Brahma Vihara Of Upekkha - Equanimity

Our meditation practice is about balancing the mind. Our minds as we have been learning are thought producers. It doesn’t mean we have to believe them or follow those thoughts along. With practice, we bring our minds into balance and learn to see what it’s doing.

Transcript

This is the final talk on these beautiful aspects of ourselves that we can cultivate,

That we can grow.

And I started them talking about kind of the what cultivation means,

You know,

To cultivate something is to ready it for planting.

And so this practice is kind of like readying the soil,

Tilling the soil.

Our practices are to bring mindfulness to ourselves,

To be aware of what's going on.

You know,

We spend a lot of time from the neck up and not too much time from the neck down.

So we're bringing some awareness to that,

Not like it needs to change,

But just to notice how much time,

What's the balance.

You know,

Our practices are to bring mindfulness to ourselves and to our shared humanity.

We're all in this together.

Can we move through the world in a harmonious way?

It feels like that's really needed,

Right?

Can we offer harmony out?

Can we offer balance?

Can we aspire towards being happy and have happiness for others in the same way that we are happy for the successes of our loved ones and ourselves and our friends?

Can we offer that to everyone,

Every living being?

So these qualities are loving kindness,

Compassion,

Unselfish joy.

And today's talk is on equanimity.

I've written so many talks about equanimity over the years.

I would say that if I had a favorite of the four Brahma Viharas,

It would be equanimity,

A balanced mind.

In some way,

You could say that the whole of this path is about equanimity.

The middle path is born of wisdom,

Balance born of wisdom.

I'm not a Tibetan practitioner,

But I was delighted to learn that in the Mahayana lineage of the Tibetan path,

Of these,

The way that they present the four Brahma Viharas,

They're ordered with equanimity being the first cultivation.

It made me happy because I feel like our meditation practice is about balancing the mind.

Our minds,

As we've been learning,

Are thought producers.

That's what the mind does.

It's a thought producer as an organ.

It doesn't mean that we have to believe the thoughts or follow them through.

We don't have to go along with the thinking.

One of my teachers,

Jack Kornfield,

Used to say,

The mind has no shame.

It will go anywhere and it will,

You'll find that.

So with practice,

We bring it into balance and we learn to see like,

What are we doing here?

What are we doing?

We become,

As Jack has said,

Awareness itself,

Awareness itself.

And when we,

When the mind takes flight and just goes sailing off out of control,

We sort of reel it back in,

You know,

With the breath,

With the sense,

The felt senses in the body,

We reel it in.

And in that way,

It becomes trainable.

It becomes balanced.

There was a story that I heard many years ago.

Before the Spirit Rock Retreat Center was built,

They would often retreat at this center out in Yucca Valley in the Mojave Desert,

Where there was a large retreat center.

And about 80 to 100 people would come to this retreat center in Yucca Valley.

And at the meditation hall,

Everyone would leave their shoes,

But there weren't any racks.

So there would just be this pile of shoes,

Like a sea of shoes.

And apparently on one retreat,

Someone stole the shoes while everyone was meditating.

And so people came out of the retreat hall,

And it was like,

Chaos,

Where are my shoes?

Where are my shoes?

And there was a monastic practitioner,

A monk who was on this retreat.

And so as everyone was sort of like,

They had just finished meditation,

And they came out and it was like,

What?

My shoes?

Activation happens right away.

And the monk,

He comes out and he says,

No shoes.

And then he went off,

Just walked away,

Went about his business.

They come,

They go.

That's how things work.

That's how life works.

And I think this story illustrates the wisdom of equanimity.

No shoes.

Oh,

Well,

Comes and goes.

So the wisdom that comes from this practice,

It's not really intellectual wisdom.

It's not about having more information or more knowledge.

It's really developed through this careful observation,

By stepping back,

And by observing and experiencing our life directly.

So the wisdom is really grounded and down to earth.

And I find that reflecting on impermanence regularly has been really,

Really useful in cultivating balance and cultivating wisdom.

Wisdom is seeing clearly that everything is always changing,

That everything is coming and going.

And when we sit in silence,

And we bring our attention to this core part of our body,

The organs that are not above the neck,

We get in touch with,

Wow,

There's so much change happening as I sit here in stillness on the level of my own body.

So when we don't see clearly,

When we don't see change,

Like this is subject to change,

Then what happens is our mind becomes obsessed and becomes attracted,

Or it becomes repellent by things that are coming into our view.

And then it starts to spin,

And we get pulled around by our preferences.

We want the liking,

We don't want the not liking,

We want the pleasant,

We don't want the unpleasant,

And we're just pulled back and forth.

And somewhere in between that pull is the balance.

Somewhere between these two extremes is a balanced mind.

So how do we cultivate equanimity?

How do we till the soil of equanimity?

It's really by allowing ourselves to feel the pull of our preferences,

To feel it,

To feel the pull of wanting and not wanting.

We find the balance by seeing that,

You know what,

This wanting will change,

This not wanting will change.

It's fragile,

It's impermanent.

When we can reflect with wisdom on the nature of things,

This is how it is.

Things come and go,

Everything has the nature to arise,

Everything has the nature to cease.

Things are going to change.

If we're healthy right now,

It's going to change.

And sometimes it's temporary,

And sometimes it's not.

There are those who are sick,

And those who are not yet sick.

And we keep forgetting this.

We ignore the truth.

We choose not to pay attention to this aspect of reality.

And so there's resistance to this reality.

And guess what?

That resistance is okay.

Mindfulness sees it.

Ah,

Resistance,

Yes.

There's resistance.

That's feedback.

That's feedback,

Not liking.

Not liking that things are going to change.

Not liking.

Seeing the preference.

So we can learn from that resistance.

It's feedback.

We can use our practice to really feel the contraction of resistance and bring awareness to the experience.

That's what our practice is about,

Just being aware,

Seeing it,

And not reacting from it.

Stepping back,

Reflecting with wisdom on the nature of things,

Feeling the resistance,

Allowing the heart to learn from that feedback.

And we learn by breathing in,

Breathing out.

And that allows us to sort of zoom out a little bit,

Remembering the bigger picture here.

Everything is going to change.

This thing that I'm obsessing about right now,

In the course of my whole life,

How does this matter?

Everything comes and goes.

So holding this long view,

Equanimity,

Is really manifesting in the whole state of our inner life.

How are we,

Are we allowing the flow of life to move through us?

Or are we damning certain parts?

To know that balance is a generous state because there's an allowing for things to manifest as they are and be what they are.

And what we're doing is we're,

It's generous in that we're willing to be present for it.

What the world needs is people like you and me to meet it with balance.

I'll close with a little piece from Young Pueblo,

A bit of advice that he offers.

He writes,

Repeat daily,

Notice the stories you hold in your mind.

Let go of the ones that cause tension.

That's balance.