Finding Your Balance

You can overdo the inner life too. Even the medicine has a right dose.

The old book calls balance an art — and it means that literally. It’s not a formula you apply once and you’re done. It’s a feel you develop, a constant small adjusting, like a musician tuning by ear or a cook tasting as they go. And it insists that this rightness of measure belongs in everything, including — maybe especially — the inner work itself.

Because here’s a trap that catches sincere people: once you’ve tasted a little of this, you can swing too hard. You can become rigid about your practice, harsh with yourself when you miss a day, so strict about “doing it right” that you squeeze all the ease out of the very thing that was supposed to bring you ease. Strain is just as much an enemy of stillness as neglect is. Grip the practice too tight and it stops working, the same way a fist can’t hold water.

Not too tight, not too slack. The middle isn’t a compromise — it’s where the thing actually works.

And the other failure is obvious: too slack. The practice drifts, the kindness fades, the good intentions quietly evaporate. We’ve all done both — gone all-in for two intense weeks and then vanished for two months. The art is finding the sustainable middle, the pace you could actually keep for years, and trusting that gentle and steady will take you further than fierce and brief.

This is also just kindness to yourself, which the whole course has been quietly insisting on. You don’t have to be a perfect practitioner. You miss a day, you begin again — without the drama, without the self-punishment that’s really just another extreme. Balance includes being balanced about being unbalanced. Tune, adjust, continue.

Take a breath. There's no rush to the next page.

Where this comes from

From “Balance / Moderation” (ความพอดี), the book’s reflection on right measure as a living art.