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Having a Heart for Equanimity

Good evening, welcome. It's nice to see you all.

Today I'd like to continue my exploration of the Seven Factors of Awakening. Not surprisingly, there are seven of these Seven Factors of Awakening. I've gone through all seven, and I'm doing a little bit more on this last one: equanimity.

There's no requirement to memorize all these lists. Maybe they'll become familiar after you practice for a while, so I don't want it to feel burdensome. Frankly, it's because I'm going to be teaching a class on the Seven Factors of Awakening that starts in a couple of weeks, and I just wanted to teach this series to give me an opportunity to think about all these topics, and also to share them in the form of a Dharma talk as opposed to a class.

What are the Seven Factors of Awakening? Mindfulness, investigation, energy, and joy are the first four. Mindfulness is just being aware of what's happening. And then there are these three energizing factors: investigation, energy, and joy, which bring the energy up. Then there are three tranquilizing, calming factors that bring the energy down: tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. Even if you've never heard any Buddhist teaching whatsoever, you would just recognize that energy and joy are a little bit more bubbly, and investigation feels like something that you do, as opposed to tranquility, concentration, and equanimity.

I'd like to flesh out a little bit more just talking about equanimity. As I mentioned last week, this wasn't a word that was in my vocabulary until I encountered Buddhist teachings and teachers. With this beginning, "equa," I figured it had something to do with equal. But equanimity turns out to be a really rich word, and there are so many ways we can think about it, look at it, understand it, and practice with it.

For me, this is something that I appreciate so much about the Buddhist teachings: there's such a depth, a breadth, and a richness there. No matter how many times I come back and maybe teach the same thing, or study, and do a little bit of translating to look at some of the early teachings, I'm always finding something new. I'll think, "Oh yeah, this is related to that other teaching," or, "Oh right, this is that experience that I've had. I wouldn't have put it in this language, but now I understand it differently." So I hope to share with all of you some of my appreciation of the richness of what's available.

Of course, for me—and I'm imagining for many of you too—this is in contrast to some dogmatic view, like, "This is the way that it is." I have encountered teachers that have this kind of fundamentalist, dogmatic view, and it just makes me feel uncomfortable. Instead, I'd like to encourage a spirit of inquiry or engagement, as opposed to, "Okay, this is just some list I'm supposed to memorize." Maybe it's a way you might see that it makes sense to you and is helpful in your life and your practice.

Steadiness and Seeing the Bigger Picture

A way that I'd like to think about equanimity and practice with it is the recognition that it has a number of different qualities, including that it's a steadiness of the mind and the heart.

What is steadiness? When I was young, I maybe watched a little bit too much TV, and there was this commercial that is still in my mind. It's quite something how some of these commercials, decades later, are still in my mind. There was this toy that was called Weebles. Some of you are nodding your heads. You know what the little jingle was like: "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down." That's for me a little bit of equanimity. It's this idea that we might get a little bit off balance, but then we'll come back to center. Maybe we get way off balance, or maybe it's just a little bit, but Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down. I never had any of these Weebles, but I just saw enough of those commercials that I understood the premise of them.

The steadiness is there. Maybe there's a little bit of wobbliness, which brings me to another point about equanimity: it's not an on/off switch. It's not a binary where you have it or you don't have it. Maybe sometimes you get way off balance. Maybe the wobble is pretty far before you come back to a sense of balance. Or maybe there's just a little bit. But whatever it might be, it's pointing to this idea of not falling down, or if you do fall down, finding your way back.

It has this steadiness, or inner balance. I'm using this Weebles example, but another way to think of it is a keel on the bottom of a sailboat. It's this really long bit that helps the sailboat not tip over when there are winds. Equanimity is not only this stability, steadiness, and balance; it also has this quality of seeing the bigger picture.

That's part of why it doesn't get off balance: because it understands what the bigger picture is. One part of it is realizing, "Of course it's this way. Of course I'm late, because I left a little bit late, and I forgot it was commute hour, and I had to stop and get gas in my car." Instead of this frenzy of, "Oh, I'm going to be late, and what are people going to say? I just said I wasn't going to be late anymore," we recognize, "Of course it's this way, because there were all these conditions in place to make it that way. Of course I don't feel well, because I got some really difficult news, and I ate junk food because I wasn't feeling well, and I didn't sleep so well last night. So of course right now I'm feeling a little out of sorts." And maybe that's why we were short with our coworker or our partner. It's being able to have this sense that things are the way they are because there were conditions in place to support it.

Maybe this goes without saying, but maybe it's helpful for me to make it explicit: having this stability and balance makes life easier to navigate. We have to do less navigating if we have this ability to not be thrown off balance so much that we feel like we can't ever come back to some sort of center. To be clear, when I'm saying "center," I'm not saying that we're rock solid. I don't know if anybody's life is completely rock solid. But it's opposed to just going back and forth and getting blown all over the place.

Equanimity makes life easier to navigate. What would it be like if we didn't have to avoid awkward situations? What if we had the confidence to think, "Okay, this is going to be uncomfortable. I need to set boundaries with this person and tell them it's not okay that they're doing that. Or I need to apologize for a mistake that I made. Or I need to finish that project even though it's not quite perfect, and I really want it to be perfect, but I just need to finish it." What would it be like if we could do these things, recognize the uncomfortableness, and do it anyway?

Our lives would just unfold better if we didn't feel like we had to avoid all the uncomfortableness that arises. Or when something wonderful, nice, or wished for arises, what if we didn't feel like, "Oh my gosh, I have to hold on as tightly as I can because I might never get this again, and I gotta squeeze every last bit of goodness out of this experience"? Wouldn't it be different if we felt like we could just drink it up, appreciate it with gratitude, and allow ourselves to feel nourished by it without this feeling of holding on with everything we've got?

As I'm speaking about this, it occurs to me that it also goes along with this idea of confidence. Maybe it's not so much the idea that we can do whatever needs to be done, but the idea that we can recover from the difficulty. If it doesn't turn out great, somehow that's still going to be okay. Sometimes we have this feeling like if anything's not okay, then we feel like a failure. We think we should always make everything be okay, or nothing is ever going to turn out right. We have that feeling, right? Sometimes it just feels overwhelming and we collapse into it. So equanimity makes our life easier to navigate. Not only can we be with uncomfortable situations, but we don't have to hold on to things that are pleasurable. It gives us the confidence to try new things or to be in new situations.

The Eight Worldly Winds

I want to speak a little bit about what I appreciate about the Buddhist teachings. The Buddha taught thousands of years ago. I like to think about how many people have heard these teachings and been touched by them. This is just part of the human condition, so much so that thousands of years ago they were talking about it. They were talking about the conditions in which we're not equanimous—what are the things that knock us off balance?

You probably wouldn't be surprised if I said it was a list. It's often called the Eight Worldly Winds^[1], but it's four pairs. Recently I discovered a new translation or a new understanding of what these four pairs are, and I really like this new set. We could call it a new translation because it's a bit more modern language that we might use in everyday parlance. You can find lots of books on how to work with these things, and probably untold talks about them.

Before I say what these four pairs are, I just want to emphasize that there is no human who is exempt from experiencing these. No human—even the Buddha experienced these things. Just recognizing that alone—that this is part of our inheritance as humans, that this is what it means to be human to have these experiences—is helpful.

The reason why they are in pairs is this idea that you can't have one without the other. As soon as you say something's on the left-hand side, then of course there's something that has to be on the right-hand side. As soon as we start defining left, then right gets defined too. As soon as we say, "Oh, that one's tall," we have to say it compared to another one that's not as tall, that's shorter. As soon as we start dividing up the world conceptually in one way, then we're also defining the other way: if something's good, then something else is bad; if we're equanimous, the opposite is out of balance or suffering. That's the reason why they come in pairs. Because as soon as you say that you want something, by definition that means you don't want other things. Of course, this is how the world works. [Applause]

Before I say what these pairs are, I want to reiterate that equanimity is not about getting our life perfect. It's not about manufacturing, creating, or engineering things to have everything exactly like we want it. It's not uncommon to have this secret wish: "Okay, well, as soon as this happens, and then that happens, and then that happens, okay, then everything will be fine." Yet here we all are! If that worked for you, you wouldn't be here on a Monday night listening to a Dharma talk. Of course we want everything to be perfect. We want all the ducks to be in a row. But it doesn't work out that way. And I feel like—spoiler alert!—it's never going to be that way.

Equanimity is about our relationship to what is. It's not about making things perfect so that we can be happy and feel balanced. It's about our relationship to things. Even though things are not the way that we want, can we still feel in balance? Can we still have some steadiness? I think this is worth repeating: it's about our relationship to them. In the Buddhist teachings, there's the first arrow^[2]—the unfortunate things that happen. Then there's the second arrow, which is how we want things to be different, our aversion, or holding on to things so tightly. It's about not having the second arrow. We can't avoid the first arrows.

Okay, so what are these eight things, these four pairs?

1. Success and failure: Everybody's going to have success and failure; nobody is immune from this.
2. Status and disgrace: Sometimes we talk about reputation. Sometimes your reputation is up or down, and in this age of social media, I think this is getting really heightened.
3. Approval and disapproval: This is going to happen in our lives. Of course it is. Maybe we're even doing this to others: "Okay, well, I approve of this, but I don't approve of that."
4. Ease and unease: There are going to be times when we feel comfortable and times when we don't feel comfortable. It's just the way it is.

How can we cultivate equanimity? By recognizing that these Eight Worldly Winds, as they're often called, are winds that just blow. We don't get to control them. They just blow one direction or the other. Recognizing that, how can we stay balanced? How can we do this equanimity thing?

Well-Being and Warm-Heartedness

One thing that I want to point out: I started by saying equanimity is a part of the Seven Factors of Awakening, and it's the seventh one. It's at the end. Equanimity is in a number of other lists also. It's in the Brahmavihārās^[3]—these heart practices—and it's at the end of that list. It's in the ten pāramīs^[4], these qualities that we can cultivate in daily life. There's a little bit of overlap with the Seven Factors of Awakening, but equanimity is the tenth one. It's in the jhānās^[5]. These are concentration states, and of the first four main ones, equanimity is the predominant experience in the fourth one, after having gone through the earlier three. In the Progress of Insight^[6]—this development in later Buddhism of how awakening occurs—right before awakening is this step of equanimity. So it's always at the end of all these lists.

One way to understand that is because all these preceding factors are part of what's cultivating and creating the conditions in which equanimity might arise. Because it's tempting, of course: "Equanimity, this sounds like a good thing. I want some. What do I do?" And we have this idea: "Well, can I just take it out of all these Buddhist practices and just do this equanimity thing? Do I have to worry about all this other stuff that these Dharma teachers are talking about?"

I certainly tried this. I have a little story about going on a long retreat. For those of you who have been on long retreats, you know there's this question: "How does laundry work when you're on a long retreat?" If you're there for months, you don't have months of clean clothes, so how does this work? When there are a hundred people in the meditation hall, there's a hundred people's laundry that has to get done, so it's a big ordeal.

It's a little bit different now, but how they used to do this years ago is that there would be a laundry day for half of the people. So let's say 50 people doing a week's worth of laundry—this is a lot of laundry! It was somebody's job; they had washing machines and dryers, and for a whole day they would just run non-stop. But how to get your own laundry back? It's one thing to put things in, but of course you want your clothes back. And everybody's wearing gray sweatpants and white t-shirts, so how do you find yours back? Laundry tags. They would have some ribbon and an indelible marker, and you could write your name on this ribbon and then safety pin it onto every single piece of your clothing. Then you'd bring it to the place to be laundered, and afterward there'd be this huge pile of laundry, and you would just go through everything and find your pieces. Not the best system. It's as bad as it sounds.

So I had this idea after learning that this is how it is. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to make my own personalized little laundry tags. I'm going to turn this into a whole little art project for myself." I wanted to have equanimity—I'd heard about this—and I thought, "Okay, I'm just going to do this equanimity thing on this long retreat." So I made it much more complicated than it needed to be. I made all these little tags that said upekkhā^[7], which is the Pali word for equanimity. And then when I was on retreat, safety pinning all these little upekkhās on all my clothes, I was thinking, "Okay, this is all I have to do. Just say this word over and over again, and I'm going to get equanimity."

It didn't work. I didn't have equanimity. I wanted it so badly, I thought, "Okay, if I just say this word, think about it enough, or do it over and over again, somehow it would arise." But it didn't.

It wasn't until later, on another retreat, that I discovered something really important. This gets back to equanimity being the last in all these lists. Well, what's second to last on all these lists? What's preceding it? In the list of the pāramīs, loving-kindness is before equanimity. In the list of the Brahmavihārās, sympathetic joy is before equanimity. In the Seven Factors of Awakening, concentration is before equanimity. In the jhānās, happiness is before equanimity.

So there's this quality of, maybe we could say, warm-heartedness, or this type of well-being. Loving-kindness, sympathetic joy (which is being happy when other people are happy, being happy for their good fortune), or concentration—which I talked about before—all have this quality of well-being.

When we think about it, it makes perfect sense. Of course equanimity arises out of a certain amount of well-being. When we have a little bit of settledness, or this feeling like we have enough love, we have enough of something inside of us, we feel filled up in some kind of way—then, of course, we're not going to get so knocked off balance. So one of the key ways to develop equanimity is to develop well-being. One of the ways to develop well-being is some warm-heartedness, some loving-kindness. It's not the only way, and next week I'll talk about other ways, but I think sometimes this is neglected. When we think about equanimity, it can feel a little bit cold-hearted or indifferent. But it's really about this warm-heartedness, and seeing the big picture with a little bit of care, that allows us to come back to balance, even if there's a little bit of wobbling.

Cultivating Warm-Heartedness

You might say, "Okay, Diana, that sounds nice, but how do we cultivate warm-heartedness for this well-being?" Well, of course, there's a list! But I'm not going to go through a list. I'm just going to talk about a few things here. One is just inclining the mind towards warm-heartedness or well-being. There are a number of ways to do this in daily life, on the cushion or off the cushion, it doesn't matter. One is to notice when it's arising naturally in your experience.

Just notice when you get that email from a friend and they say, "Hey, do you want to go to lunch?" and you feel like, "Oh yeah, actually I do," and that little bit of uplift that happens. Or when you get home and your dog is wagging his tail, so happy to see you. Or when you are with a good friend and you just feel happy to be with them. Maybe they're having difficulties and you're happy to be able to support them. Maybe your partner brings you a cup of tea or coffee. There are lots of mundane things. I'm hoping that these are in your life. It's true that there are times in our lives when we feel like they're not there. I don't want to make it sound like everybody has these all the time. But I want to encourage that when it is there, can we just recognize, "Oh, here's that little uplift"?

I'm using "warm-hearted" as a really vague word that maybe you can find your way with. Some people might say mettā^[8], or goodwill, or benevolence. So just notice when it naturally arises. When you're feeling the opposite of loving-kindness—maybe irritation with somebody—maybe just notice what's in the way. "Why am I feeling cold-hearted here?" Maybe cold-hearted is too strong of an expression, but just notice when it's naturally there. When our minds start to notice it, tune into it, and notice the pleasantness of it, it makes it more likely the mind will do that again without our having to try to do anything special.

And then this is something that I appreciate again with the Buddhist teachings: we don't have to wait until the conditions are just perfect to have this sense of kindness, this sense of goodwill towards others or towards ourselves. We can cultivate it. One of the conventional ways is with loving-kindness practice. There are a few ways we can do that in a meditative setting. Perhaps many of you are familiar with this practice. It often begins with wherever it's easy, whomever it's just easy for you to feel some warmth towards; start there. I teach loving-kindness on Tuesdays and Thursdays online, and Nikki Mirghafori^[9] teaches it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So if you're interested, five days a week we have loving-kindness practice online.

I always say start where it's easy. There's no reason not to start where it's easy, and then to feel the connection with this lovable being. It can be helpful to say phrases: "May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease." I can tell you from doing this practice over and over again, it is transformative. People that have been coming to what we call "Happy Hour" are saying, "This has changed my life in a way I never expected. I just kept showing up at 6 p.m. because it was nice, it was pleasant, but my life is turning out to be different." It's so common that we come to mindfulness practice or Buddhist practice thinking that we have to get the mind quiet, we have to learn to sit still. But we might underestimate how powerful it is to be cultivating loving-kindness, especially towards ourselves.

It turns out we're often subtly beating ourselves up. Very commonly, when we're meditating and we notice that our mind is off the breath, lost in thought, there's this little, "Dang it, get it together. You're supposed to be meditating." We come back, and there's this little irritation. Well, we're kind of cultivating a little bit of aversion, or not appreciating ourselves, and that cumulative effect has an impact. Loving-kindness practice is a way to soften that. It softens that inner critic that can arise when we're doing this practice.

I'll mention one more thing before I open it up to some Q&A. Something that we don't do here very much at IMC—we do very little of it—but is a practice that I think is really great and powerful is chanting, specifically chanting the Mettā Sutta^[10]. Some of you might be familiar with the sutta. It talks about goodwill for others and it's very inspiring. It can be a practice to chant it, or memorize it and chant it. I memorized it by listening to it again and again from the monks at Abhayagiri^[11]. I'll just mention this: they have a whole chant book with MP3s you can download and listen to again and again.

Appreciating when it just arises naturally in your life, doing some intentional meditation practices, or doing some chanting. Chanting opens up a different part of us. It's not for everybody, but for some people it's really meaningful and helpful.

So, loving-kindness practice serves as a support for equanimity. Loving-kindness is a way to soften the heart. Think about it: when we feel this sense of love, this sense of care, there's a sense of stability that goes with it. There's an increased capacity to be with whatever is difficult. Next week I'll talk about some other practices that we can do, but I would just like to offer this as well: loving-kindness practice as a support for equanimity.

With that, I'd like to open it up to some Q&A, if there are any questions.

Q&A

Diana Clark: Okay, so I guess our friends on YouTube have some questions. Yes, Sage, do you want to use the microphone?

Questioner: One of our friends from the internet is asking, would you give us the reference to download the Mettā Sutta to chant?

Diana Clark: That's a good question. I recommend going to abhayagiri.org (a-b-h-a-y-a-g-i-r-i). I can write it down on a piece of paper if anybody here wants it, and if you're at home I'll spell it one more time: a-b-h-a-y-a-g-i-r-i. Abhayagiri. They are a monastery up near Redding, and this is part of their regular chanting. They have a whole chant book, and they have it in English and in Pali. You can hear them chanting it both in English and Pali. Part of the reason why I'm recommending that one is because sometimes on retreats at IRC (Insight Retreat Center), we chant that, and we chant it in the same style that they do. So if you learn it from them, you'll be able to use it at IRC. Was there another one? No? Okay, just saying nice things. Well, that's nice! Anybody else have a question? Let's speak there.

Questioner: Good evening, Diana and everyone. Thank you, Diana. I had a question regarding equanimity and confidence. I know it's not like, "Oh, I know I'm going to do this right," but just that whole not grasping thing. How does one do that, if that makes sense? The relationship between equanimity and faith, and not grasping.

Diana Clark: Yes, yes, of course. Right, this is what we all want, absolutely. Loving-kindness practice is something that we can start. We can practice with this. This is something we can do, and it does make a difference. I am not saying it's always easy, and I'm not saying it's fast, but this is something that can really make a difference. Next week I'll talk about what we might call wisdom practices, but I'm calling this a heart practice.

I cannot emphasize enough this idea of doing loving-kindness practice where it's easy, and really spending time there. What's very common is that people will do a little bit of loving-kindness—"May you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you live at ease"—and then they want to do it to the person that bothers them the most. Of course they do! And it doesn't work so well. We can't just switch like this. The best way it works is to stay with loving-kindness where it's easy: cats, dogs, babies, even imaginary beings. Allow oneself to be filled up, and just keep practicing. This could be one day, one month, one year. I know some people have done this for years.

Then what starts to happen is the loving-kindness just starts to overflow naturally. If you practice it—instead of it being like a tool where, "I've got to fix this problem"—if you use it as a way to just roll around in it, swim in this loving-kindness, breathe it, you get filled up, and then it automatically flows out. Then it automatically starts to touch all your relationships, including the difficult people that are making our lives miserable, and it just starts to shift that relationship. Is that helpful?

Questioner: Very much so, thank you.

Commenter: I just wanted to say, I don't have a question, but I love chanting. I have downloaded the loving-kindness Mettā Sutta on my phone, and it's three minutes long. Sometimes I'll use it to fall asleep by. And also when I go hiking over at Edgewood Park, on the bench I'll play it and sing it at the same time.

Diana Clark: That's fantastic. Yeah, learning it and chanting it really helps with concentration. It's calming and collecting the heart and the mind in a way that can be really supportive. Thank you for sharing that, it's very nice. We have time for another comment or question.

Questioner: Hi, thank you so much. When you were speaking about equanimity and saying we can't grasp the larger picture...

Diana Clark: I would say that equanimity is about seeing the bigger picture.

Questioner: Seeing the bigger picture. I'm a little confused by that, just in the sense that we don't know what part this plays in the larger scheme of things. Because you were talking about the things that came before, and I was confused about what preceded this episode. It seems different than my understanding of, "Oh, we don't see the whole piece."

Diana Clark: Thank you. I didn't really talk about that very much, so thank you for pointing out that this could be expanded a little bit. What does it mean to see the bigger picture? I talked a little bit about seeing what preceded it, but another way to think about it—and this might be related a little bit to loving-kindness—is that when we're having a difficulty, or something that we really like, we're completely enamored with it. There's a way in which our awareness just collapses around it, and that's all we can see. When there's a pain in the knee, it just feels like that's the only thing: just the pain in the knee.

Another way to understand seeing the bigger picture is to recognize, yes, maybe there's that pain in the knee, but there's also this neutral sensation of pressure against the body from what I'm sitting on. And there's this neutral sensation of sounds, or seeing light. Seeing the bigger picture sometimes is just seeing that there are other things happening at the same time, in addition to seeing what preceded it. So there are a number of different ways we could understand this idea of the bigger picture. Is that helpful?

Questioner: Yes.

Diana Clark: Okay, so that's nine o'clock, and it's a pleasure to practice with you all. May you find some balance, some steadiness, some equanimity, and a little bit of this loving-kindness thing that I've been pointing to, for the rest of your evening today, or tonight, and always. Thank you.