An Introduction to Equanimity

When we talk about mindfulness, most of what we talk about is awareness. And it goes without saying that developing more awareness is truly important, but it’s not the only thing that mindfulness develops. In my opinion, the most sublime product of mindfulness is equanimity.

Equanimity comes from the Pali word upekkha. For those of you that don’t know, Pali was the language that the Buddha spoke. In Sanskrit, the word is upekṣā. Buddhists value it so highly, that it’s considered one of the four „boundless qualities” or one of the „divine abodes“, along with loving-kindness, sympathetic joy and compassion. The original Pali word translates as „to look over“ and that translations illustrates the feeling unusually well. Equanimity is our capacity to look over the situation we’re in, to look over our memories, thoughts and feelings and remain unmoved by them. Some people define equanimity as „seeing with patience“. Sharon Salzberg simply refers to it as nonreactivity. For me, equanimity is the stability of the mind that arises from clear discerning – what I can and cannot control, what I see and what I believe about what I see, etc. My understanding of equanimity is not entirely derived from Buddhism and I will say a few words about that later on.

The Buddha on equanimity

Here’s what the Buddha says about equanimity in Dhammapada. This is an elegant and clear take on the concept.

As a solid mass of rock

Is not stirred by the wind,

So a sage is not moved

By praise and blame.

As a deep lake

Is clear and undisturbed,

So a sage becomes clear

Upon hearing the Dharma.

Virtuous people always let go.

They don’t prattle about pleasures and desires.

Touched by happiness and then by suffering,

The sage shows no sign of being elated or depressed.

Equanimity as protection

Whereas equanimity allows you to look over your experiences, it’s not just that. It’s also a strong protective factor against what is know has the eight worldly winds: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, success and failure, fame and disrepute.

You may wonder: why do you need protection against success and fame? Because of vanity. Why do you need protection against pleasure? Because just like everything else, pleasure is impairment and clinging to it will only cause suffering.

Equanimity will not set you free from these or your desire to experience them, but it will allow you to “look over” while you’re experience them and to, therefore, detach from them with greater ease. You will remain unperturbed.

Equanimity as a caring quality

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking about equanimity as some kind of cold, distant quality. In the past, I’ve had students react very adversely to the mention of equanimity because they would somehow mistaken it for not caring. Equanimity couldn’t be more different. It is a quality that arises from compassion, from our desire to suffer less. Equanimity takes away nothing from your experiences – good or bad ones – it, in fact, adds to them. It adds the powerful insight that you are the on conceptualizing your experiences as good or bad, desirable or undesirable. This insight further provides stability. It helps you survive.

All beings are owners of their own karma

I understand that karma is a highly specific cultural construct and I’m not asking you to adopt the notion if it’s foreign to you. Think of it simply as responsibility for one’s own actions. It’s not quite the same thing, but the parallel works well to understand equanimity.

It’s normal to develop attachment to people, places and/or things that we love. We can cultivate equanimity by simply reminding yourself that you are responsible for yourself and that goes for others. When we feel too much compassion but have too little equanimity, we have a tendency to help when help is not asked, to take other people’s burden on our own backs, to solve problems that are not ours, and to hold ourselves responsible for saving others. When equanimity cooperates with compassion, you extend a helping hand when asked or when the other person feels ready to accept it. When equanimity cooperates with compassion, you have equal compassion for yourself as you do for others. When equanimity cooperates with compassion, you can feel the need to reduce someone’s suffering without sparing them the consequences of their own actions.

Sharon Salzberg (2018, p. 187) recommends the following phrase for meditation on equanimity:

All beings are the owners of their karma.

Their happiness and unhappiness depend

On their own actions, not on my wishes for them.

When you ground yourself, establish mindfulness and spend some time focusing on the breath to calm your mind, you can slowly recite these words so that you can plan them as seeds in your consciousness. Reflect on their meaning, observe how they make you feel.

If you don’t like to involve metaphysical concepts like karma in your meditation practice, you can use the phrase that I use in my own practice:

All beings are responsible for their own actions.

I am only responsible for what is in my control.

Sometimes I will meditate for 5 minutes between sessions with clients, and using this phrase in meditation helps be me a better therapist. A therapist who takes responsibility that is not theirs is a bad therapist. For me to help my clients, I have to know what is in my power and what is in theirs. Equanimity helps me keep those boundaries in place.

Ataraxia

Even though I’ve focused here on Buddhism, this is not the only philosophy where we find equanimity. It’s a concept that is ubiquitous in European philosophy, or at least in those ancient schools of philosophy where good life was the object of their considerations. That is, nowadays, rarely the case with academic philosophy.

In European philosophy, equanimity is known as ataraxia. This is an important concept in philosophies such as Epicureanism, Stoicism and Pyrrhonism. The last school on the list, also known as skepticism, is my favorite and so it will be the one I will talk about the most. Skepticism is called Pyrrhonism because of its founder, Pyrrho of Elis. None of his writings survive, but we do have extant writings of one of his followers, Sextus Empiricus.

Sextus Empiricus himself didn’t consider skepticism as a philosophy, so much as a movement. Over the centuries, from their contemporaries all the way to my friend Matthew, philosophers have been outraged and rather harsh towards skepticism. Matthew says it’s “anti-philosophy”, he calls it self-defeating and that’s only the beginning. Matthew, however, much like many of his professors hasn’t actually read Sextus Empiricus. Instead, he relies on interpretations and summaries from textbooks. And even though written by intelligent people, those are necessarily infected by implicit biases. Skepticism is an approach to knowledge which practically denies that we have any. When you’re a philosopher, in search of truth, skepticism is by definition terribly threatening as it makes your efforts look like futile intellectual exercises.

Sextus Empiricus tells us that equanimity arises once we suspend judgement. If you read his surviving works, you can see that this isn’t meant to paralyze you or put you in a state where you can’t make a decision. Instead, suspending judgment just means that you don’t treat anything whatsoever as a dogma. You can look at ideas as useful tools, but you can’t treat them as absolute truths.

Here’s a quote from Sextus Empiricus himself:

For the person who believes that something is by nature good or bad is constantly upset; when he does not possess the things that seem to be good, he thinks he is being tormented by things that are by nature bad, and he chases after the things he supposes to be good; then, when he gets these, he falls into still more torments because of irrational and immoderate exultation, and, fearing any change, he does absolutely everything in order not to lose the things that seem to him good. But the person who takes no position as to what is by nature good or bad neither avoids nor pursues intensely. As a result, he achieves ataraxia.

My worldview being constructivist, I feel a close kinship with Sextus Empiricus and I admire his method quite a lot. In my personal practice, I use it daily. Every time I catch myself getting upset or overly happy, I remind myself that what is making me feel one way or another is just my construct that reality isn’t bound to follow or care about. This may seem like a silly thing to do, but I’ve seen rather incredible results with this approach over the years.

Is this in my control?

For Stoics, ataraxia is certainly a desirable state of mind, a sign of wisdom, but achieving it is not their endgame, which is why I won’t be talking much about them. And in all honesty, I am incredibly ambivalent towards Stoic philosophy, and especially the pop-cultural interpretations of it that make it downright banal.

Stoics place a lot of emphasis on discipline and action. We can learn a lot from them in those areas.

For Stoics, control plays an important role in determining how to act. Here’s what Epictetus (Discourses, 2.5.4–5) says:

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.

Their advice is to, in every situation, ask the following: what is in my control and what is beyond it? Simply remembering to ask this question can already make you feel more stable. It creates clarity and gives you direction. Knowing what’s in your control helps you delineate where you can act and what you have to live with and accept.

The right perspective

A rather morbid exercise that helps me maintain equanimity is to ask myself one simple question: one day, hopefully in distant future, when I’m on my deathbed, will this be truly important?

This question, if you can put your aversion towards death aside, is a powerful balancing factor. The idea is not to repeat the question without actual reflection, but to really feel the gravity of the situation. In my experience, death puts things into perspective. When I look at administration or taxes or a rude salesperson through the lens of my life ending, suddenly all those things become minor, insignificant inconveniences, not worth losing sleep over.

Meditation for people we care about

When people we care about are in trouble, equanimity is difficult to maintain. In meditation, you can visualize those persons one by one and use one of the following phrases to speak to them:

·        I wish you happiness but cannot make choices for you.

·        I will care for you but cannot keep you from suffering.

My preferred approach is to add a phrase or two in my daily mindfulness practice, only without focusing on a specific person. Instead, I will use a more general phrase. I usually choose among these:

·        Things are as they are. (Alternatively: May I accept things as they are.)

·        May I accept the arising and the passing away.