vital essence
a hand supporting your back

life force energy
a hand cradling your abdomen

human spirit
a hand touching your heart

when these are balanced, poised, and equal
you become spontaneous and full of life

when they are cultivated with ease, relaxation, and naturalness
you resonate harmonically with the tao

when you stay loose and playful reaching out to embrace the world
you become an invincible child impervious to harm

you will see

but if you allow them to compete
with each other
one of them will exhaust the other two
and you will surely die young

what is dying
dying is walking away
from the tao way of life

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; An authentic Taoist translation. translated by John Bright-Fey

Essence, energy, and spirit—what is meant by each of these? If we allow the following line of each to guide us, then we might interpret them to mean . . .
. . . essence as fundamental structure, who we are when all superficial trappings have been stripped away (hence a hand on the back, the spine, the pillar or support-beam which keeps a house from collapsing in on itself);
. . . energy as motive force, as that animation which separates the living from the inanimate (whose focal point is the abdomen, the location of the dantian, a “sea of qi” in traditional Chinese medicine often described itself as life force energy);
. . . spirit as emotion, as feeling, as “the heart” where purpose, meaning, loss, love, and compassion are experienced.

It is no stretch of the imagination that these aspects of humanity ought to be balanced with one another. On the contrary, it is obvious that the man who knows his own nature (his own limitations, abilities and proclivities), who is motivated and ambitious (within those aforementioned limits), and who finds meaning in his action and in his relationships with others would be someone who loves life—and thereby is filled with it. We could go so far as to say such a person embodies the mythical Taoist immortal, for such a man lives each moment to moment engaged in life. For him, time is irrelevant. He has already accepted what has occurred, is occurring, and what is to come. That is what it means to live according to the Tao, to come to love the journey of life more than any one of life’s destinations.

But suppose a man did not find such a balance. What would his life be like? Imagine one who values his essence over motivation and meaning—he will quickly become stultified, stuck on a single iteration of himself without the necessary energy or spirit necessary for self-transformation. Now Imagine one who values ambition over his essence and purpose—he is the workaholic who sacrifices his own happiness and relationships for the sake of something he doesn’t even want. Now imagine one last man who values meaning, purpose, and compassion over his essence and his motive force—such a man is doomed to one of two dark roads: either he will sacrifice himself for the sake of others, or he will over-extend himself and repeatedly fail. Whichever road he goes down, he will only ever escape into the other.

The ultimate result of the described imbalance is an “early death,” by which we can understand to mean a kind of death during life. In all three cases, our unbalanced man strayed from the narrow Road. He strayed from the Way, from the Tao way of life—opposite from an affirmation of being. Where else could this lead him but to deny life itself?

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Fifty-Five”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.109