Episode 173: Balance

As you get older, your sense of physical balance declines a bit;  and so you might think, well, I'll just try to be balanced and just stay there  •  but if you're working with a trainer, they deliberately try to throw you off balance  •  they're looking to see if you can return to balance when you're thrown off — which is the whole point  •  in meditation practice, we're continually trying to find the balance between too tight and too loose  •  as soon as you start to notice that you're losing your balance, you bring yourself back, until eventually the slipping itself brings you back  •  the Buddhist term “middle way” means finding a middle way between all sorts of extremes  •  for example, finding a middle way between “eternalism” on the one hand and “nihilism” on the other  •  eternalism is related to the blind hope that somehow everything is going to work out, and nihilism is the assumption that nothing is going to work out  •  the middle way approach cuts through both extremes: you don't buy into the assumption that some savior figure is going to come save the day and rescue you; on the other hand, you don't conclude that everything's hopeless and you're on your own  •  in a way, you carry such extremes with you like guardrails: you bounce off them and then come back to center  •  it's a very dynamic process: we can regain our balance; we can find a middle way between such extremes  •  like the compassionate bodhisattva, as soon as we slip, the slipping itself brings us back.