Yesterday, I went to T’ai Chi class for the first time in years. It was a beautiful fall day at the park, and practicing with my old teacher, in the dappled light and shade beneath the trees, felt very peaceful.
I started T’ai Chi at age 18—quite young, for an art that mostly draws senior citizens. I became intrigued by it after studying kung fu as a teenager. Although these days, T’ai Chi is mainly taught as a kind of low-impact aerobics for older people, it originated as an “internal” martial art—one that focuses on cultivating chi, the subtle energy associated with acupuncture and Chinese medicine, rather than external force.
As a young man studying T’ai Chi, I was mainly interested in its martial arts applications, not its health benefits. The truth is, I didn’t have any real health problems to worry about back then.
But my context for going to T’ai Chi class yesterday was different. I recently turned 39, a little over 20 years older than when I took my first T’ai Chi class. And earlier this year, I injured my shoulder while practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I thought that maybe T’ai Chi could help with my recovery.
And indeed, going through the T’ai Chi form felt like a gentle massage, as the postures naturally rotated my shoulder through its full range of motion.
The movements of the T’ai Chi form are a constant alternation: sinking down and rising up, pushing or striking and then rolling back. Your weight is always shifting from one foot to the other. In T’ai Chi theory, it’s thought of as alternating yin and yang.
This alternating rhythm in T’ai Chi reminded me of the larger rhythms in our lives. After a hard workout, it’s crucial to give yourself time to recover. After spending a full week in the office, we need time with our family or hobbies in order to rest and renew ourselves.
In Ta’i Chi, you’re almost never “double weighted”—that is, your weight is either on one foot or the other. You’re either more yin or more yang, not 50/50. It’s like a sine wave, with alternating peaks and valleys.
Crucially, work and recovery are also like this. Too often, we think of “work/life balance” as something that needs to be equally weighted all the time. That’s unrealistic and unhelpful. Real work/life balance, like balance in T’ai Chi, is a matter of alternating yin and yang, effort and recovery.
When you’re at work, in the midst of a challenging project, you need to be 100% present and engaged. When you’re at home, if you want to truly recover, you need to turn off notifications from work texts or emails and be 100% present with your family, your book, your woodworking, your nap, or whatever it is you do to relax.
Since the pandemic, work-from-home culture has made it more challenging for many of us to draw a clear line between working and not-working. At the same time, it’s also made our lifestyles more flexible in some ways.
In order to balance work and recovery now, we need to be both more mindful and more creative. Perhaps, for example, you have to manage your kids while working in a home office. But also, maybe it’s possible for you to sneak a 30-minute nap in the afternoon. (I won’t tell your boss.)
The key is to know when you’re working and when you’re resting, and commit fully to what you’re doing in the present. If, instead, you try to multitask by, for example, responding to work emails during movie night with your family, you’ll end up doing sub-par work and never feel truly relaxed or present. And that, I can tell you, is a recipe for burnout.
Instead, consider the lessons of T’ai Chi, and find ways to alternate yin and yang, focused effort and deep rest in your life. Just like in the T’ai Chi form, this alternation is the key to finding flow.
How do you balance work and life? What are your favorite ways to rest and recover? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: If you could use some help balancing your work and the rest of your life, 1:1 coaching can help. Just reply to this email to book a free 20-minute consultation with me.
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This made me realize why the yin/yang symbol is not two semi-circles, but instead split by a sine wave. Hope your shoulder recovers soon, Chris.
This is made so much more difficult with entrepreneurial life, because when you're own boss, the work is never done, there's always more. I've struggled with this for decades, and only just recently feeling as though I'm able to truly set the work aside and just be with family without part of me still multi-tasking. This is a real thing!