Joyful Equanimity
November 19, 2023
Close your eyes. Focus on your breath. Notice where you feel the breathing as you breathe in, breathe out. And ask yourself if it feels comfortable. If it does, keep it up, whatever the rhythm you’ve got. If it doesn’t feel comfortable, you can change. You can make it longer, shorter, faster, slower. Deeper, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Get a sense of what you can control inside the body.
This is an important principle in the practice. We read so much about how the Buddha teaches equanimity, but he doesn’t teach us to have equanimity for everything all at once. If we just say, “Well, everything’s going to be the way it is; there’s nothing I can do about it,” that’s very defeatist. That’s very depressing. The Buddha doesn’t want us to be depressed. After all, he wants us to put an effort to put an end to suffering, and you don’t put an end to suffering just by accepting things. You realize there are certain things in the world that you can change. That’s why the concept of a path makes sense.
So you can change the way you breathe. You can give rise to a sense of well-being in the body right now. The mind needs that to feed on. You look around you, and there are so many things in the world you can’t change. There’s war going on. There’s famine. There are injustices. You can look all over the place and see that the human race looks pretty depressing. And you have to accept a lot of things. There are a lot of things you simply cannot change.
But if you just leave it there, then the mind gets down, depressed. So you have to find someplace inside where you can make a difference. So start from the inside; work toward the outside. That way, what change you can make in the world comes from a good place. And this is one of the ways of doing it, getting this sense of well-being, simply by the way you breathe—and allowing the mind to settle down. When the mind can settle down with a sense of well-being, then its strength grows. And as its strength grows, it becomes more clear. When it becomes more clear, you can see precisely what you can change, what you can’t change. You can focus on changing things that you can in the most skillful way you can think of. But it has to come from a good foundation inside.
So when the Buddha teaches equanimity, it’s always equanimity with a sense of well-being. There are a lot of things you have to accept, but you don’t have to accept the fact that you’re breathing in an unskillful way or you’re thinking in an unskillful way. Or you’re allowing unskillful perceptions to come into the mind and take hold of the mind. You can change these things. And when you change these things, you’re coming from a sense of well-being. In that way, whatever you do, and say, and think to help with the world is not coming out of a neurotic desire simply to be helpful. You see what you really do perceive as a necessary thing to change in an area where you can make a change. And you feel inspired to make the change, because you’re coming from a position of strength.
So build this strength inside so that your equanimity does have a good, solid basis. And it’s a cheerful equanimity, not a depressed equanimity. That’s the kind of equanimity the Buddha taught as part of the path. As he said, if you tell yourself just to be equanimous about things, it goes no further than those individual things. Then it’s very easy to slip off into your likes and dislikes again.
But if your equanimity comes from a sense of well-being inside, then you can be equanimous about the things that you realize lie beyond your ability to change, and it doesn’t get the mind down. It simply focuses your efforts on the areas where you can make a change.
After all, the Buddha himself was making a change in the world when he taught the Dhamma. As we pick up his Dhamma and use it, we can make a change in ourselves. And if we have the energy left over, and the opportunities present themselves, we can make a change in the world. But even if we don’t go around trying to straighten other people out, just simply straightening ourselves out is a big change in the world right there. As the Buddha says, when you become more skillful, become more heedful, it’s like the moon coming out from behind the clouds. It brightens the world. So getting yourself in order is a gift to yourself and to the people around you.