Dear Friends,
Turning now to Sally Armstrong’s talk, “Facets of Equanimity,” which looks at some ways to categorize the many ways equanimity is part of our meditation practices.
Sally again mentions her list of lists. I don’t have her handout, but it likely incorporates items similar to those listed here:
https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/dhamma-lists/
I appreciate her invitation that each of us must find our own way in the practice. The lists can be helpful, to know what’s possible, to know the direction we can go, but each of us has to figure out what that means for our particular circumstances, and how we can weave these different practices to live skillfully with ourselves and each other.
What Sally does with the rest of the talk is group the lists into three broader categories of “sila-samadhi-panna” – the three “baskets” of the eightfold path.
In the category of sila, or ethical conduct, she includes equanimity as a parami.
The paramis are a list of ways we can behave in the world as we develop our skills. Equanimity is the tenth of the paramis, but each of the paramis intertwines with and supports the others. Sally sums up the paramis as “the essence is kindness.”
She relates this equanimity to sila in that people can trust us that we won’t strike out irrationally or unpredictably, out of fear, anger, or other reactive states. “We can start to trust that we’ll have a wise response to our inner experience and our outer experience, because the mind, in its balance, has wisdom.”
For this week’s good news story, I invite you to read about a village in Japan that has been moving towards zero-waste, which in turn brought about greater connection and care in their community. To me, it demonstrates how a wise response in one area can ripple out and benefit in ways we can’t imagine:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/the-inspiring-thing-that-happened-when-a-japanese-village-went-almost-waste-free/
If you have a good news story to share, please let me know.
Reflection: Have you noticed a relationship between when you have more inner balance and your outer actions?
Feel free to share your reflections or comments below, or by email.
With warm wishes,
Andrea