How to Find Balance
Understand the Interconnectedness of Power, Balance, and Wisdom
There are three lower energy centers. There are two intermediate centers: the throat center and the chest center. There are two higher centers: the third eye and the crown center. You’re accessing all three meridians, which creates the development of a balanced being.
If you only meditate on the navel center, you get too heavy and you don’t have enough power to deal with life and the world. If you just meditate on the intermediate states, a lot of the emotional body develops — but without the other centers, there’s a lack of balance.
The upper centers are wisdom; the central centers are the perception of life as beauty and truth; the lower centers are the power centers. So we put power, wisdom, and feeling together so that we develop with balance. Without balance, our meditative practice will not escalate.
Choose a Purpose for Life
The purpose of life is happiness. The purpose of life is something that we choose. By choosing a purpose, we learn that we also choose an outcome. Our purpose, our intent, is the outcome immediately. If you feel that the purpose of life is happiness, enlightenment, understanding – then that’s what you’ll experience. You experience or become what you focus on.
Balance is to choose happiness. Balance is to feel that the purpose of life is to love – not necessarily to be loved – to be happy, to be conscious, to be aware, to be fulfilled. And if that’s what you seek, that’s what you’ll find.
Do Something Fun
In college and high school, you get A’s. That’s the game you play. If you don’t play that game, you’re missing all the fun. How many can you get? After college, it’s how much money can you make? If you miss that, you are missing the fun.
Intelligence, on the other hand, is the apprehension of the newness of each moment and being creative. Do something. Don’t be in the waiting room waiting for the perfect person, the perfect career, the perfect meditation teacher. Just go do something fun, something bright. Learn something. Be a student of life.
Meditate
The shortcut to happiness and spiritual balance is to meditate. Meditate twice a day. While you meditate, raise your attention with your willpower to a brighter sphere of consciousness. Learn the discipline of meditation and practice it in a very beautiful way.
The planes of light exist – just as the earth exists, just as the oceans exist, just as the ages exist, they too exist. They are just beyond this dimension, just a little way down the street. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, the mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, towards the planes of light, towards the one perfect creation that is inside your own mind.
All quotes reprinted or included here with permission from The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism