I often feel that I am thinking too much, or that my mind is running away from me. Maybe you know the feeling – planning too far ahead, or worrying about all those things that you have to do by the end of the week. Lately, I have felt overwhelmed by work – all of the emails! – and weighed down by the world’s unimaginable problems and my inability to solve them.

Something is off. Something that yoga can fix.

In an Ethics class I teach, we study Aristotle’s golden mean. It has to do with finding the balance between two extremes. The virtuous person, according to Aristotle, is the one who can find the golden mean, or middle ground, between the vice of excess and the vice of deficiency. We can develop a virtuous character by acting, intentionally, to form good habits. Only then can we reach what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “human flourishing.”

Before Aristotle, the Buddha emphasized a similar search for the Middle Way, or balance. In one Buddhist fable, the spiritual leader says this about the musical lute: “The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.”

Well, if I were a lute, I’d definitely be too tight! When we are unbalanced, too focused on our thoughts and plans and obligations, we lose a critical connection with our body. We focus too little on our physical well-being. Like building virtuous character, yoga requires practice through habit and intention. The practice of meditation, of re-establishing balance by checking in with our physical form, can be built up and sustained through the cultivation of habit. We might hold a posture, for example, or pause our breath, or even remember to check in on our fingers and toes. The habits we build in class can realign our personal Middle Way, our personal golden mean.

So, if things have gotten too extreme lately on one end or the other, this is your sign. Recommit to your personal practice, and we’ll see you in class.