January 24 – The heart of equanimity

Dear Friends,

In Morning Instructions – Working with Equanimity, Jill sets the stage for practicing with equanimity as a heart quality.

One of the ways to cultivate equanimity in practice is with the use of phrases.

Jill summarizes some from various teachers that relate to cultivating equanimity with the truth of impermanence:
Jack Kornfield: May I learn to see the arising and passing of all things with equanimity and balance.
Sharon Salzberg: May I be undisturbed by the comings and goings of events.
Kamala Masters: May I accept and open to how it is right now because this is how it is right now.

When cultivating equanimity as a heart practice in our relationships, Jill suggests another set of phrases:
I care about you, but I cannot live your life for you.
Your happiness or unhappiness depends upon your actions, not upon my wishes for you.

When I first heard phrases like this, I noticed a bit of resistance. With practice and time, I have come to realize that my resistance is related to a conditioned desire to want to make things better for those I care about, which means to have people live the way I think they should, because obviously that’s the right way… Ahem… or not.

Jill explained it well:

Often, though, we have a tendency to want to fix things – to fix other people, to fix ourselves, to fix situations. And by “fix” here, I mean it in both senses of the words, as in to mend or to repair, but also to make fixed, static, unchanging.

I have found the equanimity practice is helpful to see these tendencies in me, and to see how this causes suffering – in my relationship to a person and beyond.

This quality of equanimity does not mean we are apathetic or passive. Equanimity has heart. We engage from a place of steadiness and wisdom. We can plant and nurture the seeds for change and growth, but we recognize that we can’t force the results.

Jill then outlines the intention for a guided meditation, where we are invited to bring in these phrases when working with a person we care about but where there is currently “some kind of unhelpful agenda or stickiness, the desire to control.”

We are reminded that it’s important to approach this practice gently and patiently. If things start to feel forced or painful, we should take care by bringing in compassion or turning mindfulness of the body – whatever we need to do to reestablish balance.

The meditation recording from this retreat had skips and blips that I found distracting. Fortunately, I found a similar meditation that Jill offered at an online event last year that we can use instead.
https://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/64219/

May you have steadiness and ease,
Andrea