How Moderation Sparks Vibrational Expansion
Moderation is so damn hard. Let's explore why mastering this skill largely influences the health of our vibration.
*Here’s an audio version of this article read by the author. It may include a few sidebars ;)
As the seasons start to change, and Starbucks rolls out their annual pumpkin spice latte, let’s take a closer look at how moderation and slowing down can actually enhance your vibe- instead of just be kind of boring.
Building Vitality: Stop Before You’re Done
Moderation. Small helpings. Sample a little bit of everything. These are the secrets of happiness and good health. ~Julia Child
Eating until you’re 80% full is nearly impossible. I’ve tried. I leave that concept exempt from this list. I’m targeting this section toward building physical and mental vitality.
If I go to the gym in the morning and pour it all out until I’m toast- well, now I have my whole day to go live. I’m going to go into the red as far as physical vitality is concerned.
The hard part is I likely won’t see the downside to this behavior while I still have the reserves of youth. Yet, when we start to creep toward our 40s, 50s and on that’s where all of a sudden the well of vitality that was powering this behavior can start to run dry.
We experience this drying up of vitality as health issues that start small, and often escalate. Our health sags along with our vibration.
As my favorite Ayurvedic professor used to say. “We all have a lifetime supply of cheese. Some of my patients come in, and I tell them they’ve already eaten through their lifetime supply of cheese, so no more.”
This applies to pretty much everything in life. What we don’t often calculate is that we’re born with lifetime limits on things that can appear infinite through the eyes of youth. Joint fluid, insulin, estrogen, collagen.
Anti-aging is about building vitality instead of leaning heavily on the reserves we’re born with to power everyday lives without moderation.
If I go to the gym in the morning and use about 47% of my energy for a workout, I can then skip through my day, and maybe even have some energy left to put in my vitality reserves at the end of it all.
A startling concept in our society.
The same goes for mental work. If I analyze something until I’m fried, instead of taking breaks, I’m slowly driving my mental vitality and vibration into the ground.
That exhausted feeling in our brains after we push ourselves too hard is the feeling of our mental state oscillating at a lower frequency. I wouldn’t make any important decisions in that space.
It takes far more vitality to repeatedly build our vibratory selves back up than it does to keep a rapid oscillation through moderation.
In a society busy buying face creams to combat aging, mastering moderation is far more likely to produce an ROI we’re excited about.
To Speed Up, Slow Down
Everything that exceeds the bounds of moderation has an unstable foundation. ~Seneca the Younger
As one of my favorite meditation teachers Jeffrey Allen shares, students are often asking him how to grow faster… and his answer is to slow down.
The fastest path to growth is respecting our capacity and not overshooting it; this way we don’t encounter the strain, blowback, and emotional baggage that comes with trying too hard. More on this in my article on how resistance lowers our vibe.
Stress means we’re trying to function at a rate that’s weakening our vibrational frequency.
Most everything in nature, our home frequency, unfolds in moderation. When we shove against this natural rhythm in our life it diverts us from vibratory regulation and makes it hard to hear our intuition.
Ironically, moving through life at our natural pace is how we get there the fastest and keep our vibration robust.
Yet, as Ralph Waldo Emerson notes, “Moderation in all things, especially moderation.” Sometimes you just want to run to hug someone, or eat the whole dang chocolate cake, and there’s a place for that too.
Clashing Ideas: A Catalyst for Progress
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.” ~Elon Musk
There are people who totally disagree with what I write- and tell me all about it on social media with creative emojis. It’s ok. There will always be a yin and yang in the universe.
Counterpoints to ideas give us concepts to push off of. When different ideas clash the discussion process births entirely new concepts that couldn’t exist otherwise.
Moderation is often found in the middle of opposing forces. When we try to smother perspectives that don’t make sense to us we diminish our world’s capacity for change and creativity.
I recently listened to a woman whose podcast topics I completely didn’t agree with; I was curious to hear her perspectives in an area where I could sense my views were a bit extreme.
Not surprisingly, I didn’t care for a chunk of what she had to say. Yet, I felt my body soften as she made some… really good points.
I just couldn’t see the world through her lens with my upbringing. It was too different from her reality. I needed her perspective to help me see my blind spots.
Combining my perspectives with hers I felt myself slide closer to the middle of the continuum between our opposing views.
Oddly, I felt relief. Defending extremes (and trying to live them) can syphon our energy real quick. The middle is a more relaxing place to be.
Echo Chambers, Arguments & Your Vibe
It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken. ~Aristotle
Echo chambers can agitate vibration. They enhance a sense of “I’m right and why aren’t other people seeing things this way because it’s so obvious?”
Believe me, I know this place because I’ve been there. Repeatedly. Yet, when I’m there I can also identify that righteous agitation coupled with intensity isn’t great for my vibration.
Arguing is like a sugar high for vibration. It often mimics what it feels like to spike your frequency way up… then drops your real frequency down. This is why it can feel a little addictive sometimes. We all love things that mimic the feeling of our vibration rapidly increasing.
There’s a more subtle vibrational fluctuation that happens when we can relate to more people than those in our corner. But it’s up and to the right, and that’s really what matters.
Connection elevates vibration. Arguing diminishes vibration.
My path to relaxation wasn’t in getting everyone to believe what I did. It was in listening to the other side and uncovering some damn good points.