MAINTAIN BALANCE

Finding stability in a world that never stops changing

In the late 1960s, in a small apartment in Calcutta, people with families, jobs and responsibilities came to learn meditation from a woman named Dipa Ma. She did not live secluded in a monastery or teach from a temple. Her proposal was much closer to everyday life: there was no need to escape from life to find balance. Life itself could become the place where we learn to recover it, precisely because that is where emotions, interruptions and events capable of throwing us off balance appear.

Born in 1911 near Chittagong, in present-day Bangladesh, Dipa Ma trained in vipassanā meditation in Burma and later began teaching in India. Her influence would eventually reach some of those who spread these practices in the West. What interests us is her insistence on integrating attention into everyday activities: walking, cooking, caring for others or doing daily tasks. Balance had to work precisely when life stopped being calm.

We tend to imagine balance as a perfect state in which everything is finally in order. Yet we only need to watch a tightrope walker to discover the opposite. Their apparent stability is the result of countless corrections: they sense a deviation, slightly adjust their position and keep moving forward. Balance is not immobility, but a dynamic process of detection, adjustment and recovery. A balanced person would not be someone whom nothing disturbs, but someone capable of recognizing that they have been displaced and readjusting.

In the tradition in which Dipa Ma trained, there is a particularly useful concept: upekkhā, usually translated as equanimity. It does not mean indifference, emotional coldness or absence of feeling. We can intensely enjoy joy, love or enthusiasm and also experience fear, sadness or pain. The question is whether we can feel all of this without being completely governed by it. An emotion contains information, but it does not have to automatically become an instruction.

This is where it is worth looking at science fiction too. Not to escape reality, but to understand it better. Science fiction works as a laboratory for thought experiments: it changes one of the rules of our world and observes how we react. By taking our dilemmas to extremes, it makes visible human mechanisms that normally remain hidden. Three great works allow us to examine balance from very different perspectives.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin takes Genly Ai to Gethen, a world where some of his categories about sex, gender, identity and behaviour no longer work. The real journey consists of recognizing the limits of the mental maps through which we interpret reality. Sometimes recovering balance does not mean returning to our certainties, but accepting that some of them need to be reconsidered.

Contemporary science studies some of the processes related to this capacity from another perspective. Researchers such as Richard Davidson, Antoine Lutz, Gaëlle Desbordes and David Creswell have examined practices related to attention, acceptance, self-awareness and emotional regulation. There is no single form of meditation, nor do they all train the same processes. But some allow us to observe something extraordinarily important: we can become aware of what our own mind is doing.

That is precisely what The Matrix turns into science fiction. Neo discovers that it is not enough to question what is happening: he must question the system through which he interprets what is happening. Outside the Matrix, something less spectacular but very ordinary happens. A thought may not be true, an intuition may not be infallible and an intense emotion may not describe the whole situation. There can be a space between thinking something and believing it; between feeling something and acting on it too.

A simple attention practice allows us to experience this. We focus on our breathing, a thought appears and we begin to follow it. At some point, we realize that our attention has wandered and we return. We do not need to keep the mind empty. Training also happens when we detect the deviation and decide to return. It is exactly what our tightrope walker was doing on the wire.

Emily Lindsay and David Creswell have studied the relationship between monitoring and acceptance. Being aware of an emotion does not guarantee a balanced response. We may know that we are angry and still react impulsively. Acceptance introduces another possibility: recognizing an experience without immediately starting a battle against it. Acceptance does not mean resignation, but seeing clearly enough what is happening before deciding what to do.

Dune takes this question into the realm of fear. Paul Atreides has been trained to preserve his capacity for observation and response under extraordinary pressure. Frank Herbert does not imagine a hero incapable of feeling fear, but someone capable of moving through it without automatically handing it control. That distinction is fundamental: maintaining balance does not mean eliminating our emotions, but preventing each of them from immediately becoming an order.

That is also the value of these stories. Gethen questions our categories, the Matrix our perception and Arrakis our relationship with fear. Science fiction exaggerates what can throw us off balance so that we can better observe how we respond. We do not need to travel to other worlds to experience something similar: an argument, an opportunity, unexpected news or the fear of making a mistake can quickly change how we interpret a situation.

Research on meditation and mindfulness offers interesting results, although exaggerated promises should be avoided. Certain programmes have shown benefits related to stress, anxiety and some depressive symptoms, while their relationships with attention, self-awareness and emotional regulation are also being studied. But meditation does not guarantee better decisions, creativity, leadership or wisdom. It can improve some of the conditions from which we make decisions, but it does not decide for us. We still need knowledge, experience, values and judgment.

Nor is there a universal recipe. Contemplative practices differ, people differ too, and research has documented adverse experiences in certain practices and circumstances. Reducing Dipa Ma to a precursor of contemporary wellbeing would also be historically misleading. Her teaching belonged to a much broader spiritual tradition. We can, however, take from it a powerful idea: momentarily losing our centre is part of life; learning to return can be trained.

We can test this by observing our breathing for a few minutes. The mind will wander towards a worry, a memory or a pending thought. When we realize that this has happened, we return. Then it will happen again, and we return again. We are not trying to turn ourselves into emotionally perfect machines, but to practise something deeply human: recognizing a deviation and making a correction.



Dipa Ma and these three imagined universes ultimately meet in the same reflection. Our reality will continue to change, we will continue to feel, and there will be moments when we lose perspective, stability or direction. We cannot always control what throws us off balance, but we can develop our ability to recognize it, readjust and find our way again. Therefore, maintain balance.