We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss. We practiced Dr. Rick Hanson‘s guided meditation called Equanimity. The meditation is drawn from his book, The Buddha’s Brain: the Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom.
The meditation encourages students to explore the “mind of no preferences”. My partner Tim’s photo of this amazing mushroom inspires me to reflect on equanimity. We’ve recently enjoyed one of the most beautiful summers ever – day after day of sunshine followed by intense thunder storms. Rather than be dismayed at the returning rain, Tim and I have been enraptured by these magical mushrooms blanketing the forest floor near our home. It’s described as a fungus, developing from a primordium. It’s fruiting body eventually to be surrounded by a universal veil. Now how cool is that!?!
Rick explains that developing equanimity involves cultivating a sense of time and spaciousness around what we perceive. It isn’t apathy or indifference to experience, nor is it about trying to suppress or inhibit what we feel. If we are able to pause and simply be present with experience we can interrupt the impetus to react with a response which may ultimately increase our sense of stress or suffering. He writes that equanimity ” . . . breaks the chain of suffering by separating feeling tones of experience from the machinery of craving, neutralizing your reactions to those feeling tones. . . . Through equanimity’s non-reactivity it creates great space for compassion, loving kindness, joy at good fortune of others.”
I often joke that I’m in the “humble pie slice of life”. It seems like meditation practice has “gifted” me the ability to recognize when I’m triggered to react. I’ve also been around long enough to to be dealing with the long term consequences of things I’ve done or failed to do in the past. There is ample motivation to practice. I could certainly use more compassion and loving kindness. I want to sincerely rejoice in others’ blessings.
In guided meditation, we started by centering our awareness and entraining with the breath, becoming increasingly aware of “feeling tones” of whatever perceptions arose: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. With each passing breath we simply intended to allow a growing impartiality to develop and observed our minds quiet. We expanded our focus to include sensations and thoughts noticing associated feeling tones very simply without being caught by what we sensed or thought. We again expanded our focus to include conditions in the room, the vibrations of each others’ bodies even the sounds from traffic outside.
This space, time and sustained awareness allowed us to perceive the constantly changing nature of these experiences: aware of passing thoughts and feelings without identifying with them. Rick writes: “No one needs to own them or be defined by them. . . . In the pleasant, there is just pleasant, with no reactions added. In the unpleasant, there is just the unpleasant, with no reactions added. In the neutral, there is just the neutral, with no reactions added. This is the mind of no preferences.”
The fruit of this effort is often a sense of ease, contentment and even a subtle freedom. We could rest as awareness, abide as equanimity. It did feel good to simply be, not cycling between grasping for my desire of the moment or trying to avoid a some thing or some one. Rick writes that this is a very curious state for our brains since we’re suspending those “programmed” reactions without suppressing them.
I recognize that this is much easier to do in a meditation hall especially when we’re all together offering mutual support. We’re encouraged to take every opportunity to practice so we can respond skillfully when we encounter the challenges Buddhism calls the “Eight Worldly Winds”:
pleasure/pain praise/blame
gain/loss fame/ill repute
Over the past few months we’ve been exploring a variety of ways to build the inner resilience of mind to keep our calm in difficult circumstances. The aim of developing equanimity is to remain “disenchanted – free of spells cast by pleasure and pain.” We begin to “see through the apparent charms and alarms and not get knocked off center by either.”
So much experience remains outside our awareness. I value emotions as natural expressions of living that have a lot to tell us about ourselves. Yet I recognize the sometimes unintended, even hurtful consequences of actions that are driven by unconscious beliefs and emotions. This is why we really need to incorporate compassion into practice. I certainly feel we share this aspiration.
You can find this week’s homework and other resources at: