Talk: The Development of Equanimity
October 3 – 5, 2008
https://dharmaseed.org. retreats/1149/
Summary:
Rob gives an introduction to equanimity - what it means to have equanimity and how it can help us navigate the world and the challenges that we face in it skilfully. He outlines two techniques for attending to our experience with equanimity and developing this skill.
the focus of this retreat is equanimity in relationship to all the conditions of life, all the situations and experiences that we find ourself in as a human being, coming and going and changing, sometimes favourable and sometimes adverse. What is it to have equanimity in the face of all of that?
As an aside Rob briefly mentions quite beautifully the relationship between equanimity and compassion:
compassion is the movement of the heart in response to the suffering in the world, and when the heart that is open and moved by compassion encounters suffering in the world, it trembles with that suffering. The open heart, the empathic heart, is touched by the suffering in the world and wants to respond, wants to move out, to heal, to alleviate the suffering. And that, the totality of that, is what we call compassion – this empathy, this trembling, and this wanting to heal, wanting to soothe suffering.
in our life and the complexity of our life and all the kind of conditions that come together, we quickly realize that our efficacy is limited. What we can do to help another or others can be very great and it’s important that we do that, but it’s also limited. And the realization of the kind of balancing of the wish to heal, the balancing of that with the realization of the limitations of my wish to heal and the limitations of my efforts, that’s equanimity in relationship to compassion.
Practice 1: Being with what arises (vedana)
- Bring your attention to a line between your navel and the top of our head. In this region is where the majority of our emotional life manifests as felt experience.
- Look for the changes in your experience. The subtle or not so subtle shifts in body sensation throughout.
- The words “May I be at peace with the flow of experience” may help you remember and be with the changing experience of your body.
Practice 2: Tuning in to the vedana
- This is a practice of focusing on the vedanā. Can we keep tuning in, keep attending, tuning in the attention to this simpler, more basic level of experience, just over and over again? It’s a much simpler level. And what that does, first of all, it simplifies. It simplifies. We get so used to complexity and the whirlwind of complexity. It’s actually just simplifying. A peace comes with just that simplifying. And there’s something here to understand that’s absolutely crucial for us as human beings to understand. Out of that understanding, out of the simplicity, and out of the peace comes freedom, comes equanimity.
- vedanā in the vedanā:
- So what tends to happen is we can be sitting in meditation or in our day, and we feel, I don’t know, a constriction in the heart area, and it’s unpleasant, and then how quickly we interpret that block, that constriction: “Ah, I haven’t sorted out my relationship with my mother. I haven’t …” whatever it is. Some self-view comes in. And it’s added something on the top of it.
- can we see the feeling in the feeling, the vedanā in the vedanā?
- When there is a pleasant vedana, we want to keep it — craving. When there is an unpleasant vedana we want to escape it — aversion.
- The practice is becoming aware of this second order vedana/reaction. The vedana happens (noticing it is practice 1); our reaction to the vedana (noticing the subtlety in that is practice 2).
Key takeaway:
This is a skill, an art that we can develop as meditators. What we begin to notice if we can do this is that as we relax the reaction, suffering begins to drain from experience. So here’s something unpleasant, and we’re suffering because of that unpleasantness, but as I learn to relax my relationship to it the suffering tends to drain from the experience. You can also relax some of the fraughtness with craving, and the suffering drains. You begin to see that the vedanā itself, the pleasantness or the unpleasantness is actually not a problem. That’s not the problem in our life. For the most part we suffer because of our relationship, because of our reaction of being pushed and pulled, of pushing and pulling.
What is equanimity
The eight wordly conditions are split into four pairs:
praise and blame,
success and failure,
gain and loss, and
pleasure and pain.
We like one axis of these poles. But we are always subject to all eight and the movement between them. What would it be like to have a kind of unshakeability of heart in the face of all that. That is equanimity.
Sometimes we give too much authority to the difficulties that we’re going through; whether they’re physical, mental, emotional or relational or whatever it is. We don’t quite question that authority fully enough. But a whole different way of seeing is possible.
An obelisk set into the earth that does not waver in face of what is thrown at it. This is the analogy of what it is to have equanimity.
Equanimity is an unshakeability of the heart
But, as much as it is about being firmly rooted and solid, there is a flexibility to it too. So equanimity can actually be a very spacious state, very, very open and spacious. There’s a balance in it.
Equanimity is about our relationship to conditions (what is going on).
So we could also describe equanimity as a kind of calming of reactivity. The normal human reactivity in response to things – we like, we don’t like, we want, we don’t want, difficult, easy – that reactivity is just calmed, or there is a calming of that.
Equanimity is a calming of our usual reactivity
Equanimity is not indifference. Not a state of being disconnected or cold. Indifference is when one is shut down or closed down, disconnected, closed, cold, everything’s kind of a bit grey, the whole world and the world of experience has been painted grey. When it’s indifference, what’s happened is that aversion, rejection, pushing away, not wanting, turning away, that quality has crept into the relationship with what’s going on, and it colours everything grey, and it closes the heart, and it closes us down.
Indifference is the near enemy of equanimity. It looks like it but it is very different and often its opposite.
Equanimity has aliveness and openness and brightness to it. Warmth, love and beauty.
Equanimity is not discrete. It is a continuum and we can talk about it deepening over time. In a way equanimity is the highest emotion there is for a human - it is peace.
Importantly, we can think of equanimity as a quietening of our emotionality, but that is absolutely not to deny the beauty and the value of, in a way, the richness of our emotional life as human beings. So as human beings we have this capacity to feel, to resonate, to respond with the heart. The heart space can take all kinds of colours and kind of textures, and can be tender, and there can be sadness and joy and all of that.
And I feel it’s important for us as human beings, very important for us, to actually explore the fullness and the richness of our heart and our emotionality. That’s really, really important. So the two kind of stand together for us as practitioners on the path: both this quietening of the emotional life in equanimity, and the richness of it. Very, very crucial.
The Buddha taught a path that actually involves our whole life. The totality of our existence, every aspect of our life is included in the path. And that path is for the relief of suffering, but very much, for the Buddha, concerned with a complete relieving of suffering, complete freedom from suffering. And in a way, this path is directed to a totally radical awakening, a completely radical re-understanding of the whole nature of existence and reality and our place in it. Totally turning everything upside down. That involves understanding, you know, quite – in the heart, understanding, a non-intuitive understanding of things like emptiness, etc., and if we have time we’ll go into that a little bit. But just to say, the deepest equanimity actually comes from that. It comes from that awakening. It comes from realization of emptiness, etc., from that radical kind of turning upside down.
The deepest equanimity comes from the realisation of emptiness.
Equanimity comes almost, to some degree, easily and naturally when there’s a priority of awakening. It’s an interesting thing. If something in the being has just landed in a place where I’m very clear, in my heart of hearts, in the depth of my heart what I want, and that’s awakening, that’s liberation, that’s to understand fully, it’s almost like everything else begins to just fall into its place.
What often is our priority? Often our priority – and it’s very normal and very human and understandable – is that we want to fix the situation. “I’m not sure where I’m going to live. I need a place to live. I need to fix my money situation. I need to fix whatever it is.” And of course that’s important as human beings.
But something else is possible if we have a shift of priority, and the priority becomes listening to that whisper of the Buddha, listening to that whisper 2,500 – older, even before the Buddha – 2,500 years old, whispering: it’s possible to be free here. It’s possible to be freer. It’s possible to suffer less. It’s possible to be at peace.
We say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that. Why are you saying this? I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it’s possible to be free – after I’ve sorted this out.” Now, this is so normal, it happens all the time. Not all the time; most of the time, perhaps, for us. What is the priority in the moment, and actually is it possible that we’re practising not only this big shift of priority (which may be there or may not be for some people), but in a moment of difficulty, in a moment when things fall apart, in a moment where we feel challenged and pressured, there’s a shift?
There’s a shift in priority. And yeah, we address the situation, and yeah, we look for a place to live, and yeah, we whatever-it-is. But there’s a shift in what’s the most important thing.
Interestingly, to shift priority actually takes faith. It means that that whisper from the Buddha, and other teachers, of course, other traditions, that we kind of believe that at some level. It resonates with something in the heart.
When there’s faith, we can make a shift in priority. Faith rests on experience of the path. It rests on our other practice. It rests on an intuitive sense, that we just intuit there’s another possibility. It rests, interestingly, on letting go of fear.
The basis of this is from the Satipatthana Sutta (“The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness.”) where the Buddha lays out the four foundations of mindfulness.
It is the second of these - feeling tone or vedana (i.e. the affective tone of any given experience) is the basis of how we relate to experiences in the world. It through our relationship with vedana that we can develop a greater sense of equanimity.