Episode Summary

Spiritual balancing is taught in the wisdom of every world religion. Spiritual Balancing is the only spiritual wisdom that links the religions of the East and the West.

Episode Notes

I learned this technique one day when I watched a workman carrying carrying two five gallon pails of spackling compound up some steep stairs in an old house we were remodeling. His euphonious name was Meladin Keladin and I asked him, “Meladin, why are you carrying two buckets of mud when you only really need one?” He replied, “Because two pails keep me balanced. If I only carried one bucket, I would be pulled off to one side and it would hurt my back.” 

Since that moment I have used the concept and the technique of spiritual balancing to help people cope with their griefwork and depression. I have also lectured about spiritual balancing to psychiatrists and psychologists some of whom have adopted it as a therapeutic technique and others have told me politely to keep my day job. What I discovered is that if you ask people who are depressed or suffering, “Is there anything good still left in your life?” they will all answer yes, and they will all be able to name their blessings without hesitation. Their problem is that they are spending all their time thinking about what is going wrong in their life and almost no time thinking about what is still going right. They have become so fixated, so obsessed, with their suffering that the thoughts of their blessings are crowded out by their need to fixate on their burdens and they have therefore been spiritually strangled. So I ask them to spend five minutes recounting their burdens to me in excruciating detail. Then I ask them to spend exactly the same amount of time recounting to me their blessings. At the end of the session many of them feel more balanced. That is spiritual balancing and that is the topic of this episode. 

My absolute favorite rabbinic legend (midrash) teaches this point precisely. The rabbis ask, why was it that some of the people who crossed the Red Sea argued with Moses and God as soon as they went free on the other side? They answer, “Those people did not see the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea. But others asked, ‘How could they not have seen the miracle? They were walking through the middle of Sea themselves and their eyes were open?’ But the others answered, ‘They did not see the miracle because they never looked up, and so all they saw was mud.’”  They were so consumed by the dangers of the Exodus; they missed the miracle of the Exodus. All they needed to do was to look up and down and the journey ahead would have become balanced and easy. 

Spiritual balancing is taught in the wisdom of every world religion. Yin and Yang are the symbols of spiritual balancing in the I Ching. In Buddhism the eight fold noble path is the heart of Buddhist teachings, and its purpose is to teach those seeking enlightenment to walk a balanced middle path in their life between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification. Says the Dalai Lama, "...the practice of Dharma, real spiritual practice, is in some sense like a voltage stabilizer. The function of the stabilizer is to prevent irregular power surges and instead give you a stable, balanced and constant source of power."

Spiritual Balancing is the only spiritual wisdom that links the religions of the East and the West.