This Spring: Do the Opposite
The desert at night
The sand dune in the stock photo shows the dark of night, the opposite of springtime green and increasing light.
As I write this, the day and night hours are close to equal. According to the Farmer’s Almanac website, the Spring Equinox took place on March 19 this year at approximately 11:06PM EDT for the Northern Hemisphere. The Equinoxes are the periods during the year when daylight hours are equal to the night or dark hours. How you experience the cycles of the seasons really depends on your location on the planet. In the Southern Hemisphere, as in Australia and New Zealand, for example, the summer months are turning into the autumn season. All over planet Earth, however, the day and night are close to being equal right now, so close to the Equinox, and so it is an ideal time to bring balance into life.
The exercise of “doing the opposite” has many expressions and applications, and it is the perfect thing to do right now during this time of Equinox. In this blog post, I explore the concept of living balance and applying the “do the opposite” concept when it comes to getting things done and managing your schedule.
Observing Transitions
Transitions give you a way to observe where energy is and how it is flowing or not flowing. Learning to observe transitions is an essential Tai Chi practice. In the Northern Hemisphere right now, you can observe the last of the cold dark winter days changing into full springtime. This feeling of coming out of winter darkness and thawing out is what happens in the springtime. It can be a relief to come out of hibernation, but it can also feel like a shock: A loud alarm clock sound is waking us up, after we have had a rough night. The spring season is a time of high energy, which can be experienced as annoying and aggravating. It is a little like too much of a good thing. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the springtime is the time for caring for the liver meridian, which usually needs kindness and balance during the spring. The liver organ takes care of filtering and purifying the blood among many other functions in the body. In the spring, it is a great time to balance the liver meridian, because the springtime is when life comes to life.
Here in the United States, we recently changed the clocks to encourage and acknowledge the increasing number of daylight hours. The “spring forward” clock change can feel like a big stressful change. But the daylight savings time change can also remind us of the superpower we humans have to just change things whenever we want to. Sometimes you forget that this applies to you personally. You can change your mind. You can change little things or big things.
Doing the Opposite
“Doing the opposite” is a powerful practice that can remind you of this superpower humans have to change and tweak things. I consider the “do the opposite” technique to be an awareness tool that helps you interrupt unbalanced or extreme patterns of energy that have taken hold. This way, you can use the tool to restore health and balance. Because life is complex and dynamic, creating balance can be messy and unpredictable. Holding an intention to balance may require some kind of learning or discovery process that tells you where things are out of balance and going wrong. This can be hard to see and take in, so we need to do it with patience and compassion. Finding balance is worth it.
In ordinary life, you might find that you need to balance extremes (less of this, more of that) in order to get things just right. As you work, or as you take care of your family, participate in your relationships, take care of your home or living situation, you find what works and what does not work. This takes time and experimentation. It can be an exercise in directing your attention and sustaining your focus. This takes practice, and we can all be better at it. There is a rule in all attention practices: you cannot change what you are not aware of, and it follows that whatever you focus on with pure awareness will change. So “doing the opposite” requires sustaining focus and intention to hang in there and see things through, but you can also expect that something will change as a result.
Here are some examples of “doing the opposite” in ordinary life:
If you’re an outdoor person, spend some time indoors to take care of your home. If you have not seen your friends for a while, make plans to see them. Or if you have gotten comfortable in your small circle of friends or socializing only with your friends and family, find a way to meet new people. If you have been surrounded by strangers because of work or school, book some time with your nearest and dearest. If you drive a lot, go for a walk. If you have been indoors hibernating, go out and be next to plants and trees. If you have had a lot of take out and restaurant meals, take time to prepare food at home. Just try going in the opposite direction to see what happens, as if you were moving through your life in a new way.
Having a sense of the opposites! This is what we encounter in the practice of Tai Chi: Yin and Yang are opposites, Supreme Extremes. When you do Tai Chi, you cultivate awareness of opposing forces through observing yourself and sensing shifts in body weight that can feel empty (little to no body weight) or full (weighted) as you move. You can also sense force or energy around you and inside you by noticing what is tense and what is relaxed and noticing if your mind is busy with thoughts and ideas or quiet. The awareness becomes the channel for the energies to flow and restore balance.
The Unschedule: Handle Time Bravely
Another beautiful and practical example of “doing the opposite” is the unschedule concept that author Neil Fiore features in his book, The Now Habit. The unschedule is an amazing practice of doing the opposite of putting work first when scheduling activities: in other words, instead of putting work first, you prioritize health and wellbeing by putting self-care appointments first, ahead of scheduling work appointments and activities. This is radical! Put rest, relaxation, and friendship first? Yes! You can create an unschedule by first marking up your calendar, say one week or month at a time, with all the self-care activities as fixed first. You even schedule guilt-free play first before you mark any work at all. Then you study your calendar and look for the remaining available spaces in the day or the week or the month, and that’s where you then “fit in” your work.
When I first started using the unschedule, it felt like an act of faith that the work would ever get done. I have employed this unschedule strategy when working on long-term projects. It totally works, because it clarifies priorities and makes time management doable. This is essentially what I did this past weekend when I had lunch with family and went to the movies with a colleague I hadn’t seen in months. Even though I still had a lot of work to do and calls and emails to respond to, I scheduled those social activities as guilt-free play, and I squeezed in classes and work commitments where there was a little time available in between or after all that socializing. The guilt-free aspect was not so easy for me at first, but the discomfort was truly only temporary. Connecting with friends and family is a way of building social fitness , which is a great stress regulator and a key aspect of maintaining health. I felt the ample rewards of the mental clarity and good vibes on the other side when the weekend was over. When I did take care of my work commitments, I felt free and easy, and everything felt upleveled somehow.
“Free and easy” is the phrase that describes the ideal energies of springtime. This is what the springtime is calling us to be and do. How do you get there? It may not be immediately obvious, and it may take effort. But holding the intention to get closer to these energies of freedom and ease can point you in the right direction and help you find the key to your own personal sense of balance. Perhaps this means doing the opposite of what you have been doing (maybe enacting an “unschedule” of your own might hold the key for you). Whatever it may be, accessing and embodying a living balance is worth it. It is work, and it is play. It is having ordinary social relationships. May you enjoy the results.