With all the trials and tribulations that everyday existence can throw at you; it’s not overly surprising that it can often feel that ‘life happens to us’.

How many of us go through this life being buffeted and pulled from pillar to post, like being carried away downstream by a rather heavy current to who knows where.

If you’re happy for your life to be a never ending series of knee-jerk reaction to external stimuli; then I wish you ‘every happiness’ that you may chance upon. However personally I would rather have some input in to what tomorrow might hold.

We have homes, we have bills, we have relationships, etc, etc. We are all guilty of focusing on one part or other to the detriment of something else.

To be happy it would seem that the sensible thing would be to have balance in our lives and all its aspects. ‘Easier said the done’; I hear you say. Who ever told you that attaining and maintaining balance was going to be an easy ride?

As Kuk Sool Won Practitioners we should understand this better than most. Our whole martial art system is built around the central tenet of balance and the journey to find it.

The Korean flag (taegukki) symbolises the origins of all things in the universe from the individual to the divine. Perfect harmony and balance a continuous moving sphere of infinity, resulting in one, a whole; greater than its parts.

Slow and fast, hard and soft, active and passive, offence and defence, you can see how it continually comes back to balance.

So here’s an exercise for you next time you’re training and you find yourself huffing and puffing your way through a class; turn your thoughts inward and try to balance the physicality of the body with a stillness of the spirit. You may experience nothing at first, but stick with it… it is more than worth the effort. Balance is not static; it is dynamic.

Once you begin to bring things into balance, you’ll find that rather than life happening to you; you’ll happen to life.

By PKJ Kevin Clouting