Dear Friends,
I’m on retreat this weekend, but I’ve queued up this message to keep you company until I’m back on line on Monday.
The “worldly winds”, the vicissitudes – these terms describe what most of us have experienced. There’s a standard list of eight, listed in opposing pairs:
Pleasure and Pain
Gain and Loss
Praise and Blame
Fame and Disrepute
I remember an example from several years ago, I was supporting the computer application that generated tax receipts for students at the post-secondary institution where I worked. The government had introduced a new rule that students could get tax credits for months when they were part-time students, in addition to those for full-time status that was already in place. The standard tax forms had changed, and I had to figure out the calculation of part-time status and update the printing of the form to show the number of full-time and part-time months. We did testing of different scenarios for the calculations and verified they were working, and I got the form output so that it would show everything lined up in the new columns. Hurray! We printed off thousands of the receipts and mailed them. (This was prior to on-line access to this kind of stuff!) The people in the student registration area were pleased. Praise!
And then… someone noticed that we put the full-time data in the part-time column, and vice versa. I was devastated. I remember that sleepless night, where I was trying to figure out how I could make up for that mistake. How much extra postage was I going to cost the institute? How could I have not checked that? Blame! (Mostly from myself.) The registration folks and my supervisor were very understanding; we made the fix and sent out revised copies, and things worked out in the end…
You probably can think of any number of examples in any of these categories. We all want the pleasure, gain, praise, and fame. When we have any of them, we naturally want it to stay… and it doesn’t. We don’t want pain, loss, blame, or disrepute. When any of those is present, we often are trying to make it go away, to deflect it, or to numb out. When equanimity isn’t present, we tend to identify with whatever is present. It’s a sunny day… “This is the best holiday ever!” … and then it storms, “Why do my vacations always suck?”
Christina Feldman:
We develop the habit of leaning toward and pursuing the pleasant, flinching from the unpleasant, and doing all we can to arrange the conditions of our lives in ways that protect us from pain. We rarely appreciate that our very pursuit of pleasure makes us increasingly intolerant of pain and binds us to a life of agitation and anxiety. Equanimity holds within it a quality of resilience that is not an armoring against the winds of the world, but born of inner strength and poise. We are affected deeply by the unexpected changes and events of both the lovely and the unlovely. We will bend before the force of those winds but learn to return to uprightness.
pages 114-115
We cultivate equanimity in our sitting practice. Sharon Salzberg describes it this way:
Sit like a mountain. Sit with a sense of strength and dignity. Be steadfast, be majestic, be natural and at ease in awareness. No matter how many winds are blowing, no matter how many clouds are swirling, no matter how many lions are prowling, be intimate with everything and sit like a mountain.
https://www.lionsroar.com/sit-like-a-mountain-an-image-of-equanimity/
We can practice with phrases. Christina suggests these:
May I embrace change with stillness and calm.
page 117
May I deeply accept this moment as it is.
May my home be a home of balance and spaciousness.
We cultivate equanimity in our practice so that when the winds blow us around in daily life, we’re more likely to have stability.
Christina:
Each time we return to an intentional way of being with both the lovely and the unlovely, we are untangling the patterns of aversion and craving that lead us to abandon the moment. Moments of dissociating and abandoning the moment we are in are all moments that undermine our confidence in the freedom of our own hearts. … Equanimity teaches us to live as if we were a mountain, touched by the winds of the world but unshaken. We learn to be steadfast, receptive, and committed to freedom.
pages 117-118
Pascal Auclair has a talk and leads a guided meditation on equanimity, which you might want to try:
https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/198/talk/50207/
Warm wishes,
Andrea