Peace of mind isn't a reward. It's a starting point
A yogic take on why balance matters and what we're really reaching for
Hi dear one.
It’s been a lot of AI content lately, trying to figure out how we can all co-exist with this genie they’ve let out of the bottle. So I needed a breath before diving back in. A moment to come back to myself. Back to some sort of balance with it all. And balance, as it turns out, is exactly what this is about.
In Bali we have a lot of geckos. There’s one on my wall right now. She’s been there for about twenty minutes, completely still, watching me type. She doesn’t appear to be having a crisis about whether her spiritual practice is consistent enough, or whether that heavy breakfast was a bad idea, or whether she should be meditating instead of hunting insects.
She’s just... there. Fully. In her body, alert in her mind, doing whatever it is geckos do that passes for soul.
I’ve been thinking about her as I try to write this, because the moment I type the words “mind, body, and spirit,” I notice something. Most of us feel an instinctive longing when we hear them together like that. A recognition. Yes. That’s what I want. I want those three things to feel okay at the same time.
What we’re really reaching for, I think, isn’t a perfect schedule or a flawless routine. It’s something quieter than that. Something my teacher Nalanieji comes back to again and again, and that the entire yogic tradition is essentially organized around:
Peace of mind.
Not happiness, exactly. Not the absence of difficulty. Peace. That still, steady place underneath the noise, that you can return to, even when life is full and complicated and loud.
Balance is the path. Peace of mind is what’s waiting at the centre of it.
Three things that are always talking to each other
In yogic philosophy, the human being isn’t three separate departments that need to file reports to each other. Mind, body, and spirit are more like three instruments in a single piece of music. Sometimes one carries the melody. Sometimes another does. The art isn’t in making them all play at the same volume. It’s in learning to hear all three and to keep returning to the harmony when one instrument pulls away.
The body is the most honest of the three. It doesn’t have an agenda. It doesn’t gaslight you. If you’re exhausted, it tells you. If something is wrong, it whispers and then, when ignored long enough, stops whispering entirely. Your body is the one living in actual time, not in yesterday’s regret or next week’s anxiety. This is why every serious wisdom tradition begins with the body. Breath. Posture. Movement. Not as a warm-up to the real spiritual work, as the spiritual work itself.
The mind is the trickiest one. Brilliant, creative, relentlessly productive and also completely capable of convincing you that the worst-case scenario is not only possible but probable, and somehow your fault. The mind narrates everything. Left unexamined, it runs the show loudly. The yogic tradition calls this chitta vritti the fluctuations of the mind and the entire project of yoga, as Nalanieji teaches it, is essentially the quieting of those fluctuations. Not by force. Not by suppression. But by gently, persistently returning your attention to something steadier. That’s the practice. That’s how the mind becomes a tool rather than a tyrant.
And then there’s spirit, the one that’s hardest to point at. I’m not going to tell you what to believe about it. What I will say is that most people, in some quiet moment, watching a sunset, holding a new born, sitting in stillness, have felt something the mind couldn’t fully explain and the body couldn’t fully account for. A sense of something larger. Of belonging to something that doesn’t begin and end with you. That’s the thread. You don’t have to call it God. You don’t have to call it anything. But ignoring it is its own kind of imbalance and the mind, interestingly, is the first to suffer when spirit goes unfed.
What imbalance actually looks like
The strange thing about being out of balance is that it rarely announces itself clearly. It disguises itself as something reasonable.
You work long hours because you’re dedicated. You skip the walk because you’re busy. You stop sitting quietly with yourself because it’s uncomfortable. You intellectualize your grief, your longing, your exhaustion, turn it into analysis, into something that looks like productivity. And all the while, one of the three is starving.
When the body is neglected, the mind gets foggy and the spirit gets brittle. When the mind is neglected, either by numbing it or overworking it, the body holds the tension or the spirit has nowhere to land. When spirit is neglected, when we forget that we are more than our to-do lists and our metrics and our output, we can find ourselves doing everything right on paper and feeling completely hollow.
The imbalance doesn’t always feel dramatic. Sometimes it just feels like a low-grade hum of not-quite-okay. A vague restlessness. A sense that you’re moving through your life like a visitor, watching it happen to someone who looks like you.
That feeling is information, it’s not a failure, and it’s a signal. And according to everything the yogic tradition teaches, it’s pointing you toward the same place it always points: back inside. Back toward that peace that was never actually gone, just buried under the noise.
What rebalancing actually looks like (Hint: Not a retreat)
Here’s what I want to gently push back against: the idea that recalibrating mind, body, and spirit requires a special occasion. A retreat. A complete overhaul. A version of yourself with more time, more money, or fewer responsibilities.
I live in Bali, so I’m very aware of how easy it is to outsource this to the setting. The rice paddies, the temples, the smell of incense every morning that is in the air, it all does something. But I’ve also met plenty of people who come here for two weeks, feel transformed, then go home and slide straight back into the same patterns. Because the transformation wasn’t in Bali. It was always available inside them. Bali just made it easier to hear.
The real work is smaller and less glamorous than we want it to be:
For the body: Not a six-day-a-week training plan. Just the question, what does my body actually need today? Sometimes it’s movement. Sometimes it’s rest. Sometimes it’s standing barefoot on grass for five minutes, feeling the ground, remembering you’re a physical creature in a physical world. The body doesn’t need you to be an athlete. It needs you to pay attention.
For the mind: Less input, more processing. Most of us consume information like its oxygen. We are chronically under stimulated by silence and overstimulated by everything else. Even ten minutes of genuinely doing nothing, not a guided meditation, not a podcast, not scrolling, is a radical act of care for an exhausted mind. Nalanieji often talks about the importance of turning the mind inward rather than always outward. Let it wander. Let it be still. Peace of mind isn’t built in the noise. It’s uncovered in the quiet.
For the spirit: Connection. With something larger than yourself, whatever that means for you. Prayer, nature, creativity, seva (selfless service), and the simple act of being fully present with someone you love. When the spirit is nourished, the mind quiets down and the body follows. It works in that direction too, and faster than you’d expect.
The Goal underneath the goal
When people say they want “balance,” what they usually mean is: I want to feel okay. I want to feel like myself. I want the different parts of me to stop fighting.
Yogic philosophy has a word for what they’re reaching for: samadhi in its fullest sense, or even just sukha, ease, sweetness, a quality of mind that doesn’t depend on everything going perfectly. Peace of mind isn’t the reward you get after you’ve fixed everything. It’s the ground you stand on while you figure things out. It’s available now. In this breath. Under this moment.
Balance, tending to the body, steadying the mind, keeping the spirit fed, is how we keep clearing the path back to it.
The gecko on my wall just moved. She repositioned herself, perfectly calm, and went still again. No drama. No spiral. Just a small, responsive shift in the direction of what she needed.
I think that’s it. That’s the whole teaching.
What’s one part of yourself, mind, body, or spirit, that you’ve been quietly ignoring? Drop it in the comments. No judgment. Just noticing together.
Until next time, stay grateful and curious.
Love and joy,
Kim