Achieve Mental and Emotional Balance in Life

Living a balanced life involves more than just your choices of outward activities. Achieving a state of mental and emotional stability provides a steady foundation to support you through any kind of life situation. So how can you achieve this unshakable emotional and mental balance? Sadhguru explains:

Sadhguru: “Life is balance. Everything that you see as life, everything that you see as yourself is beautiful only when it is in balance. Right now, if I lose my balance in body, I will fall off this chair. Sitting is balance. Standing is definitely balance. Standing on these two legs and balancing is not a simple act; you have taken it for granted. When you were an infant and tried to stand up, you know what it took? You are doing it effortlessly right now. If the body goes little out of balance, then you will see, just to stand is such a feat. Don’t take this balance for granted.

Just like sitting and standing, walking is supreme balance. Just two feet! The way you are walking, do you know how much is involved just to keep you balanced when you walk? It is a big thing.

If you lose balance in your thought, it is called insanity. If you lose balance in your emotion, the very juice of life, it becomes torture, both for yourself and for others. Your body, your thought, your emotion, your activity, everything is beautiful only when it is in balance.

So, how to bring balance into one’s life? What is the basis of this balance? Balance is such that even if you are on the battlefield, you are still balanced. If your inner balance is absolute, you can harness the external, your body, and your mind, to the highest possible level – and that is all a human being can do. When it comes to external situations, there is no such thing as perfect balance. Within myself, I may be absolutely balanced, but in activity, it is still a constant adjustment.

There is nobody on this planet who has balanced his outside activity perfectly. I may believe something is perfect, but somebody else says it is nonsense. Isn’t the same thing happening within the family? You think you got everything organized, you are hugely successful in your life, and the whole world is clapping. But your children stand up and say that you are no good.

So, external situations are always going to need an adjustment – constant calibration depending upon the needs of the situation in which we are placed. Balance will come only if you are physically, mentally, and emotionally balanced within. This will naturally find expression in your activity. It is not the activity that is balanced. If you can get the physical body and the mind to function at its highest potential, whatever you could do in this world, you will do to the best of your ability, depending upon the opportunity and the situation. That is all you can do.

Externally, how much activity and how we do the activity is not something you should decide. Activity should always be in line with the situation in which you exist and not be about you. But right now, most people are living here as if the activity is about them. This is simply because who you are has not been established. You are trying to establish it through your activity.

You have heard them say, ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ Look at it, is your existence first or is your thought first? Because you exist you can think, isn’t it?

Once you get into this mode – because you think you exist, because you act you exist  – there is no question of knowing a moment of balance in your whole life. Such a thing is not possible. Outside things may be beautifully arranged, but inside is a big mess because you are going on in a completely different mode all the time, you are trying to handle life upside down.

So, when we say balance, what would be your idea of balance? Today, if the day goes off well, would you call that balance? For me, balance means – if I shut my door and sit down for four or five days, I won’t have a single thought in my mind. I am not trying not to think; if I want to think I have to think, otherwise nothing comes in my mind. I am just empty-headed, because not a single thought arises in my mind unless I think. That is not the case with everybody. They have not known a single moment of no thought in their life unless they were grabbed by something outside, isn’t it? It never happened by yourself simply because you are identified with something that you are not. The moment you are identified with something that you are not, thought is an endless process.

So if you want to get to this state, what do you have to do? Your mind has to take instructions from you, that is the most important thing. In many ways, it has been expressed – not just in India but all over the world. Even Jesus went to the extent of saying this, ‘If therefore thine eye be single, your body shall be filled with light.’ That is, in your physicality, there is always you and me. If you want to balance anything, there must be two, only then balancing becomes a necessity. If your experience of life has transcended the duality of who you are right now, if you transcend the limitations of the physical, something beyond the physical becomes a living reality and now you have a single eye. You have one eye; you are looking at everything the same way.

Now everything is in perfect balance. You don’t strive for balance anymore; existence is balance. It is only the physical reality which is fluctuating. Everything else is in perfect balance. It is only the physical, which is going up and down. Isn’t it so?

So, the most important thing in human life is that you transcend the limitations of the physical. You are the only creature on this planet who has come with that capability; all the other creatures are trapped in their physicality. You are capable of rising beyond the physicality but not going against your physicality. This is not about rejecting the body; it is about going a little deeper, not remaining on the surface. This is one thing that must happen to every human being.”