Mon, 24 May 2010
A Balanced Life
The balanced person is happy in all circumstances. The more unbalanced we are, the less makes us happy. We devote our time to chasing after happiness. We become overjoyed when we achieve it and despondent when we do. The effort to find happiness makes us more and more unbalanced. It creates, anger, worry, depression, the whole cast of negative emotions. When we first take up the practice of meditation, we imagine that meditation will make us happy, or at least remove the negative emotions that make us unhappy. Enlightenment is imagined as never ending bliss, an imagined opposite to our current sense of lack. But the purpose of meditation is to bring us back into balance, that is, back to reality as it is and not as what we imagine it might be. Meditation doesn't end unhappiness or make us happy. Rather, when we are balanced we have a natural enjoyment of all circumstances. "Every day is a good day" is not optimism or positive thinking, it's an expression of how things are. And meditatation does not eliminate negative emotions. They fall away as the struggle to achieve is seen as pointless and we relax. What we learn is that contentment is not passive resignation, it's a positive expression of health and well being.
