A practical guide to finding harmony and balance in everyday life.

It can be said that most everyone is looking for balance and harmony in life, two of the preconditions for happiness. We are all trying to balance our work with our personal life, our need for individuality with our need for love and relationships, trying to find harmony between our spiritual practice and our need for money.

Anyone who ever tried this can tell you that it’s really hard work, and when life becomes hard the obvious question arises: What do we include and what do we leave out? We have a limited amount of time and energy to spend or invest. We can’t save time, tuck it away under our pillow and store it for a rainy day. We can’t do everything. And so the question remains, what is important enough to invest time in?

In my search for an answer to this question I have come up with a system I call the seven human needs. It is based on my study of the Indian chakra system, the Greek philosophy concerning balance and ethics by Plato and Aristotle, the hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow, the multiple intelligence model by Howard Gardner, the six human emotional needs by Anthony Robbins and the integral work of Ken Wilber. These sources of inspiration coupled with my own experience result in a definition of the seven most important areas of life, all of which are included in our physiology, psyche and social structure. Everyone must find a way to include and balance these seven in order to find and maintain health, happiness and peace of mind.