Question: Sometimes I can hold my concentration, and other times my eyes close and then I wake up because I'm losing my balance. What can help us have more control?

Sri Chinmoy: When you feel that you are tired, exhausted, please breathe in quietly. Take several deep breaths and try to feel that you are breathing in from various places. Try to feel that you are breathing in through the eyes, the ears, the forehead, through the crown of the head, through the shoulders and so on. When you are breathing in, if you are conscious of your breath, then you will not feel sleepy. But being conscious of your breath does not mean that you will make a sound. You will just feel that a stream of energy is entering into you with every breath. Feel that every place you are breathing in is a door. Each time you breathe in, you open a door here, there or somewhere else. Naturally, when you open the door, light enters. Then energy enters through the various doors into your body. This exercise is for everybody.

When you are meditating very well, you can feel that unconsciously you are doing this — you are drawing energy not only through your nose, but through your head and other places. Energy is coming from all quarters, so that universal energy wants to enter into you by various doors. Naturally, the more energy you can draw inside you, the higher will be your meditation. Everything depends on the energy that is circulating inside you. Where does it come from? It comes from the Universal Consciousness. So when you do not have the energy, it means that the Universal Consciousness is not entering into you properly.

If you cannot meditate well, please feel that it is still a necessity to meditate, just as it is a necessity of the body to eat even though you may not get most delicious food. Your wife knows how to cook extremely well, but if she does not give you the most delicious food every day, what will you do? Will you get angry? No, you will just feel that she has done something more important than cooking food. Similarly, you will think that if the Supreme has not given you a good meditation today, He is thinking of doing something more important for you in some other way. Instead of getting angry with Him or disgusted and disheartened, if you have faith, which you have, you will feel that the Supreme is going to give you something else most important. In the case of your wife, her whole existence is inside you. If she cannot give you most delicious food, she will do something else to please you, to make you happy. In God’s case, if God does not give you a good meditation today for some reason or other, He will give you something else which is equally important or more important. In the meantime, your business is to accept whatever He gives you. Even if your wife cooks very untasty food, you have to eat it. Similarly, when you sit down to meditate, you also have to feel that it is up to Him. Meditation is our spiritual food. The Supreme will not give you the same taste every day. He may give you something different each day.

If someone loves us, that person has every right to please us in various ways; otherwise, it becomes monotonous. Today the Supreme is pleasing us through meditation, tomorrow through dedication and the day after tomorrow through something else. He wants to fulfil Himself in and through you in a new way every day. He has every right to change, so we should not have a fixed expectation. If we do, we will be disappointed. If we eat the same food every day, then after a few days we will be sick of it. There should always be variety.