On a recent Saturday morning, shortly after I began teaching meditation, I was on my way to teach a daylong retreat outside of Nashville. While driving on Granny White Pike, a busy two-lane street, I signaled and merged into the turn lane. Just as I did, someone in a white car sped up and honked at me multiple times.

The blasts startled me. I was driving at least the speed limit, I signaled and moved into the turn lane correctly, and, to my knowledge, I did everything completely normal. But the sudden blasts penetrated my body to the core and shook up my nervous system. I felt upset as I waited for the turn light. “What’s up with that guy, I did nothing wrong. What a jerk!”

We’ve all seen the headlines of road rage incidents that then escalate into dangerous, even fatal, encounters. This episode was harmless overall; the driver was gone, yet the lingering anger I felt remained. Then the voice of wisdom piped in, “you’re on your way to teach a retreat, you don’t want to carry this frustration in your nervous system a minute more.”

I then remembered a practice I can do while driving or at other times when an encounter throws me off. I center in on the place where I still feel the response—starting with my awareness of the angry thoughts, then bringing my attention to my body, feeling the agitation and contraction in my gut area. I take a few breaths and gradually let go of the narrative of “that driver was a jerk.” I often find, when bringing my attention to the physical sensation of agitation in the body and the breath, that the sense of self that often solidifies amid feeling wronged or hurt just melts away, especially when there is no recourse or further action needed. This act of going back to bodily awareness often supports a return to equanimity when the mind and heart are feeling agitated.

I didn’t want the driver to leave me with a second arrow; the first arrow being the horn, the second arrow being the anger and sense of being wronged one carries with them. As I remained present without proliferating thoughts, the anger and frustration began to dissipate. Nothing was left but the breath and my body, sitting at a traffic light. All was well, my nervous system had reset to ease. The light changed, and I drove the rest of the way to the retreat feeling at peace.

While teaching that morning, I used this encounter as an example of how to let go of feeling wronged in a situation where there is no external control or recourse. I explained how I unwound the tension and anger, all the way to a sense of self, and then let it go.

Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

During a break, a young man asked if we could meet privately. We went into a room at the back of the house, and he confided, “that story you told of the man who aggressively honked at you—I’m that guy.” I was stunned. How likely was that? He continued, “I’m not literally that guy, but that’s just like me, I can’t control my anger. My wife and child are leaving me. I’m losing everything that matters to me. I don’t want to live like this any longer, can meditation help me?”

My heart softened. The proverbial jerk on the road sat right in front of me, exposing his suffering and the real consequences that arose from his hostility. How often do we see behind the hardened surface to the actual human who we think is a jerk? Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

This angry man was willing to reveal his vulnerability. That’s rare. Because I had already unwound my own reaction from the encounter with an aggressive driver, I could more fully listen to and receive this man’s tenderness and feel connected to his suffering. While a different flavor from my own, I knew that in the deepest place, this man was another reflection of the ways I too was not fully awake.

An Exercise

Ahead of everyone’s busy holiday season of bustling and commuting, here is a step-by-step guide for how to unwind a reactive response:

• Begin by recognizing and bringing awareness to the reaction at the thought level, just noting without judgment the narrative itself. Don’t try to stop it, let it run for a minute through the spotlight of your awareness.
• Now find the place in your body where you find a corresponding felt sense of the reaction. Perhaps a tightness in your gut or chest, or a constriction at your throat.
• Begin to explore the way these sensations feel in your body. Notice if your mind returns quickly to the thought. Gently bring it back to the bodily sensations.
• Start to let go of the narrative as you stay with the physical sensations.
• Don’t demand anything, trust the wisdom of the body, and let go of trying to figure it out or change it.
• Now investigate if you can find a “me” or “mine” in these sensations. Chances are, you can’t.
• Just continue to rest your attention at the sensations for a few more minutes. As you disidentify from these thoughts and the sense of self that felt wronged, you’ll likely begin to relax and return to equilibrium.

The post Awakening with a Rude Driver appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In an often-told Zen tale, the parents of a village girl storm the hut of the aging monk Hakuin and thrust on him their daughter’s newborn child. They blame him for fathering the baby, mock his esteemed reputation, and name him a dirty old man. Awkwardly cradling the squalling baby, Hakuin makes a deep bow and responds with equanimity, “Is that so?”

That night, as a chill wind penetrates the hut, he encircles the baby with his own warmth, offering her protection. He nurtures this child as a father would his daughter: stitching her clothes from his monk’s robes, sharing his own meager broth and rice, as well as schooling her in poetry, brush painting, and the wisdom of the dharma.

When the true father is revealed, the village girl’s parents appear once again at Hakuin’s hut, this time to claim the child as their own and to take her away. They praise Hakuin for his generosity, ask forgiveness for tarnishing his image as a monk, and name him a great benefactor. As he releases the beloved child, he makes a deep bow and again with equanimity responds, “Is that so?”

I’ve found myself returning to the Hakuin tale as I’ve reflected on a recent school reunion. A reunion—what better occasion to confront the tight grip of the self image; the exquisite pull, and sometimes pain, of seeing through the lens of reputation, name, and identity?

The first class reunion for my progressive New York City private school was our twenty-fifth. Some of us, including me, had started at the school at age 6, and so we went back a long way together. At the reunion, my fifth-grade teacher told me a story. “At morning circle,” Joan said, “I asked for a volunteer. Before I’d mentioned the errand, you raised your hand and jumped from your seat. You raced out of the room en route to do that errand. Who knows where you went? It was ten minutes before you raced back, empty-handed, confused.” I’ve savored the tale of this small, intense enthusiast, and wondered, “Who was she?”

At our second reunion, our thirty-fifth, my childhood friend Suzy told my 10-year-old daughter about the young me: “Every single day at school your mom would cry.” And who was this? I’ve pondered both of these stories for hints of who I was and, in some ways, who I am now.

Over these many years, I’ve committed much time and effort to meditation practice, to therapy, to qigong or yoga, to countless modalities to train in awareness and equanimity. That’s meant I’ve often taken myself gently by the scruff of the neck—to listen with more care, to contain soaring emotions (not always so benign as enthusiasm or tears), and to pause and consider before I jump. At times I’ve taken pride in my progress; indeed, I’ve relished praise from friends for how I have “changed.”

Of course, in Buddhism we’re taught that pride is based in illusion and, ultimately, causes pain, as does attachment to either blame or praise. Yet how I’ve yearned for you to certify me, to stamp me, to applaud me, to mirror me back to myself as a new and improved self. And who is this “you?” I’ve been in awe of you since I was 6—the Big Shot, the primo-identity!

This past year, I’ve been one of the planners of a third reunion, our forty-seventh. In my kitchen in Berkeley I met with a classmate, Carly. She had been the queen Big Shot. When we were little, I dreaded the Fifth Avenue bus ride home with Carly, who teased me daily about my little-shot ways—a dreamer, a klutz, a teacher’s pet. Often, as we rode downtown, she would knock me down and sit on top of me, crushing my cheek against the seat. With me struggling underneath her weight, my face stinging with tears, we’d ride past my stop at 81st by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all the way to hers at 53rd, almost as far as MoMA. It was a long walk back uptown to my stop.

I still don’t know why she did it or why I stood for it. I do know that at some point I paid a high price to win Carly’s friendship. I also know that we continued a long love-hate history throughout school and beyond; listening to Mozart together, staying up all night talking about our boyfriends, our mothers. We went through her breakdown during college and mine ten years later. Since then, our on-and-off visits have felt strained for reasons that have remained mostly opaque.

At our recent visit, after reunion planning, we exchanged news of family and work. I picked up a booklet of photos from the past month’s meeting of the Berkeley City Council, where in their tradition of naming days in honor of local artists, my birthday for that year was named “Barbara Gates Day.” The cover photo featured a group shot of my crew, arrayed in jeans and shawls, running shoes and silver boots—family, the staff of Inquiring Mind, neighborhood kids—precious strands of my life that had come together to celebrate. But as soon as I opened the booklet, something felt off. I hurried through to the final shot of me at a podium, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared, gesturing with dramatic flourish. “Whoa!” Carly shook her head with a snort. “Same old Barbara!” She scowled, narrowed her eyes, and, as if to someone across the room, added, “Nope, hasn’t changed a bit!” I felt it like a wallop. A whole lot of words followed that I couldn’t take in, that I could barely hear, but three that I thought I did were: “Full of yourself.”

Where did that come from? I had the urge to grab her by the shoulders, to escort her out the front door, and, with an imperceptible shove at the landing, to knock her down the steep sixteen steps. Tongue-tied, I sat there raging. Once again I was pinned under Carly on the Fifth Avenue bus headed past my home stop. Again, I felt crushed into some diminished picture of my “self.”

But what if instead, like the Zen monk Hakuin, I had responded with a gracious nod, “Is that so?” What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Not so easy. I try to imagine our monk by the doorway to his hut clasping the dazed baby to his fast-beating heart, blamed, called dirty old man. Or years later, releasing this child, whose tender life felt inseparable from his own, now praised with the lofty great benefactor. When his world as he knew it was overturned and he was presented with opposing identities, what a feat to hold steady in himself, to be unshakable. For me, pulled as I am by enthusiasm, by hurt, or by thirst for validation, such freedom from the addiction to identity doesn’t come easily.

This visit with Carly touched off memories. So many memories from childhood were of the powerlessness of us little shots and the clout of the Big Shots—whom I feared, hated, and secretly craved to impress.

What if I had let her comment breeze through our exchange?

Who were the little shots? They were dreamers, artists, tellers of tales: Ariana, with her tender cheeks and spun-sugar halo of hair, a painter, even at 9 capturing the nuance of seasons; Plum, with her silky braids and embroidered tops, a book lover who wrote endless tales of mystery and imagination; and me, a fervent story-maker, rapt in the child’s worlds of dress-up and dolls.

And the Big Shots? They were the tough girls. Each and every one could throw a mean pitch in baseball or Soak ’Em—the scourge of little shots like me. In a Soak ’Em game, sometimes dubbed Dodge Ball or Murder Ball, the Big Shots seemed all powerful. When two teams faced off in the gym, the team with more Big Shots always inevitably won. When one of them got the ball, we knew they would slam it at one of us little shots and knock us out of the game. A sidearm throw aimed at the face could blacken an eye or bloody a nose, or aimed at the feet could send us flying–smack–against the gym floor. And for me, the choosing of teams was the most excruciating part. Big Shot captains took turns picking, and my friends and I were always chosen last. Talk about a diminished identity.

After two years of planning, when the forty-seventh reunion finally happened, our gatherings included a visit to a building overlooking Central Park that for many years housed our school. In a bizarre juxtaposition with our freedom-loving progressive institution, this building now housed a minimum-security prison. A bright-eyed, gray-haired, and balding group of us was graciously ushered around the site. As we toured the lobby (now complete with metal detectors and a gun arsenal) and the former classrooms (now dorm units with tight tiers of bunks), I had an eerie vision of the sacred chambers of our childhood illuminated in the background. Glowing behind a large, dimly lit room rose our school gym. A Soak ’Em game was in full swing, Carly in a blue mesh pinnie spinning a mean ball, sending me sprawling.

As I descended the stairs from the cafeteria and peered down the corridors of locked doors, a memory blossomed into consciousness:

With a passel of children, I skitter down the steps, laughing and shoving, dash left through the fifth-floor hallway, almost to the end, and throw open the door. It’s Fred Shultz’s fifth-grade math class. Fred is late, so someone seizes the boxes of fresh chalk and starts throwing. It’s like a multi-ball Soak ’Em assault, two Big Shot girls in alliance with the boys against the little shots—Ariana, Plum, and me. We recoil at the far end of the table and duck a barrage of flying chalk while flinging handfuls of broken pieces back at our tormentors. Suddenly, the Big Shot girls, armed with new packs of ammunition, jump up on their chairs and, towering above the rest of us, focus their full attack on Ariana.

Through the cloud of chalk dust, I stagger up onto a chair. In a sudden reversal, I turn on Ariana, pummeling her with chalk. Ariana, with her spun-sugar hair; Ariana, who has been my dearest friend. When I’ve used up the last of the chalk shards, I search wildly for more. That’s when I grab the eraser from the tray along the blackboard. With all of the force I hadn’t been able to muster in hundreds of failed Soak ’Em games, I hurl that eraser. When the speeding missile hits Ariana’s eye, she shrieks in pain.

Did Fred finally arrive and make us stop? Did Ariana leave in an ambulance? I can’t remember. I do remember that Ariana was out for the rest of the week while rumors spread that she might lose her eye. It was June already, almost time for summer vacation, and as the year drew to a close, she stayed home, and, in fact, the following year she never came back.

As we alumni headed out of what once was our school and into Central Park, I grappled with the karmic consequences of this chalk fight. By hitting Ariana with that eraser I ended our friendship and was catapulted into the ranks of the Big Shots. Heady with the pheromones of betrayal and victory, I was now allied with Carly and her pals. Secretly, I harbored the anguish of loss mixed with a stinking dirty sense of shame. And now, more than five decades later, despite the fact that Ariana’s eye healed quickly and that she and I reconciled during college, I have continued to feel the pain of that betrayal. Now, sitting on a park bench, I came back into contact with its burn. I lost Ariana. I lost my way.

Our school had espoused freedom; mostly, it was the opposite of a prison with metal grids and an arsenal. But indeed, we were human beings suffering from the same imprisoning habits as the rest of our species. How locked in we were by our fixed images of each other—Big Shot, little shot, crybaby, enthusiast, athlete, artist—and our images of ourselves—in my case, so rigid that I sacrificed what I loved most just to end up in a different cell.

Sitting on the bench, my thoughts steeped in the chalk fight, I returned to the grown-up event with Carly. In my Berkeley kitchen when I had felt accused, I jumped to anger so fast. Yet I hadn’t known my raw heartache underneath—of feeling somehow unseen and unappreciated. Now, I let that heartache seep through me. It then came to me, Carly may well feel that way too. Why would the pain that drove me to switch sides and assault a friend somehow be different from what drives Carly or anyone else to bully?

And I returned to “Is that so?” Is anything ever really “so?” I questioned the pictures I hold of myself or Carly, of little shots or Big Shots. Without those, what is left? Not me. Not her. Not us. Not them. Right there a glimpse of emptiness. And out of that, a taste of equanimity.

⧫

This piece has been adapted from the Fall 2010 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 27, No. 1). Text © 2010 Barbara Gates.

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “Happiness Beyond Worldly Measures”
• “Gabe and the Medicine Buddha”
• “The Buddha as a Parent”
• “Reunion on the Path of No Speech”

The post Who Was She? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Times of great uncertainty and disruption call for an appropriate response. An Ecosattva is a being committed to protecting and serving all, including our precious Earth. We can all walk the path of the Ecosattva, responding to the cry of the earth with clarity and dedication to the interdependent well-being of ourselves, our communities, and all beings.

There are two things that any Ecosattva needs to cultivate to be able to meet the challenges of this moment: fierce compassion and equanimity. Fierce compassion means seeing the suffering of our times clearly, and being willing to take a stand, to act to relieve that suffering however we can. Equanimity is the spaciousness, the perspective to have our action come from a place of deep wisdom rather than reactivity. 

Compassion and Appropriate Action

In many temples in Asia, you see statues of a great being, the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara Kuan Yin. A bodhisattva is an awakened being. In this particular statue, you’ll often see many arms and many hands. In each palm, there’s drawn an eye. Sometimes the bodhisattva is male, sometimes female, transgender; it is very gender fluid. This eye on the palm of each hand, is the eye of wisdom. 

That if we look deeply into the situation, then our action will be appropriate action. But if we are caught up in our own story, and in our strong emotions, our anger, our reactivity, then we won’t be able to see the situation and its depth, and its complexity and its impermanence. Then our action may actually cause more harm than good because it doesn’t have this deep grounding in wisdom. 

It’s challenging to see a situation clearly. The Buddha said that most of our perceptions are wrong. So we need to act, but we need to try to see clearly. For this we need the skill of equanimity, which is non reactivity. It’s seeing things from all sides. 

The word in Sanskrit is upeksa. It means to be able to look and see from all around, like you’re standing on the top of a mountain. You’re not caught in any one side, in any perspective. 

During the war between the US and Vietnam, there was the School of Youth for Social Service. Thousands of youth were going into the countryside to rebuild villages, schools, roads and improve the lives of people. This School of Youth for Social Service was set up by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This was important work. It was often the difference between life and death for people. Yet every week, these young social workers would take a day of mindfulness for themselves to refresh themselves, to come together and practice and to heal, to listen to each other, to share from their hearts. 

They didn’t say the work of the war is too urgent, we have to work seven days a week. They understood that in order to sustain themselves, they had to take regular pauses to take good care of themselves. 

The peace activist A.J. Muste has said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” The young social workers in Vietnam were practicing peace, not working towards peace in a frenetic or frantic way. That’s not how we create peace. We need to manifest it in every step. Not running for something in the future, but being peace in this moment, because the future is made of this moment. 

The young people in Vietnam would rebuild bombed villages. In one village in particular, they rebuilt it, and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a second time and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a third time. I believe it happened four times that they rebuilt that village and they didn’t say, “Hey, this isn’t worth it. Let’s just call it a day.” 

They weren’t rebuilding the village because they wanted a particular outcome. Of course they would have preferred I’m sure that the village remained unharmed, but they weren’t dependent on that as their outcome. They rebuilt the village time and again because that’s what they needed to do, not because there was any guarantee that their action was going to work, and succeed in the end. That is a deep example of “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  

We’re not doing something with the expectation of a particular outcome. If we do that, if we say, “I’ll only do this, if this happens,” we will burn out very soon. Because either we won’t do it at all, or we do it and if it doesn’t work, then we lose all of our energy, and we fall into despair. So it’s like the difference between conditional and unconditional love. 

It’s hard to practice unconditional love, and it’s very hard to work for change without wanting things to go the way we expect. If we want to survive with our energy, and our hope, our love, our enthusiasm intact, we have to look with this eye in the palm of our hand, which sees that no action goes unrecorded in the larger scheme and the larger flow of life. That an action done out of pure intent to bring joy or relieve suffering is never lost, even if in the immediate outcome it’s not what we want, and maybe it’s even the opposite. That eye in the hand of our action is the eye that sees that all we can do is what we deeply feel and know needs to be done. 

The only way we can be truly free and deeply powerful in that action is if we do it because we know it needs to be done. That is the power of equanimity, that we need to balance out the fierce compassion that drives us to action. 

In The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a senior nun from Vietnam, who came to visit Plum Village, his monastery in France. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given three or four months to live. She accepted this and decided to put all of her energy into practicing to be fully present in each moment for the [remaining] days she had left to live. She was aware of her breathing, of her steps. She was mindful of each of her bodily movements throughout the day. Before returning to Hanoi, where she expected to die, a sister persuaded her to go get a checkup in France. The doctors found that all of the metastasized cancer had receded to just one area. She lived for more than 14 years after she was told she had just three months. 

He tells this story as a collective metaphor. We are facing a possible extinction as a species. If we can accept that things are going to change, maybe end, and we are on the brink of real collapse, we put our whole hearts knowing this is it. We live deeply, fully as a human species, with other species, and with the earth, understanding, “Okay, we’ve messed this up. Now we just have a little time. How can we live deeply with all beings on this planet?”

This is what the nun was doing when she was determined to practice. Because she said, “Well, my life is going to end in a few months. Let me give all of my attention to this step, this breath, this moment.” She wasn’t trying to live for 14 more years, that just happened. Her desire was simply to do what needed to be done, to practice with all of her energy for the few months that she was told she had left. So she was truly free. She wasn’t thinking, “I’ll do this so that I can get this in return.” 

That is really working with the mystery, the unknown, and letting life just unfold, and hold us and teach us. So that is what this practice of the Ecosattva path is, to give our best wholeheartedly, not with any outcome that we are attached to. We never know what may come of that action. 

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in November 2023 titled “Taking the Ecosattva Path: Equanimity and Fierce Compassion.”

The post Embodying the Equanimity and Fierce Compassion of Avalokiteshvara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Equanimity (Pali, upekkha; Skt., upeksha) is one of those über-qualities in Buddhism. It’s the last quality of the ten paramis, the four immeasurables, and the seven factors of enlightenment, and is both the result of and support for the hard work required in spiritual practice. Equanimity is stability and equipoise in the face of life’s changes and challenges—an unshakable ease that doesn’t rely on the need for things to go our way but instead arises from understanding and accepting things as they are. Equanimity accommodates opposites, resolving the apparent duality expressed by the Serenity Prayer (“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”) and Angela Davis’s rephrasing (“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”) In other words, upekkha is neither indifference nor passivity. It doesn’t imply resignation. To be equanimous means to be deeply caring and to support that care with bright wisdom and fierce determination. It means to remain unmoved in the face of the eight worldly winds of gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, so that we can focus our energy and strength on love and compassion and justice and respect—very simply, on what matters most.

• “Equanimity is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love. While some may think of equanimity as dry neutrality or cool aloofness, mature equanimity produces a radiance and warmth of being.” –Gil Fronsdal
• Tip: Although equanimity is often referred to as a “cool” quality, it’s never cold or aloof. Notice the warmth that springs from a true sense of acceptance that’s free of bias, desire, and aversion.
• “Equanimity contains the complete willingness to behold the pleasant and the painful events of life equally. It points to a deep balance in which you are not pushed and pulled between the coercive energies of desire and aversion.” –Shaila Catherine
• “Every moment of mindfulness is also a moment of equanimity. It is not a disengagement from the object of awareness but rather a full and complete engagement with it.” –Andrew Olendzki
• Tip: Pay close attention to your own quality of attention. Notice if and when you disengage or grow distant and mistake this for equanimity. Remind yourself that upekkha isn’t indifference but stability. To get close to your experience again, ask yourself, “How does this feel?”
• “Through equanimity, we fortify ourselves with nonfear, with compassion, with acceptance. We cultivate the strength to face reality without being crushed by it.” –Kaira Jewel Lingo 

♦

Editor’s note: This is the tenth installment of Pocket Paramis, our series on the ten perfections: generosity, ethical conduct, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, lovingkindness, and equanimity. A printable version is available here.

The post Pocket Paramis: Equanimity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Equanimity is part of a group of four, which I’ll call the “qualities of the heart.” This group is made up of benevolence or lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Benevolence is a very natural, basic wish for well-being that we have when the heart is not hindered. It’s a basic wish that we have for others or for ourselves, and when this wish meets what is difficult, it becomes compassion—a particular kind of love or care in the face of what is challenging. When benevolence meets beauty or success or goodness, naturally it rejoices; it becomes joy. Therefore, here we already have three of these four qualities of the heart. The fourth quality is equanimity. Some people describe it as a stability of heart or mind that can meet what is difficult without falling apart, or lashing out, or closing down. It’s the heart that is able to be with what is difficult and is also able to be with what is pleasant without fear of losing it, without wanting to defend, keep, or get more of what we have. Another word that comes to mind for equanimity is composure. When we’re equanimous, we maintain access to our inner resources and to our balance of mind.

These four qualities are very important to one another. When they play together, they play well. Lovingkindness puts us in touch with our basic goodness. Compassion is the capacity to see what is difficult and to be with it. Joy calls to us saying, “Hey, come on this side of reality too; come see what is beautiful.” If they were separate from one another, I think they would become diminished. We’d see only what we like or what works for us. But compassion and joy together make space for what is broken, or rickety, or imperfect. And equanimity gives breadth and depth and duration to all these qualities.

I like to think of myself as benevolent, but I notice sometimes that I’m benevolent so long as things go my way. When they don’t work out as I want them to, my benevolence quickly goes out the window. So equanimity supports and strengthens the other three qualities.

Equanimity requires a strong, courageous intention to stay in balanced contact with what we face.

Courage is another quality associated with equanimity. In French the word for “heart” is coeur. Equanimity requires a strong, courageous intention to stay in balanced contact with what we face. It’s the highest quality in Buddhist psychology because it’s linked to insight and wisdom. Equanimity is not just a decision that we can will into being: “Let me be equanimous, right now, in the face of this difficulty.” It’s based on a deep understanding of the impermanent, unstable, changing, unreliable, and conditional nature of reality. Through insight, through meeting these characteristics of reality intimately and living with them with sensitivity to the changing nature of things, we cultivate stability. But first we have to experience the fleeting nature of events and phenomena. Deeply understanding that things do break leads to a stable heart.

The Practice

I invite you to establish your posture and to then bring your intention to the foreground: “I’m really interested in keeping balance of mind; keeping some kind of calm. I’m really interested in seeing if it’s possible to keep the mind stable and balanced and not fall into worry or fear.” Maybe you want to learn how to hold things with composure and courage. Having this intention, this curiosity to see if doing this is possible, take a moment to feel your body. What does it feel like to be in this body right now? Can whatever you feel be OK? Can you know this body and this mind, this heart, just as they are? This is an invitation to practice equanimity. Can whatever is be OK as it is, just for now?

Explore this quality of equanimity by bringing to mind things that are unresolved or that are slightly difficult. You could first think of a friend who is experiencing some challenge in an aspect of their life and see whether you can hold them in your mind with care, with calm. This is the step before trying to find a solution to a problem or taking action. Think of someone who may be experiencing trouble in a relationship or health or work or finances. See whether you can recognize and quietly name what is happening. A phrase that could be useful here is, “This is what is happening for you right now. There is this difficulty in your life.” It’s a factual recognition of what is happening—not turning away, not blaming, judging, worrying; just holding or learning how to hold this truth. “This is how it is for you right now.”

Play with this on your own for just a few moments and finish by bringing to mind a compassionate wish: “May you find inside yourself and around you the resources needed to overcome this or accept this.”

Now come back to the room where you are, this space filled with silence and stillness, and notice the state of your mind. Maybe you got caught up a little with worry—or maybe not. No judgment. Just notice anything that comes up and see whether with the three S’s of space, stillness, and silence in and around you, you can help find balance again.

This time, you can think of one aspect of your life that is unresolved or unsatisfying, troubling maybe—not the most difficult thing, but something that is uncertain or challenging. The intention here is to hold this with calm and balance in a simple and factual way—maybe with the help of this sentence or another one: “This is how it is for me right now. There is this challenge, this difficulty in this aspect of my life,” and just recognizing, very simply and honestly, the challenge. “Can it be OK, just for this moment, that this situation is unresolved or uncertain? Can it be OK, just for now, that I haven’t figured it out?” See whether it’s possible to have this acceptance.

Next, express a compassionate wish: “May I find inside myself the courage, or creativity, or compassion, strength, patience to be with this situation or overcome this situation. May I find inside and outside the resources to help me navigate it.” Let go of the thoughts that may be coming up as you do this, coming back to just being here and now and becoming aware of the stillness, silence, and space.

Equanimity can be thought of as balance, equilibrium. It can be thought of as space or perspective, or as groundedness. It can also be thought of as pliability of mind—the mind that is able to consider something, let it go, and bring something else to mind.

To play with that flexibility, we can now think of someone we know who is doing well. Just to see whether the mind is able to navigate in the region of appreciation, think of someone and name them inwardly. Think and name their good qualities and rejoice in them. Think of their intelligence, kindness, humor, uniqueness. And wish this for them: “May your good qualities protect you. May your good qualities be your contribution to the world.” Notice the state of the mind and heart. It would be very natural if, in tiredness, the mind became stuck and lost track of what was happening. On the other hand, notice if it’s present and vibrant—whatever is there is totally natural. Whatever is there is completely what is.

Finally, a wish for all of us: May our good qualities protect us. May our good qualities—those that we are developing and those that are well established—protect us. May they be our contribution to the world.

♦

Adapted from a talk given at Heartfelt Wisdom: Insight Meditation Retreat with Insight Meditation Society.

The post The Fourth Quality of the Heart appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Each of our lives will be touched by what are called the winds of the world. Moments of praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, gain and loss are woven into every human life. In the light of approval and praise, we glow; in the light of disapproval and blame, we find ourselves ashamed and withering. 

Understandably we long for acceptance and appreciation—the near enemy of this very human longing is the pursuit of approval and praise. Too easily we place ourselves at the whims of another’s words of affirmation. Understandably blame, judgment, and criticism are hard to bear. The near enemy of this pain is to seek an elusive perfection or to deafen ourselves to feedback from others. Too easily we internalize the anger and aversion of others as being an accurate measure of who we are. We are prone to personalize both praise and blame, describing ourselves by them and subjecting ourselves to elation and despair. Equanimity disappears in the contractedness of identification. 

The wonderful meditation we finally achieved, the love we were sure would last forever, our health and youth—all are delighted in, yet all will change, and we are asked to meet the bleak landscape of disappointment and feelings of failure. Life continues to teach us the hard lessons of letting go. Culturally we are told that our worth as human beings is defined by our successes and that failure is unacceptable, an indictment upon our worthiness. During the recent recession, rates of mental illness and suicide skyrocketed. We strive to become the kind of person who is immune to failure and to fearfully defend our successes. Culturally we are taught that success opens the door to love, acceptance, and reward, whereas failure sentences us to the shadows of life. We can become frantic in our search to secure our well-being through success and possession and come to fear the loss of that certainty, believing it will sentence us to a life of invisibility and meaninglessness. We can even believe that equanimity will be the outcome of securing success rather than found through the willingness to be equally near the highs and the lows of life. 

Our hearts are touched and gladdened by the moments of pleasure and delight the world offers to us. The simple joys of the sunlight touching our face, the great joys of a newborn child, the wonderful art, music, and poetry available to us gladden our hearts and enrich our lives. We love health, lovely emotions, and pleasant thoughts. We do not open so easily to the moments of pain—the unexpected illnesses, the difficult emotions, the repetitive thoughts, the vexing sights and sounds. The sounds of the birds outside the window are drowned out by the roar of the garbage truck. A delightful fantasy or plan is replaced by a nightmarish obsession. Our health falters and at times we become weary and bored with what we previously delighted in. 

Equanimity is a teaching not only of poise but of grace, a deep knowing that life will not stand still for any of us and that to rely upon stability is a recipe for agitation and anxiety. 

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. Cultivating our capacity for balance, we learn to meet the many small moments of discomfort that are part of our daily experience without flinching or turning away, discovering it is possible to surround discomfort with a calm stillness. We discover the capacity to meet the many small lovely moments of our day with a quality of appreciation that is not distorted by our desire to possess and maintain the pleasure of the lovely. 

Experiences of gaining and losing are woven into the rhythm of our lives. We gain stability and security, money and stature. Many of the achievements of our lives are born of skillful effort and dedication and are to be honored. We also lose a great deal. We are separated from people we love; our livelihoods disappear; we face the loneliness of friendships that change or disappear. We lose our youth and vitality; we gain a newfound peace in the midst of aging. A mother told the story of the heartache of being informed that her son had died in the Asian tsunami. The following week she received a postcard from him saying, “I am in heaven, this is the best time of my life.” There are unexpected moments of stillness, unpredicted moments of depression. Equanimity is a teaching not only of poise but of grace, a deep knowing that life will not stand still for any of us and that to rely upon stability is a recipe for agitation and anxiety. 

In the midst of all of this, we still breathe, our hearts beat, we go from morning to night, and remain present and alive. We ask ourselves how our hearts can continue to absorb the ongoing, changing stream of events without being shattered. We see the ways in a single day that our minds swing between highs and lows, elation and despair, fear and confidence. Equanimity pivotally teaches us to meet this river of uncertain and changing events equally with respect, yet without being governed by them. The Buddha said, “Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, success and failure are the eight worldy winds. They ceaselessly change. As a mountain is unshaken by the wind, so the heart of a wise person is steady amidst all the changes on this earth.” 

A Practice

In the midst of a life with its “ten thousand joys and sorrows,” we can simply attend to how we are present just now. Allow the body to come to stillness and the mind to settle, attending to the life of this moment, however it is. In the midst of the lovely, in the midst of the difficult, we make our home in our capacity to embrace, include, and care for the well-being of our hearts.

May I embrace change with stillness and calm.

May I deeply accept this moment as it is.

May my home be a home of balance and spaciousness.

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. Through flights of aversion, we build fences that make our world a little smaller, telling ourselves we cannot bear this life as it is. Through following patterns of craving, we convince ourselves over and over of the insufficiency 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. A Zen master was once asked, “What is the secret of your happiness?” He answered, “Complete, unrestricted cooperation with the unavoidable.” The unavoidable is our life.

⧫

From Boundless Heart: The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity by Christina Feldman © 2017. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

The post The Worldly Winds appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s sometimes said that life is a precious gift, but I wonder if that’s the best metaphor. Is it better to understand one’s life as a loan? A loan that can be called in at any time, sometimes with no warning at all. We are reminded never to take it for granted. Does that make our lives even more precious?

We naturally seek stability and security, but Buddhist teachings emphasize that everything is impermanent and insubstantial. The world isn’t a collection of separate things: it’s a confluence of interacting processes, and those processes include you and me and everyone we know. That means there’s nothing to cling to, and no one to cling. Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, said that nonattachment isn’t about getting rid of things, it’s accepting that they pass away.

A student asked Zen master Unmon, “What is the goal of a lifetime of practice?” He replied: “Responding appropriately.” We practice not to transcend the world, but to transcend our egos. Our path isn’t about escaping this world, it’s about becoming more intimate with it. But how do those of us who live in Boulder, Colorado, say, respond appropriately to events like the supermarket shooting that killed ten people a year ago today, on March 22, 2021, or the wildfire that destroyed over a thousand homes just east of town in December 2021?

In the Buddhist tradition, there are different answers, because there are different ways of understanding our emotional life. One answer is that our practice helps us find a place of imperturbable equanimity and serenity that is impervious to tragedy. No matter what happens in the world, we are at peace. We accept it, not because that’s what we want to happen, but because that’s what did happen. There’s some wisdom in this, I think, but not enough. It seems an example of what Zen calls “clinging to emptiness.” There’s something dualistic about it: we dissociate from our experience of the world.

The Japanese poet and Zen master Ryokan Taigu was once asked: “Is there no way to avoid calamities?” Ryokan replied: “When you meet a calamity, meet it completely. That is the wondrous dharma of avoiding calamities.” But how do we meet completely calamities such as mass shootings and uncontrollable wildfires?

In central London there is a memorial to the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. The inscription simply says: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” That’s all. Our grief is the homage we pay to what we love. Then never to grieve would be to close ourselves off from love. That points to another way of responding. Instead of trying to avoid grief, can we meet it completely, by opening ourselves up to it and becoming intimate with it?

Often we resist that. We are afraid of being overwhelmed by unbearable pain. We worry about becoming stuck in such a dark, heavy place. We forget that grief, too, is not a thing, it’s another of those impermanent processes, with its own dynamic—sometimes surging, sometimes ebbing. The whirlwind of emotions is so powerful and disruptive, but whirlwinds don’t last forever. To turn away from it usually makes it worse. As in our meditation, we need to trust the process and let it do with us what needs to be done. That is how we pay homage to what we love and have lost. That is how healing occurs.

Healing doesn’t mean the process of grieving is finished. But when the whirlwind dies down, we might find that we are a different person, maybe living in a different world. The disorientation can cut through the bullshit of our usual preoccupations. Realizing so directly and deeply the fragility of life encourages us to ask what’s really important. We are confronted by the most crucial koan of all: what do I really want to do with the time that’s left to me—with this precious loan?

The post How to Handle Grief When Equanimity Isn’t Enough  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sitting in radical equanimity, we let all of life be just what it is and our resistance drops away. Whether it’s cancer, problems at work or in a marriage, our broken dreams or dashed hopes—all the ups and downs of life are “just as they are” when we are sitting. Our problems and fears remain but, somehow, by dropping resistance to them, everything is okay. We let them be, we leave them behind, in our equanimity during the minutes of our sitting. (After sitting we had best work to fix that marriage, solve the problems, cure our cancer. However, during the minutes of sitting, we put aside all need to fix, solve, and cure.) By assuming a balanced, stable, and comfortable physical posture—as comfortable as our health will allow—we facilitate a balanced, stable, and easy heart. Then, we just let be.

♦

From The Zen Master’s Dance: A Guide to Understanding Dogen and Who You Are in the Universe by Jundo Cohen © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications. 

The post The Power of Radical Equanimity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How do we stay calm in a raging world? Most of us think that we need the world around us to change in order for us to change. We think that if the people in our life were more responsive to us or if politicians were thinking about things in the right way or doing the things we wanted we wouldn’t have to be so angry. But from the perspective of Buddhism, staying calm comes from healing our own anger. This is because as long as we’re meeting the world’s rage with our own rage, more rage is guaranteed.

We experience the world through the lens of our own habitual patterns: our cognitive mental patterns, our emotional patterns, and the legacy of all our interactions with other people. If we have intense habit patterns of anger, we become angry that much more easily. Even though we might appear happy or cheerful, it’s like the anger that we have within us all of the time is simmering right below the surface. It can be ignited in an instant—say, if we come across something that we’d rather avoid or that we find frustrating or that is the opposite of how we want things to be.

This is all the more so if we’ve developed a habit of not just experiencing our anger but acting out of it. Doing this reinforces the rage inside of us. Given that we’re in New York City, we have a prime example of this in front of us all the time: the subway. You can get on the subway in the morning in a perfectly fine mood, except maybe you’re a little bit more tired than usual and you really want to sit down on one of the seats. But then  somebody shoves past you to get to the seat before you can, and suddenly you have this irrationally intense feeling of anger. If you regularly ride on the New York subway, chances are you will recognize this experience.

It’s not just that in that moment somebody’s entitlement and rudeness is producing anger in you. It’s actually igniting something that was already there. What has to happen from the perspective of Buddhism is not so much that we have to like everything that people are doing around us or find their behavior acceptable, but that we meet it with a different kind of reaction.

Before we get into the ways to change our anger, it’s really important as well as motivational to consider why it’s not beneficial to give into our anger on a regular basis. First of all, why is it that we tend to continue these habit patterns? Part of it is that we falsely believe that we’re entitled to act on our anger. There’s a very strong sense that we’re justified in doing so because we’ve been wronged—that feeling of “I’m right and you’re wrong.” As soon as you have that thought, you become angrier and angrier.’

Related: Don’t Worry, Be Angry

On a subtler level underneath “I’m right and you’re wrong” is “I’m good and you’re bad,” which exacerbates the rage further. We can see this very well right now in our political climate. It doesn’t matter whether you’re progressive or conservative. If you look online even for a minute, you can see that as soon as somebody states an opinion that someone else disagrees with—and most likely these days they’re not going to be stating it gently—things become intense and inflamed. There’s a very strong reaction and the next thing you know, name calling.

It’s remarkable the number of people who consider themselves Buddhist practitioners who have no problem going online and using really abusive language toward the current president, disregarding all the ideas from the tradition about right speech and equanimity. Why is it that we’re able to disregard those beliefs so easily? It’s this sense of righteous indignation that allows the anger to erupt, the belief that I am right. And if you think about it, it’s not just “I am right.” It’s “I am right.” “I am this person, this self who is in a state of rightness, and when you assert your opinion that is to me demonstrably incorrect or even morally wrong, it feels like a personal slight,” not a disagreement between two human beings.

Related: A Buddhist’s Call for a Middle Way in Politics

These days, in all fairness, because many things that people are fighting for arise from personal experiences of injustice or witnessing injustice occur, things do feel really, really personal. As soon as that feeling arises, the anger becomes extremely intense. Then all of a sudden we feel justified in acting all kinds of ways. If you examine that feeling of acting out of anger, of unloading online or in-person, there is a very subtle wish to destroy that thing we’re angry at. It could be directed at the opinion that you heard and not the person who said it, but regardless, the force of anger can be so overpowering that it generates a desire in you to annihilate.

Even when our anger is not being unloaded and stays stewing inside of us, the angry thoughts are still quite destructive. It’s very much like how a toddler feels when they throw a temper tantrum, like they would rip the world apart in that moment if they could. We feel that way too, though we’re adults. As long as we cling to the idea that we’re right and the other person is wrong, we’re good and the other person is bad, we’re likely to be able to justify all different manners of behavior that will continue the habit patterns we’ve already formed. Over time we’ll only increase and exacerbate our reactivity and our capacity for anger within us. It’s sort of like we’re meditating on anger every time we allow ourselves to act on it or stew on it. But instead of meditating on positive qualities, we’re meditating on destructiveness and rage.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have feelings about injustices being perpetrated. But the quality of this rage of “rightness” and “goodness” is ironic, because even though it feels good, it isn’t actually constructive for trying to change the world in the ways we want to. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. If you look at images of Martin Luther King and civil rights marches, you’ll be very struck by how calm and collected people are as they’re walking. They were being physically harmed, beaten and having hoses turned on them, but they’re dignified, they’re upright, they’re linking arms. Those people trained in order to be able to march like that. There was a lot of intentionality put behind that presence of nonviolence in this world—they are purposefully not meeting the violence being perpetrated against them with rage. Years later, when I look back on it, I’m filled with admiration for their dignity, because I truly don’t know if I would be capable of engaging in such a calm manner, considering the extent of the injustices being perpetrated against them.

We have a real respect for what those marchers did. This is the thing about learning how to work with our anger and not meeting the world with rage: not only do we feel better personally, but also we earn the respect of other people. Do we truly respect people who are acting totally crazy even though we agree with what they’re saying? No. Usually we have the most respect for people who are calm and collected, people who can communicate messages—even messages that others don’t want to hear—in a manner that is clear and comes from a place of wisdom.

Another part of the reason we really dig in and hold onto anger is a second false belief we have that our emotions are correct, that they are facts. It’s easy to confuse an emotional reaction with a fact. You hear idioms that tend toward this thought a lot, like, “Trust your gut.” “Follow your intuition.”

This isn’t to say that our emotions don’t carry really important sources of information. Our emotions can help us become more sensitive to other people and ourselves, more tuned into people’s suffering, including our own. They can also distort our perception of a situation completely. We’ve all had that moment where we’ve been angry at a loved one and then when we are able to talk to them we find out that the words they said didn’t actually convey what they were trying to tell us, and there was a total misunderstanding. In that moment where we were feeling misunderstood, it’s almost like you’re seeing the other person as monstrous. And then when the moment passes they’re kind of good again. So part of what has to happen in order for us to stay calm in a raging world is to treat our emotions more lightly. Not to disregard them as though they’re unimportant and not value them, but not to treat them as though they’re absolutely fundamentally correct at all times.

From there, how is it that we change our angry habit patterns and try and stay more calm? One of the most important concepts in Buddhism to this end is the idea of equanimity. When I talk about equanimity I don’t necessarily mean the kind of mental quiescence or calm abiding that arises through meditation. I’m talking about the equanimity we have when approaching all people and experiences with an even mind, trying not to embrace some and turn away from others. I realize that this is a lofty goal! But some of the ultimate goals of Buddhist practice are to be able to approach experience in this way. It’s not that we’re going to walk around in everyday life totally calm, like a robot, not being affected by anything and being exactly the same with everybody. Instead, we start to realize that there is no monolith of good people or bad people—good red staters or bad liberals (or vice versa)—and when we think about people as individuals, each with their own unique story, we have more capacity to realize that they’re like us. There’s something about being really angry where there is a sense that people we are angry at aren’t like us, that they’re totally different. We’re reacting to something “other.” When we can realize that people are the same as us—that they have a story, they have their own suffering, they’re coming out of a particular perspective—we can start to treat them with a little bit more equanimity.

One powerful example I saw on the internet recently involved the comedian Patton Oswalt, who was was putting out some very liberal progressive ideas on Twitter. He was trolled by a very conservative person who verbally abused him and said some negative things. At first, Oswalt responded in kind, but then he went to the Twitter page of the guy who’d trolled him and discovered that the person had had a major surgery that had financially devastated him and ruined his life. Oswalt’s response was, “God, if that had happened to me, I’d be angry, too.” He started a GoFundMe page for this man who had trolled him and personally donated $2000.

Then what happened? The man responded publicly on social media that he was so grateful; that he realized the comedian was a kind person and that he had been totally wrong in his behavior toward him; that he needed to take a look at his rage and how he was acting out. I found this story totally and completely moving not only because of the generous and kind behavior involved but also because of how it showcased our capacity to look past being wounded or hurt by someone and to take in their suffering and where they are coming from. And on top of that, the fact that the suffering person actually received the kindness, which motivated him to change how they’re operating and what he put out in the world.

I think we should use this story as the model for how to stay calm in a raging world. It’s not that we are always going to have the capacity to engage in tremendous acts of generosity and kindness. It’s that we’re open and available to realizing that things are different than they seem—that people are different than we think they are, that emotions are different than we think we are. And even that our friends are primarily people we feel have benefited us, strangers are people we don’t realize we have a connection to, and enemies are people that we feel have harmed us. What do I mean by that? I don’t mean that these events haven’t happened, that people haven’t benefited us and people haven’t harmed us, or that there are people we don’t know. It’s not that. It’s that through the ignorance that we’re trying to clear up in Buddhism we think that stranger equals a blank, an enemy equals bad, and friend equals good. We go through the world with that misperception, and then there’s all sorts of confusion and reactivity. By changing our perception—by relating to people as unique individuals—we can create a little bit more space to act differently toward other human beings as well as ourselves.

The other thing that’s very important in this vein is thinking is the Buddhist concept of emptiness, which means that things are empty of inherent existence and that phenomena are labeled by the mind. This means that there’s nothing real that exists independently, including this independently existing bad person who is inherently bad. Instead what we have are collections of moments that come together through a variety of causes and conditions. For example, this man who trolled the comedian online had the causes and conditions of physical pain and suffering, being financially devastated, probably feeling humiliated by how this had impacted his life, and so on. Then all of these causes and conditions came together in a particular moment when he read something online and exploded into reactivity.

When the circumstances changed and he received kindness, he also changed. In a different moment he was spacious and open and kind. There was no inherently existing bad person at any point in this process. The more that we can embrace this idea that things are in flux, that nothing is exactly the way we think it is, that things are changing, that we’re changing, the more we can be open to relating to things differently. When it comes to thinking about what we need to do on a day-to-day basis in order to cultivate these changes, certainly we could sit on a meditation cushion and concentrate. That is definitely beneficial and absolutely recommended. We could also start to do the kind of meditation where we’re watching our minds, noticing our minds and our reactions to things.

Related: Five Practices to Change Your Mind

As an example, I experienced something just this morning when I opened the fridge. Inside I had a container of berries. Somehow when the door opened the container turned over and spilled all over the floor, and I felt this intense flash of anger that was clearly disproportionate. I mean, it’s annoying when things drop on the floor. But there was no need for me to be angry. I was really surprised. I’d been meditating for a week on giving a talk on staying calm in a raging world and here was my own moment of rage. It struck me. I realized that underneath the rage there was a lot of anxiety about giving this talk. There was a lot of worry about providing information that was helpful to people, and accurate. All of that worry had put me on edge and made me ripe for something to happen that provoked an emotional reaction.

The thing that comforts me is recognizing that there was a moment of sanity in which I could actually observe my behavior and not act on it. I’m not that particularly unique, so I think the kind of meditation that’s most needed for all of us right now is to be more and more engaged with our observations of our thoughts and feelings on a daily basis toward ourselves and others, and then to truly wonder about what’s going on. To become curious about what’s driving our reactions. When we get angry at a person on the subway instead of just lashing out as New Yorkers are prone to do, we can take a minute. If you can’t wonder about it, just don’t act. If you can, later you can ask, “Why am I angry? Why is this bothering me today? On a different day it might not have bothered me so much that someone had done this on the subway but today for some reason it really did.”

We, just like everything else, are not inherently anything, and that moment of our anger was a set of causes and conditions that came together, many of which we can understand. If we take the opportunity to reflect on why it is that I got angry in this moment, we might actually have important insights into what’s happening in ourselves and our lives. Noticing the flash of anger I had this morning opened up a moment of real self-compassion, of thinking about how hard it is, this thing that I’m trying to do today, and how much it matters to me that it’s done well and correctly and from a place of integrity and authenticity. That’s a wonderful thing. This moment that was annoying became a gateway for a better understanding of myself. I think that’s something that we’re all truly capable of.

This is, I think, ultimately the answer to how to keep calm in a raging world: to examine ourselves deeply, to remember that everything is temporary, and to try and cultivate compassion for ourselves and others. Thank you.

♦

This article was adapted from psychotherapist and meditation instructor Mindy Newman’s lecture at the Night of Philosophy and Ideas, a dusk-to-dawn marathon of philosophical discussions and events at the Brooklyn Public Library on February 2, 2019. Newman’s talk was part of a Tricycle series that presented perspectives from Buddhist thinkers and scholars.

[This article was originally published in 2019.]

The post How to Stay Calm in a Raging World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To begin with, I should tell that you it was not the strangest conversation I have ever had. That it happened in the afternoon. That the day was warm, and I was flying that evening out of Miami, where I had done a reading and visited my parents. I had about an hour to visit my cousin, and I should tell you that I like this cousin. He is funny and smart and gay, and since I, too, am queer, I imagine we share a kinship beyond blood ties.

I should tell you that this cousin usually makes me laugh. That he almost died of liver failure a few years ago but survived and now apparently watches a lot of Fox TV news, which perhaps explains why on this afternoon, sitting in his living room, he tried to convince me that someone had paid thousands of immigrants to leave Central America for the US-Mexico border. “Do you really think all those people walked on foot for weeks, and no one paid them?” he asked me.

The shades had been drawn to keep the apartment cool. When I said nothing, my cousin repeated his question. He was referring to a lie that had started on social media and that had been supported by the Trump administration, which blamed the migration of Central American families on funding from billionaire George Soros. The lie was racially coded language. In blaming Soros, the Trump administration was pushing old anti-Semitic claims that a sinister Jewish cabal was secretly using its wealth to undermine white Christian society.

“C’mon, tell me what you think,” my cousin insisted. But we are Facebook friends. He already knew what I thought, and we both knew that he himself had arrived in the United States less than twenty years ago and had asked for asylum just like my father had done in the 1960s. What could I possibly say?

People who think immigrants are necessarily pro-immigrant have not met my family. If they did, they would know that my father voted for Trump and that another one of my cousins thinks all newly arrived immigrants should get “at the back of the line” and enter the country legally like her father did in the 1970s. In fact, her father, like mine and generations of Cubans, arrived in this country illegally and seeking asylum, much like Central Americans today. But Americans don’t generally talk about Cubans as asylum seekers, because the US government broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba at the start of the 1960s and began to consider people like my father to be political exiles. (Often the difference between asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants is decided by a group of white men in Washington, DC.)

Equanimity is said to be an anchor. It protects you against the “worldly winds”—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disrepute.

I wish I could say now that the conversation with my cousin about immigrant families at the border was the strangest, most troubling one I have experienced recently. It wasn’t. One of my students, whose father is from South America, wrote an essay about bullying someone for speaking Spanish. When I suggested viewing the situation from the other girl’s perspective, she explained that she could not feel compassion. She didn’t say “eye for an eye,” but she may as well have. And before that, one of my dearest friends explained to me that she was not bothered about the president of the Philippines ordering death squads to execute people. No criminal charges. No trial or judge. President Duterte has people murdered and brags about it. The Philippines is where she was born and where her mother still lives. No, my friend wasn’t bothered. “He’s killing the drug dealers,” she told me flatly.

My mind stopped, and so did the words in my mouth. I felt trapped inside a bad novel set in Nazi Germany or in Rwanda during the genocide or in Argentina in the time of the Dirty War. A novel where a single man gets to decide who lives and who dies, and people don’t just look the other way but actively justify the murders. It’s the drug dealers, the Jews, the Tutsis, the socialists. After the 2016 US presidential election, a colleague said, “I didn’t think I was ever going to have to live through something like this.” She thought that her mother’s and grandmother’s generations had seen the worst: the back-alley abortions and the murders of black people trying to vote. Our generation had struggles, yes, but so many battles had been won already. We had elected the first black president. We had a Latina on the Supreme Court. We had morning-after pills. In other words, we had never thought we would see a man in the White House refer to neo-Nazis as “good people,” the way Donald Trump did after white men marched through Charlottesville in 2017, chanting that Jews would not replace them, and after one of those men killed Heather Heyer, a young woman resisting the hate rally.

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Almost three years later, I am realizing that no one ever told me I was going to be a Buddhist during a time like this. It feels naive now, but I never expected that my spiritual life would evolve during a time of Muslim bans and federal agents taking toddlers away from their mothers at the US-Mexico border. I figured that the practice of lovingkindness would always help me with my father, who votes Republican, but I didn’t think I would need Buddhism to navigate a conversation about extrajudicial executions or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories over immigrant families. I had thought that my student who had bullied someone about speaking Spanish would be fascinated at the prospect of practicing compassion. She was not.

To be honest, though, I have not turned to compassion myself very much these days. Or to lovingkindness. They are two of the four divine abodes, along with equanimity and mudita, taking joy in the joy of others—qualities that we cultivate because to experience them is to have our hearts open up. Think of four divine casitas, four sacred little houses, where you can dwell when times get rough.

As I thought more about my cousin and my friend and my student, however, the divine casita that came to mind was the fourth one: equanimity.

The first time I saw the Pali word for “equanimity,” upekkha, was at Spirit Rock, where it was etched onto a wooden sign. I regarded the word for a few seconds and concluded that it sounded very serious, like “equanimity” does in English. It struck me as a word for someone much further along the spiritual journey than I was. Indeed, during a retreat recently, a teacher pointed out that this divine casita is a sign of spiritual maturity, since equanimity underpins all the other divine states of mind and heart. Without that quality of balance, it’s easy to confuse compassion with pity or lovingkindness with attachment. Equanimity comes at the end of other lists, too. It’s the seventh of the seven factors of enlightenment and the tenth of the ten perfections.

I have largely stayed away from teachings on equanimity. It’s not that I’ve been worried about indifference, though I’m aware that this is a concern for a lot of people. What if on your way to upekkha you become a doormat? What if you end up accepting the unacceptable in the name of equanimity? Buddhist teachers often point out that upekkha is not passivity. It means seeing the situation clearly, so you’re responding rather than reacting.

Maybe because I am action-oriented I have not worried that equanimity would slow me down. Balanced or not, I take action. No, I stayed away from equanimity because I figured I needed to get a grasp on this lovingkindness business first, as well as on generating compassion for, say, elected officials. Not to mention cultivating appreciative joy for people who can drink milkshakes without putting on extra weight. Frankly, I figured equanimity would be like retirement: it would happen eventually after I got through the real business of the other three divine abodes.

The conversation with my cousin and my friend and my student changed that, however. There was also this: Less than two hours from where I live, a white man tried to barge into a black church in Kentucky to kill people. When he couldn’t get in, he drove to a supermarket. There, he shot and killed Maurice Stallard, a black grandfather. In the parking lot, he killed Vickie Lee Jones, a black woman in her sixties who had survived breast cancer. Witnesses reported that he refrained from shooting a white customer, telling him, “Whites don’t shoot whites.”

The next day, authorities intercepted pipe bombs targeting former president Obama and other Democrats.

Two days later, a white man murdered 11 people in a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The accumulation of news stories and the horrible conversations that followed left me feeling swept away in despair and rage, and while I know that those emotional states can be useful—anger can be a good indicator that someone is violating values you hold very dear, such as human rights—I sensed I was being consumed. I started to wonder if now was a time when equanimity could come in.

Equanimity is said to be an anchor. It protects you against the “worldly winds”—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, and fame and disrepute—by keeping you anchored so you’re not tossed about by those winds. Or hurricanes. The first time I recognized equanimity in action was during Hurricane Andrew, in 1992. I was a preteen, staying with my father’s cousin, Margo, and her family in South Florida.

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A tall, fair-skinned Cuban woman with green eyes, Margo did not panic when the winds began. She boiled water. She cooked pots of black beans. She slipped her husband a sedative. When the hurricane finally ended, sparing us but killing 65 people, Margo walked us around the neighborhood to survey the damage. The hurricane had yanked giant palm trees and flipped them over, so their thick roots poked at the air like colossal brown fingers.

Margo did not cry. She didn’t even complain. She boiled more water and got us all fed, and no plate of Cuban black beans ever tasted better.

The Buddhist teacher Gina Sharpe reminded listeners in a dharma talk that upekkha means “balance” and also “to stand in the middle of all this.” That was what I had seen in Margo when I was a child and what I wanted now for myself. To stand in the middle of all this and have a clear head about what I needed to do next.

I showed up for a dharma talk that ostensibly had nothing to do with equanimity, and since I vaguely sensed I might have to skip out and use the restroom, I sat at the back of the meditation hall.

I heard the clarion call that equanimity is my “charge,” my responsibility. It means keeping my own heart steady, free, and open.

I was trying to focus on the talk, but the room had not been well insulated and a cold draft came from the window. It was January. I was in Massachusetts. Nothing I wore felt warm. My attempt to focus on the teacher’s dharma talk failed. And I needed to pee. I thought about the bathroom and whether I should go now or hold out a little longer. I chided myself for not being more attentive to the dharma talk, telling myself something I had heard others say: when you’re listening to a dharma talk, imagine yourself listening to the Buddha himself. I tried that. It didn’t work.

Still sitting in the meditation hall, I began to think of my meeting with this teacher the next day and how I would pose my questions to her about equanimity. I was having doubts, after all. Maybe the Buddha hadn’t thought about immigrants. Maybe he hadn’t considered family members denouncing immigrants. Maybe in the teachings he had skipped talking about white men barging into churches and mosques, temples and supermarkets, determined to kill people because of their skin color or their religion or where they had been born.

The teacher was talking and I was forming my question when I felt in my body a total resistance. Thinking about racial hatred and xenophobia, I heard the words “It shouldn’t be this way” inside of me, but mostly I felt those words in my body, like a stake driven into the ground. It should not be this way. No one should hate people showing up at the border. Or black people. No one should think that a so-called president has the right to order the executions of people for any reason.

There was my pain over these horrors, and then there was the pain of believing it should not be this way.

Instantly I remembered James Baldwin’s famous passage from his essay “Notes of a Native Son”:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.

I had read Baldwin’s essay many times and had taught it to my students, but for the first time I saw that it is a teaching on equanimity. Acceptance means seeing a situation as it is. The winds—or hurricanes—that had been pushing me around were not just the horrors but my unspoken insistence that the horrors should not exist and that I should get to be a Buddhist during the “good” times, not these times. I heard in Baldwin’s words the emphasis on holding two opposing ideas: accepting the existence of injustice and fighting to vanquish it. I heard, too, the clarion call that equanimity is my “charge,” my responsibility. That it means keeping my own heart steady, free, and open.

It’s hard to describe how soft my chest cavity felt when I acknowledged all this. Maybe it was my imagination, but I sensed in my body a kind of anchoring, a settling in, a sense of I see this, even this, and I felt strong, too. It’s odd to say that I felt both soft and strong at the same time, but I did. I also felt renewed. I would talk again with my friend and also with my cousin. I would get back into the classroom and on social media with more clarity. I would write this essay.

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