Some of the reflections we teach need a balance inside. We are often talking about a balance of your practice. Thinking, wisdom, reflection, developing wise thoughts, letting go of thoughts, observing just the breath, the walking meditation, there is a balance on the outside of your practice. There's a balance on how many reflections you can do of one type compared to the others, for instance Compassion/Lovingkindness you can do every day. Sympathetic Joy for a whole hour, no you can't do it every day, there's not enough people to feel joyful for. There's a balance as how you organize your different meditation subjects. And then within some of them, such as Compassion/Lovingkindness, there is a balance in it that we need to develop.
If you focus on the Compassion side too much, it gets heavy, it gets depressive, it's all Dukkha, Dukkha, Dukkha, Dukkha everywhere. If you focus on the Lovingkindness side too much it can get too high, it can get too giddy, "Oh the world is wonderful, everything is lovely." So we want it balanced, we want to know the Dukkha.
We want the Lovingkindness part to come out as a solid, firm understanding not just as a happy, happy feeling, but something solid and firm. Now when people do the Lovingkindness side too much they not only get a bit giddy but sometimes we see they start smiling in the meditation. They are feeling good, they are feeling high, they start smiling. I've heard a person say they did Compassion meditation as a strict practice and they were so happy, they were blissed out, they were going into wild wonderful states. I asked myself "What? How can you reflect on Compassion and get happy? All that they were really talking about was that they developed an absorbed state of mind that blissed out, by repeating certain phrases to themselves, but they weren't actually reflecting.
When you reflect on Compassion you can't get happy, there's absolutely no way to get happy when thinking about Compassion. So when we are balanced, we're not going to get too sad on the Compassion side because we're going to touch the Compassion but then we're going to give it a good wish, and that balances it. If we keep balanced then we'll have equanimity and wisdom supporting our practice. But if we do have too much of the Compassion we're going to get a bit grief stricken. If we have too much of the Lovingkindness then we're going to get too high.