pesticides and try to stop genetic engineering of our food. They also want to get governments to start teaching gardening skills to school students so they and their families can start growing their own food.

So what can we do to help both ourselves and our natural environment?

• Buy organic food. Organic food is better for you and better for the environment. Even the big supermarkets are starting to stock organic food in one form or another and the more people buy, the more they will stock it. Even if you just start out small, why not give it a try?
  
  
• Grow your own food. It doesn't take much, and it is so much fresher and tastier than the food you buy in the supermarkets. Teach your children how to grow food, and encourage the people who run the school they attend to start a school garden. Many schools in Australia are now doing this, and not only does it teach children skills they can use for life, it also teaches them much healthier eating habits from an early age. Many of the people we know, or have met at The Australian School of Meditation and Yoga programs, have started their own food gardens, everything from a full size kitchen garden, down to a few herbs in pots.
  
  
• Buy food produced locally (and if you can't find much, ask your local shop keepers to source some). In this way you will be encouraging local producers, and at the same time helping to cut down the energy resources used to transport the food to the customers. Experiment with sourcing food in your area that has been grown within say a 150 kilometre radius.
  
  
• Avoid genetically modified food, or food containing genetically modified ingredients. Although the big companies that produce the seeds used to grow genetically modified crops say that they are safe, there is another side to this argument that doesn't support the environmental safety of growing genetically modified crops. So when in doubt, don't, as the consequences to the environment from growing genetically modifies crops are difficult to predict with certainty. Until proven otherwise, natural, non-genetically modified food is still the best option for both you and the environment.