#212 True Balance Looks Like Yin & Yang and Walking 'The Labyrinth'

Rachel Denning (00:10.926)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Extraordinary Family Life podcast. We are your host, Greg and Rachel Benning. This episode is being brought to you from Deutschland. We are in Germany. Frankfurt. Frankfurt. That's Germany for those of you who may not know what Deutschland is. For those of you who haven't been to other countries and realized that all the names we have in countries aren't actually their names. They all have different names and we have English names that don't really match up. All that craziness. But anyways, we're in Germany right now. So nice to be back here. We have our youngest daughter,

Sondreana was born in Germany. So fun to come back with all these cool memories and Germany is such a beautiful country. Anywho. We're flying to Istanbul tomorrow. Flying to Turkey. It's going to be amazing. But we got some good questions. We got another question. So keep asking questions. We love it. And the question.

is a lot about, it's from a traveling family and I know a lot of you love traveling, but it's not like you don't, if you're not a big time traveler or whatever, don't be like, oh, this episode's not for me. Because the question is bringing up a topic that's super relevant for all of us. It's principle based. It applies in every area of life, I think. And I think all of us, I feel bold enough to say, I think all of us struggle with this balancing act in life.

so to speak, and it may not even be balanced. I think there's a problem there fundamentally because we think balance means equal, equal time, and I don't think that's the case. I think for me, I use the word contrast, like contrasting experiences.

contrasting. Well the yin and the yang I think is the best. It is definitely. I love that symbolism for some reason as a teenager I loved the yin and the yang symbol. Me too. I don't know why. Even as a kid. That is crazy. Like I bought those stickers and put it on my skateboard as a kid and I was like oh I don't know what this is but it's cool. Right but even more so as I understand the meaning behind it I feel like it's so...

Rachel Denning (02:13.773)
applicable in so many areas of life. It's just true. Like we need the yin and the yang. We need, and this is what we're going to dive into, like we need these contrasting experiences. We need the opposite, the opposition, the opposites. We need it in our life. It's how we find, it's actually, and I love how Jordan Peterson talks about it. And in fact, there's a lot of brain science that actually ties into this because our brain is divided into two hemispheres.

and there is a podcast with this guy that wrote a book about it that Jordan Peterson interviews and he talks about how even the yin and the yang ideas line up with this idea of us having two different hemispheres in our brain. Like there's a reason why we don't just have one.

brain that's fully connected. We have a brain that has two hemispheres and each of the hemispheres are very different but they need each other to cooperate and to operate fully and functionally. And it is one of the ways that we find full purpose and meaning in life by learning how to balance out that yin and the yang because if we get too much of one thing, if we're too left -brained, you know, or we've got too much of...

the black in the yin and the yang, if we have too much of the one thing, we actually do start to feel out of balance. We start to feel like our life is lacking meaning and purpose, even if it's something that previously gave us a lot of meaning and purpose. It now begins to lose that because we don't have the opposing side of this equation. We don't have the right brain in there. We don't have the white. We don't have the whatever.

The irony is that our brains will often get in the way of that. Oh yeah, we sabotage ourselves. Yeah, that's what I was gonna use. We get in this sabotage process of only wanting one side because for whatever reason it feels comfortable, it feels familiar, it's what we know, it gives us some kind of satisfaction or meaning. And the other side might seem inconvenient.

Rachel Denning (04:23.917)
uncomfortable, unfamiliar, scary, and it can go either way. It's like, well, I don't know if you're going to read the whole question because the question is a metaphor for all of us. We'll answer the question, but we're going to do it metaphorically as well because it answers this philosophical journey of life. Well, and I think one of the examples, it's easy for me to identify this happening because we've seen it, we've experienced it, is

You know, like we've talked about with food before. We've seen many people, we've had a lot of friends and acquaintances who will pick a diet, they change their diet to one type of diet and then that becomes their thing. Like that's it. And it happens, it makes sense why it happens. It happens because they experience positive benefits from making that change. You know, they became raw, they became vegan, they, whatever, they did this thing.

They experience positive benefits from it and so now that becomes their religion in a way. And so they just keep holding onto that thing when we have experienced personally through trial, error, experience, experimenting and study and research that it's actually, that's not how it works. It's...

that has a positive benefit, but then when you learn how to balance that out with something almost completely opposite in many cases, you actually find more benefit and more positive results by doing that and taking that route than by just picking that thing and sticking with it for the rest of your life. And I'm never going to change. I'm going to identify as this person. This is my way of being now. I am this.

It's not as powerful. And you get into a struggle. And obviously there's so much power in the identity piece that helps you to do incredible things. But then if the identity and the ego get in the way, then you get stuck in that identity. And now you're like, I kind of want to break free from this, but I've built my identity. And even now, now in our modern age, we build an online identity. We have this persona online and we'll build.

Rachel Denning (06:47.789)
whole lifestyle or even businesses around this identity and then realize, shoot, now I'm kind of stuck with it. We've even seen humanitarian organizations start up to solve a problem and then they're stuck in that. They have to almost perpetuate the problem because if they solve it, then they no longer exist. They don't exist anymore, which is how it should work, honestly. Yeah, so it becomes a problem. Well, and just a little tangent here because I remember...

the same thing actually going through this ourselves, at least me, I went through it because you know online my presence is world school family and for a period of time, specifically during COVID when we were quarantined and we were at home, I remember feeling like, are we stuck in this identity? Do we feel like we have to do this? We have to be this traveling family because...

that's our persona, you know? And so you have to learn to separate that and make sure you're doing it because you actually want to do it and because it is still meaningful and fulfilling and not because you feel obligated to do it. And to recognize that I can still be the world's school family and have a house and live that life if I want, right? Like I can do that. I'm not required to fit into any certain box and do it a certain way. I can have both or I can do both.

and still be however I want to identify myself, right? So you're saying you could be a vegan that eats steak. Maybe. Your steak eats grass. Because your steak is a vegan. Your steak is a vegan. That's right. Exactly. Oh, I like that. Okay, so. I love eating vegans.

That could be really misinterpreted. Vegan cows, I mean. Yes, thank you. To the question. As a full -time traveling family now of four years, we have been for many months filling the poll to slow down even more, although we're already traveling very slow. But we want to have a base from where we travel from. We're almost afraid.

Rachel Denning (09:01.901)
though, of feeling too settled and of feeling stuck. We understand this. We have felt this before. But traveling full time doesn't feel like total freedom to us anymore. Now this is, again, if we're using this as a metaphor, this is literal because we've experienced this, but if we're using this as a metaphor, it's the same type of thing. It was like what we were just talking about. You take on this identity of I'm raw, I'm vegan, I'm a world schooler, I'm this.

Then it starts you find something that really works and feels good Yeah, and so you're doing it and you go all in and it feels freeing it feels like freedom like I remember when we started traveling it felt like freedom We are free but then there became there came this point where it stops feeling so free because you feel like you have to do it and Plus there's other things you want to do but You don't want to do them because it feels like you'll be back

You start feeling confined in what you're doing. Exactly. Right. People do that all the time. Let me give you some examples. Again, this metaphorically, you might be like, I hate my job. I hate my job. I'm going to start my own business. So you start your own business and you build a business that then becomes your master. Which is great. It's freedom. It's vigorating. Yes, this is the best.

And then a couple years down the road, you're like, I hate this business. It's now your job. It owns me. It like controls me. I hate this. It's so horrible. Yeah. OK, so it doesn't feel like total freedom anymore. We want to connect deeper with a specific place, like one place instead of many places, right? We want to grow and expand projects, you know, personally and as a family. Like maybe you want to plant a garden or you want to buy a piano that's not very travel friendly, right?

Especially the grand pianos. Exactly. Which we felt sometimes can be difficult for us when we're moving around more often. And we come to new places and we meet new people all the time. We would still like to travel when we fill the poll, but we miss having a place to go back home to. It's been really hard to come to that acknowledgement. I get that because again, it started to become part of your identity. You felt freedom from doing it. You found a lot of meaning, purpose.

Rachel Denning (11:19.501)
joy from doing it and so you, it's almost like you feel like you're betraying yourself. I was gonna say that. Yeah. It feels like, it feels like you're giving up or quitting. You're like, oh, we love this. We want to pursue this. Like crap. If I also want to have a home base, that means I'm somehow betraying my dream. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Um, so it's been really hard to come to that acknowledgement maybe because we've gotten this idea that the ideal of total freedom only exists by traveling all the time.

But is this the whole truth? Beautiful. Or is something else, or is it something else we have idealized into our minds? Like it's something else that we've grabbed onto this ideal that it's not completely accurate, right? Can we come to a point in our life where we actually need to seek more balance to feel physically and mentally more whole and well? Travel expands this and is so amazing on so many levels of growth, but can the other side of it be the same? And, um,

It's as if life has many layers and that traveling is not the only one, you know, when you cross borders and being out there all the time, it's not the only one, but there's a lot of wisdom and slowing down and being still in the same place. Beautiful. So when I read this, I was like, yep, I get that 100 % because I have gone through all of that. And we have actually experienced intentionally both sides of this.

So like 100 % homeless and having a home. Yes. And now we are, we do both. We have two homes actually. And we're out traveling right now. We are homeless. Well, we have two homes that aren't our homes because we're not there. We're not there and they're being rented out and we're seeking a new home base.

but we don't yet have it. So we are at the moment temporarily, nomadically homeless, again on purpose, but still moving forward and seeking to have that home base so that we also have that other side. And so in our own journey, you know, and I think that this is normal, we began the normal life, having a home, and then we sought out the travel life.

Rachel Denning (13:43.533)
And we wanted to do that full time because of all these reasons. It felt freeing, it felt exciting, it felt like we were learning so much and growing so much and experiencing so much. But then there did come this point where it no longer felt that way all the time. And there was things we wanted to do that we couldn't do. Like you're completely inhibited, like you said, having a grand piano or a piano at all.

when you're traveling. Or those grazing vegans I want. Right, you can't have a cattle. You can't grow a garden. There's just things you cannot do if you're traveling full time. Now again, this is a metaphor, so apply it to your own life as well. But we felt like if we gave up on that, if we went back to live a home life, a normal life, well, aren't we just giving up on our dream? Aren't we just...

Aren't we basically saying that everything we believed in and lived is not true? That's kind of what it feels like. Because you feel like if you switch, or you go to do this other thing that's the opposite of what you were doing.

as we mentioned before, it's like you're betraying yourself. You're betraying who you were and what you believed in. Or it can feel like it's hypocritical. And some people will say things like, I thought you were like nothing but this. I'm like, whatever. You can think whatever you want. I'm completely uninterested. Your opinions are none of my business. But in our in our own journey, we started to feel more of that. And so.

At first we chose the full -time travel lifestyle because that was what we could afford to do. We could not afford to do both. So that definitely comes into it as well. Like there was a time when we couldn't afford to do both. We could do one or the other. And it wasn't because we were victims. It's because I was incompetent. Let's just state that as it is. But I didn't know that at the time. Right. So I was ignorantly incompetent.

Rachel Denning (15:51.021)
Right, you were unconscious of your incompetence in the competency and hierarchy. And in the framework I existed in, I thought, man, there's one way to earn that kind of income and that would limit the kind of life I want to have and so I'm not doing that. So for us or that, it was one or the other. Yes. And so there is a way, of course, to do both things. And I think that's part of this discussion as well. Right. It's like, if you want two things, find a way to do both. Find a way to have two careers if you want. Find a way to have a home base and travel if you want.

Find a way to be... Vegan and rot. Be a carnivore and eat salads, I guess, if you want. An omnivore. Or have your meat eat the salad for you. I don't know, we're just playing with the food thing. But this starts to apply to so many things. As you were sitting there talking, I was like, this applies across the board. That's why it's a beautiful metaphor. Because there's people that...

get into religion. And they go so far, so deep into religion, they actually get pretty lopsided. And they become too churchy and fanatical or weird or they get so myopic or narrow -minded or they get so enclosed they think the only truth is in my truth. And the only good people in the world are the ones here in my congregation or...

The only way to do life is this way. And it gets so narrow it's wrong. Then there's other people that look at religion and they say organized religion is a mess and has a history of horrible atrocities like I'm out. I will never go to organized religion. Or they become completely agnostic and they don't believe in anything and so they become nihilistic. So you see the swing way too far to either spectrum.

Where you can come back and say, too much yin or too much yang. Yeah, you can come back and say, actually, you know, I can see the deep value of faith and religious practices, and yet I can still be in the world. I can still exist and operate and understand the people and truth and the complexities of life. I can see all of that. You can, it's the same with education.

Rachel Denning (18:14.285)
You might think homeschoolers are just total nut jobs and say, I'm never homeschooling my kids. And you go all the way into like government schooling. Or you might swing all the other side and like the only way to get any education or do anything good is to do it yourself in the middle of nowhere by yourself and never interacting with anyone in the world. Yeah. Compound. And the only people allowed on our compound have to be approved ahead of time. Like you can go too far. You can do it socially. You can do it with work.

You can do it with business. I mean, this applies in so many ways of having this temperance. I was thinking of Francis Bacon's quote where he says, you start studying philosophy. He says, if you go halfway into philosophy, you throw out religion, you no longer believe in God and you lose it. He says, but if you go all the way and do the full circle of philosophy, it actually brings you back to God. Well, this reminds me of a couple of things. One of them I want to talk about, so don't forget me.

Don't forget me. Don't let me forget. I will never forget you dear because you are so unbelievably unforgettable. Don't let me forget. I want to talk about people we have met that are, for lack of a better word, imbalanced. But I also want to talk about something that for me has become a personal symbol of this concept and that's what we call the labyrinth. Now the specific...

labyrinth I always have in mind is actually on the floor of a church in France. We've never been there. I've only seen pictures of it, but there is a replica of that labyrinth in Aiken, South Carolina that I've literally walked myself. And what it represents, especially this one, is... So the difference between a labyrinth and a maze is a maze has dead ends. And you get lost and you stop and you have to turn around and go back. A labyrinth actually goes the entire course...

but it starts in one place and ends in the middle. So if you walk the entire thing, you don't get lost and there's no dead ends, you walk the whole labyrinth. Every single pathway. And in the middle you end up in the center. So this idea of the labyrinth is that in order to become your very best self, you actually have to walk.

Rachel Denning (20:34.573)
the entire path. You have to go the entire journey. You have to go north, south, east, west. You have to go here, there, and everywhere. You have to go into all of those different areas, and that is what brings you back to the center and makes you whole. So this idea, like with Francis Bacon, if you study some philosophy, it takes you away from God and you lose your religion, but if you continue to study it, it actually brings you back and centers you and makes you whole.

But because people are afraid to do that, they're afraid of quote unquote moving away from God, or they're afraid of stepping into the darkness, or they're afraid of this, they never walk that path. They're afraid of being in the world, and being too worldly, or whatever it is. Some people are afraid of being poor, some people are afraid of being rich. Yeah. So because of that, instead of continuing to move forward and to make progress, they actually stay where they are. And if you're thinking about this, you know, it's actually ...

walking the labyrinth. It's almost like they just keep walking back and forth in that one little area. They're like, oh, I don't want to go over there. That's scary. That's frightening. And I found this spot. It's really comfortable and nice. Let's just keep walking back and forth right here in this little corner of the labyrinth. Right. And so you actually end up limiting your own growth and progress because you don't want to keep walking into that scary part of the labyrinth.

But I will say this, there are times and seasons where you might want to, with real clear thinking and deliberate action, to be a little one -sided. Like there may be a time when you want to be a full -on minimalist, where you just, you have, you purposely have very, very little. And then you might want a time where you have, purposely have a lot.

Everything you wanted to have but hold on let me play this out. There may be times when you're like, you know, I do I want to be Purposely homeless. I want to just go wander and I have no place to go back to and then you have plays like another time you're like, ah, I just want a place and I just want to be here for a while and so you get kind of one side of the other but The warning here the concern is this is where the what we talked about at the beginning is your mind will start playing tricks on you. I

Rachel Denning (22:55.405)
and it's easy to get stuck or trapped or lopsided when you're on the side of things. Well, because in my mind, the way I visualize it is what you were describing to me is walking the labyrinth. Because if you say you divide the labyrinth into quadrants, it's a circle, you divide it into quadrants. And maybe this is really how balance works. Maybe balance isn't about doing it.

balanced in an even way or at the same time. It's almost as doing it, it's kind of the swinging of the pendulum. You can't walk and be on both feet at the same time. You can't. In order to walk, you have to lift up one foot. So in order to go through the labyrinth, you have to go through each of the quadrants. And sometimes that looks like I'm completely minimalist, you know, whatever example it is, but it's like you're extremely into one thing.

the challenge arises when you stay extremely into that one thing. Exactly what I was gonna say, when you stop. It's really about going there and then coming back to a place that's balanced instead of going there and staying there. That's where the problems lie, I think, is when you go to that area but then you never wanna leave. So to me, this...

journey, the whole process, the whole balance is found by walking that labyrinth, going into each of those quadrants because they're very different, they're very unique, they're very...

What's the word? Extreme, sometimes, sometimes they're extreme, right? Traveling full time, that's extreme. And yet there's so much growth that can be found there. And then if you go to the next quadrant, you're growing a farm or whatever, you know, it's the opposite. Yet by doing both of them, you become a more balanced, well -developed person. Exactly. This metaphor is perfect for life, because you start out helpless and...

Rachel Denning (25:01.773)
Then you go through this childhood and then you're single and you don't want to just stay, you don't want to stay as a child. And some people try to do that and they're adults, but they're very childish. They never leave that or they are single and they just, I'm going to always be single. But then you get married, right? Then.

then that's great, you're in this space of like, it's just us. You could stay there and a lot of people decide to stay there, like, oh, we're gonna stay here. We're gonna have kids, because it would disrupt this, it would disrupt us. But then you have kids, and some have way more kids, and you have this thing, but then your kids start to move out again. Right, and where some moms or some parents don't want their kids to grow up. Yes, they get so stuck being.

It's their identity, like they have to feel needed. And when they had kids, they felt needed. And when the kids started to move on, they're like, no, I'm not letting my kids move on. I'm moving in with them or I'm following them or I'm going to call them and I just, I can't let go. But guess what? You go back to again, and this is again, we're, this is this ideal situation. You go back to just being a couple again. And some couples can't handle that because they didn't walk through the labyrinth. They got stuck or they want to stay stuck. And then,

You know, in reality, maybe one of you dies before the other, and then you're single again. That's not gonna be our case. We're gonna die together. We're going out together, babe. We're not dying ever. We're just gonna keep living. And then you start to deteriorate into this old childhood, and then you become helpless again, and then you leave this life. And so you walk this whole labyrinth.

But if you try to stay in one quadrant or one spot, it's out of balance. It doesn't work. So we have to make this one short, but I just want to end on this one little thing because I feel that it's relevant because in our personal journey where we have traveled a lot, we've been to a lot of places, we've met a lot of people, there's been a few times where we've...

Rachel Denning (27:14.285)
We've said, you know what, we've met these people. They're really awesome people. They're honestly good people. And yet there was something there that we couldn't always put our finger on, although I think we started to identify that, which I'm talking about, of where just something was missing. It's like something was missing. It's not that they were bad or they were... It's like they were really thriving in one quadrant.

of the labyrinth. Yeah, okay, so that's what I'm getting at. And you're like, dang, you're so good at this. Like, this is fantastic. But then you subtly realize, oh, wait a minute, you're underdeveloped in this other one. And it's a little lopsided. Right, and so it's, we started to notice this thing where that's the best way we know how to describe it now. It's that there's people out there that are really good people, and they're really thriving in their thing, in their area.

but there just was something missing. And I think what's missing is walking this journey. It's that they haven't gone to some of the areas in the labyrinth. They've never walked there. They've never explored it. In some ways they've never even thought about it and never wanted to. And as a result, it's left them, for lack of a better word, underdeveloped. And it was - I think that's a perfect word. Yeah. And without that full development,

you just can't be your full, you can't reach your full potential. It's just not possible. It's like having massive amounts of book knowledge. You're extremely well read, but you haven't actually been out and done anything. So you're lacking experience or having massive and massive amounts of experience, but you've never actually read a book. Either way, it's like, it's really great. And you have great conversations. You're like, yeah, the other side is missing or being really unhealthy.

or having social stuff or spiritually, whatever. This applies across every aspect of life and the goal here, my friends, is for us all to find this yin and yang, this beautiful balance of having walked and developed the entire aspect of the lab. Okay, gotta run. Love you guys. Reach out.

Rachel Denning (29:33.741)
you