This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Brahmavihara: The Beautiful Qualities of the Heart (5 of 5). It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Rachel Lewis at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So today, I wanted to just debrief Joy a little bit, and then we’ll talk about equanimity and how all of these factors, how all of these Brahmaviharas1 fit together.
Joy can be, paradoxically, a bit of a hard sell in difficult times. There can be this niggling voice that wonders whether it’s appropriate to be happy when others are unhappy. At the end of the day, one of the important functions of joy is to keep the heart fresh, lively, and nourished. We’ll talk a little bit more about this when we move on to equanimity, but if you think about it, the most effective way of helping other people is to be operating from a place of wellness yourself.
In a number of places in the suttas, the Buddha talks about living at ease among the afflicted. Because this practice is so hard, this road is hard to walk to completion. If you’re really dedicated to freedom, there’s going to be unfreedom around you, and you can’t let that distract you.
Joy, viewed through a Dharma lens, can’t be selfish. Mudita2 is altruistic. We rejoice in allegiance with the health, wholeness, and richness we see around us. It is undeniably appropriate. Although we’ve suffered tragic losses and will continue to do so, our planet still supports a bounteous, riotous profusion of life. Further, joy is not simply a passive state of enjoyment. Joy provides vital resilience and inspiration for our loving action. After all, if we can’t rejoice in the well-being of others and the world, what can sustain us in working toward that end?
I think that was something that I also wanted to draw out a little bit—just the way that work in itself can be joyful. On one of the boards that I’m on, we had an in-person meeting some time ago. One of our members lives with a chronic illness that she manages with a lot of mindfulness. At the beginning of the meeting, she let us know that she was having an okay day, but she was about a four out of 10, and so she’d really need to be careful about how she was engaging. She found the meeting so engaging—it was a really great board meeting, those things can happen—that by the end of the meeting, she reported her energy was at around a seven out of 10. She’d been using energy discussing important topics for the organization, but the using of the energy was not draining but replenishing.
So I think that the joy of work is going to be a refuge for a lot of us in the times that are here. To find work that nourishes us in the doing of it, rather than sitting at home fretting about all of the things that should be done. To pick something and do it, and let our hearts be uplifted by the doing, by the connections that we form in the doing as well.
Dan Savage writes, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon, and danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then, and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now, but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”
There was this delightful piece in Humans of New York about somebody who’d made a decision to be joyful. He says, “I work in sanitation. Our shift starts at 5:00 a.m. These guys are coming in from all over. They’re tired, they’re dragging, but I’m whistling. I’ve got my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I’m saying, ‘Good morning, bro, what’s up? We’re about to make some money. Good honest day’s work.’ Every time you get to the end of the block, you look back, you see the whole block is nice and clean. The sidewalk is nice and clean. So I’m smiling.”
So maybe just taking a moment to look at your life through that lens of appreciation. Just taking a moment to remember, what are some things that are going well? Each of us right now has internet access. That’s amazing. We probably have a warm place to sleep tonight. I bet most of us have clean water coming out of the tap. We have enough health and leisure to engage in something like this. So many blessings when we stop to look for them. The blessing of finding the Dharma, finding a way of training the mind in presence and resilience even when things are hard. The blessing of good company.
So appreciation for what’s going well can help to break the obsessive focus on what’s difficult in our lives.
Joy also functions, like I said, to balance the way that compassion can lead to heaviness. It’s really natural when the mind is turned toward what’s challenging in life for compassion at times to spill over into grief. It’s really normal for that to happen. Grief isn’t what we’re cultivating, but it’s part of the art of cultivating these beautiful states of mind to get skilled at working with keeping them from becoming their unhelpful variants. So, keeping compassion in balance so that it doesn’t lapse into grief, keeping joy in balance so that it doesn’t lapse into giddiness.
The quality that helps to maintain this balance, aside from mindfulness which is always useful, is equanimity.
There was a little quote I saw from a writer who calls themselves Story People: “We’ve all known such times when the sky and ground were turned around, no moon to guide us through the dark wood. I see how bravely you take one step after the other, and I hold my lantern high here at the edge of the forest. I’m your witness. I’m your friend. The journey is yours alone, but you are not alone.”
I love that quote because of the way it captures an important aspect of equanimity: this sense of kindness and connection, and also the respectful acknowledgment that another person’s journey is theirs. It’s not yours to control. The feeling of equanimity is this spaciousness of mind that can encompass anything. It can turn toward things just as they are without getting caught, without resisting.
The word equanimity can bring up a lot of associations for folks, so I feel like when talking about equanimity, it’s useful to spend more time talking about what it’s not than about what it is. Folks can assume that it’s kind of a tuned-out quality of mind, like just not caring, or apathy, or never being touched by anything. Those are what are traditionally called the “near enemy” of equanimity—something like apathy or delusion, just not being in touch with things as they are.
I don’t know if you have this picture handy to share on the screen, but there was a very iconic image some years ago. It became popular: this little cartoon dog sitting in a room that’s on fire, and he’s drinking a cup of coffee and saying, “This is fine.” That would be a near enemy of equanimity. This deluded ability to not freak out just because the denial is so strong.
True equanimity is a sense of allowing things to be just the way they are. Things are the way they are, and the heart is going to respond the way it does, and there is a space for all of that to be true. A simile that kind of elicits the feeling of equanimity is standing firm in the midst of everything without getting swept away. Another way of feeling into it could be observing from a height so that you can see the present moment in a larger context.
I also like to think of it as a grandparent’s love. If metta3 is the heart that connects, and compassion is the heart that cares, and mudita is the heart that rejoices, equanimity is the heart that allows. There’s still this relational aspect to it in the context of this list of the Brahmaviharas. A grandparent has a lot of caring for their grandchild, but not the reactivity that a new parent would. When my brother and his wife had their first kid, they were living in a place where there was a pediatrician on speed dial for new parents, which was good because they called him like 10 times a day the first few months. Every time, the person on the other end of the line would be like, “Yep, that’s diaper rash.” But just because they didn’t have the context for understanding what their kid’s signals meant, every little thing, because they cared so much, kind of sent them into a tizzy. Whereas when one of the grandparents would come to visit, they’d be like, “Yep, this is diaper rash. It’ll be fine.” Still caring, still doing what was appropriate, but without the tizzy aspect of it.
How do you know when equanimity is lost? One of the signs that you’re losing equanimity is getting caught in judging, or comparing, or fixing. Philip Moffett has these three as his main tendencies of how we tend to react unwisely to the world. Myself, I’m a fixer. I feel like we all have a main choice from those options that we tend to go to. So when I notice myself in fixing mode, it can be a good reminder, like, “Oh right, I’m really counting on things being a certain way. I’m really believing that having external conditions be just so is necessary before I can relax. Huh, okay.”
Once I’ve been able to name that, a space opens up where I can be with the messiness of conditions that are not what I would have chosen. One of the misconceptions we can have about equanimity is that it means always just feeling sort of so-so about everything. When in fact, I think one of the most important applications of equanimity is to have equanimity about our lack of equanimity. To be able to say, “Oh wow, I’m losing it.” The moment you’ve named that, you’re back in the land of equanimity again. There’s some space around whatever reactivity is coming up.
This ability to allow things to be just the way they are, including your own foibles and mistakes and confusion and flying off the handle. Like, “Wow, I am really counting on things lining up with my expectations and staying that way. Yep, this is me believing that.” Just saying that, there’s at least 10% more equanimity. Saying, “Yep, I believe that this is permanent.” If you’ve been around Buddhist circles for long enough, saying that out loud is going to twig something for you, and that buying into the belief will be a little bit softer.
One of the things that enables equanimity to arise is seeing impermanence, seeing, like I said a minute ago, kind of having this broader perspective. The understanding that life has ups and downs, this is just kind of how things are.
There’s a story. Once upon a time, there was a farmer who farmed a very small piece of land, and he had a single horse. One day, there may have been a storm, and part of the fence blew down, and the horse got loose and ran away. All the other villagers condoled with him. They said, “Oh, how unfortunate.” And the old farmer said, “Perhaps.” Sometime later, the horse came back and brought 20 wild horses with him. All the villagers crowded around and told the old farmer, “Oh, how fortunate you are to have all of these horses now.” He said, “Perhaps.” The farmer had a teenage son, and you know how teenagers are—just don’t tell them they can’t do something. He decided he was going to train one of the wild horses to be a saddle horse, and got thrown and broke his leg. Everybody said, “Oh, how unfortunate. You have nobody to help you on the farm now while your son recovers.” And the old farmer said, “Perhaps.” And sometime while the son was still recovering, the emperor’s army came through town and conscripted all of the able-bodied young men and took them off to war. The farmer’s son was the only young man left in the village. Everybody crowded around and told the farmer how fortunate you are to have your son still with you. “Perhaps.”
It’s not like he wouldn’t have acted as best he could in response to these changing conditions. It’s that he had a broader perspective that, yes, this is an up and this is a down, and ups don’t last, downs don’t last.
The power of equanimity is that it keeps our other Brahmaviharas from becoming neurotic. The basic wish of metta, of friendliness, is “may you be well.” The basic wish of attachment is “I can’t stand it if you’re not well.” It’s equanimity that keeps the one from lapsing into the other. “I care about you, and I understand your life is going to have ups and downs, and that doesn’t change my caring, but I’m not going to be surprised if things are hard for you sometimes.” Equanimity keeps compassion from lapsing into grief and joy from lapsing into giddiness. And those other qualities keep equanimity from becoming too cold or too removed. The closeness of metta, the poignancy of compassion, the lightness of joy all keep equanimity connected. It keeps it more like a grandparent’s love than just a coolness.
We see that things are impermanent. We see that life has ups and downs. We see that there are different types of things that happen in human lives. They’re called the eight worldly winds.4 There are four pairs of things: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and obscurity. These things are not fundamentally susceptible to our control. Two musicians work very hard to develop their skills, and one of them goes viral and the other doesn’t, works in obscurity for their whole career. Who knows why that happens? Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, they kind of come and go on their own schedule.
The Buddha described his teachings as “going against the stream.” We can see that very clearly when we look at the messages that mainstream culture gives us. “If you do everything right, if you shop at the right stores, if you take the right supplements, do the right exercise classes, you’ll definitely be able to have only pleasure, only gain, only praise, only fame.” It just doesn’t work like that. If we make our happiness contingent on those eight worldly winds only blowing in certain directions, we’re sunk. That’s not a reliable source of happiness.
Instead, we’re training the mind to find a source of inner well-being, a resilience, an aliveness that doesn’t depend on things out there lining up with our wishes or expectations or hopes.
So why don’t we give this a try? Let’s spend 30 minutes doing some of this practice.
Checking in with your body, seeing if you want to be lying down or standing up or sitting with different props than you’ve been using. Finding a posture that allows for alertness and vigor and a sense of at least inner uprightness, and also ease, relaxation, not having to do so much work to hold the body upright.
Feeling the steadiness of the earth supporting you. Sometimes equanimity is described as having a mind like the earth, just unshakable.
As we start this practice, it’s helpful to warm up the space by doing a bit of metta first. So bring to mind a benefactor, perhaps the person or being that we were working with several weeks ago. Just imagine them sitting in front of you and feeling the way your heart perks up with this imagined connection with them. And offering them phrases that express your goodwill.
“My dear one, may you be happy and peaceful. May you be healthy and well. May you be safe. May you live with ease.”
Noticing if there are feelings of warmth or tenderness or uplift that come along with these words. If those feelings do come, that’s great. Let them strengthen. And if it feels a bit more abstract, that’s fine too. We’re just aligning the heart with this intention.
“May my dear one be happy and peaceful. May they be healthy and well. May they be safe. May they live with ease.”
And turning the attention to a neutral person, perhaps one of the people we’ve worked with in previous weeks. Just somebody who doesn’t have a strong charge for you one way or the other. Some individual you could bring to mind.
“My dear neutral person, may you be happy and peaceful. May you be healthy and well. May you be safe. May you live with ease.”
“I might not have a strong connection with you, but you’re a sentient being, so I’m on your team, the team of all sentient beings. If I could choose for you, I’d choose only good things to happen.”
And having established that basic connection and caring, we can switch to equanimity contemplation. One of the traditional phrases is, “Your happiness and unhappiness depend on your actions, not on my wishes for you.” Or you could try something different, like, “Things are just as they are for you right now.”
“Everyone has their own journey. This is yours.”
Just noticing how the heart feels as you turn the attention to this equanimity contemplation with this neutral person.
And then turning back to your benefactor. “My dear one, your happiness and unhappiness depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.”
Notice how the heart feels. So offer to your dear benefactor this gift of wisdom, this gift of respect. “Each of us has our own journey. This is yours.”
And you could bring to mind someone who’s difficult for you, imagining them in a way that feels okay for you, and offering them whatever phrases express this vast, equanimous heart.
“Things are just as they are for you right now.”
“Everyone has their own journey. This is yours.”
And the greatest challenge of all is offering equanimity to oneself. Bringing your attention to yourself, trying out maybe a few different phrases. “My happiness and unhappiness depend on my actions, not on my wishes.”
“This is how things are for me right now.”
“Can I be okay with things just as they are?”
“May I hold this moment with tenderness.”
Noticing how your heart feels right now.
“There is a lawfulness to the unfolding of my life.”
“Things are just as they are for me right now.”
And turning toward all of the beings on this call right now with equanimity. “These people have come together to support my practice. Each of them has their own journey. Things are just as they are for them right now.”
Perhaps bringing to mind the beings that are near you physically right now, beings in your household or your neighbors. “For these people who are near me, things are just as they are right now.”
“For beings who are far away from me, things are just as they are right now.”
“There are beings who are experiencing suffering, perhaps ill health. Things are just as they are for them right now.”
“There are beings who are experiencing joy, connection, contribution, simple enjoyment. For these beings, things are just as they are right now.”
“All humans have ups and downs in their lives. Their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions and not on my wishes.”
“All animals have ups and downs in their lives. Things are just as they are for them right now.”
“For beings who are known to me, things are just as they are. For beings that are not known to me, things are just as they are.”
“All those who are now living have their own journeys.”
“Future generations have their own journeys.”
“May all beings everywhere feel the ease of the heart that connects and allows. May all beings rest in equanimity.”
As we end this practice period, reconnecting with the group.
There’s an opportunity for sharing how that practice was for you, anything you experienced that you’d like to share, anything you’re curious about. As always, it’s fine to type a response in chat, or if you’re okay with being recorded, it’s fine to unmute yourself and speak into the group.
One of the things that I think we touched on a little in a previous week is the way that this practice of equanimity can be quite sobering, especially after the delight of joy. I think one of the reasons why it can feel like there can be a bit of a jolt with the transition to equanimity is that there’s a trap with the cultivation of these other Brahmaviharas. There can be a sneaky little bit of attachment that comes in, just the sense of, “I am doing something that is ensuring good outcomes for you.” “Because I am thinking caring thoughts about you, that’s going to make good things happen to you.” “Because I’m connecting with you with compassion, that will make you feel cared for.” “Because I’m delighting in your good fortune, that will also uplift you.”
That little bit of attachment and magical thinking can… there’s something inflating about it. It’s kind of seductive to feel like you are controlling the world with your mind. If we could actually control the world with our minds, a lot more things would be either on fire or made of chocolate, speaking for myself. [Laughter]
So equanimity is reminding us that there is a lawfulness to how people’s lives unfold, and they have agency when it comes to that unfolding. We can help when the time’s appropriate, we can care for sure, and we can’t make their choices for them. To see that there’s a limit to how we can ensure good outcomes for the people we care about, there can be a real resistance there.
When the first time I did an extended period of practice with the Brahmaviharas, I was kind of skipping around the center just dispensing mudita to everybody. And then when I came up against equanimity, it was like being pulled up tight. Just, “Oh wow, this is different. I’m needing to relinquish this feeling of control that had grown without my being fully aware of it in the other Brahmaviharas.”
Question: The area where I’m working is around how much does courage connect with equanimity? I am sensing for myself, because there’s a fair amount of fear left in me, that in order to expand my capacity for equanimity, I need to know more about courage. Because if I try to just have a sort of warmth but steady heart, the fear intensifies when I’m including all circumstances, not just friendly circumstances. So if you could comment on courage and equanimity.
Answer: Yeah, that’s really tender. I feel like equanimity and courage really enable each other, don’t they? This heart that is willing to get close to things just the way they are and to stay steady even when they’re challenging. Courage faces difficulties, and equanimity stays steady with them. We long for happiness, we long for ease and good conditions, and that’s fine, it’s certainly not a problem. And conditions aren’t always going to match what we wish for. So having hearts that are willing to gradually increase our capacity for courage, that’s so important.
I think courage grows as we stretch ourselves gradually. I think a lot of us have a very “get it done” mentality, and so our instinct is to go right from our comfort zone into the most difficult situation possible, and that’s just not appropriate. What we need to do is stretch ourselves a little bit. On the other hand, when we get stretched, our instinct can be to run immediately back to our comfort zone. The way we increase our courage is by stretching a little bit and then pausing and noticing that we’re okay.
There was this one time on retreat, I was doing an extended Brahmaviharas practice early in my practice journey, and it was an enormous purification, by which I mean it was dreadful. I was dealing with a lot of fear coming up, and I was just so bored of it. I was just fed up, like, “Can’t I have something other than fear?” So this one day, I had this feeling of apprehension, and I’m like, “Oh God, it’s going to be more fear. I don’t want to feel this.” So I sort of averted my gaze from it for most of the day. And finally, I’m like, “You know what, this is way more effort than just opening to it would be.” So I dropped that resistance and turned toward the fear, and it turned out it was just a bit of apprehension. That was it. I was putting all that effort into resisting that.
As that willingness to turn toward the fear, however big it might have ended up being, strengthened, and I turned toward it, I was able to see, “Right, I can stay present with this feeling of apprehension. It’s not going to kill me.” And so then the next time I had the feeling that something in the domain of fear was lurking, it was easier to just not bother with that initial resistance phase, if that makes sense. These moments of noticing, “Right, I can do this,” that is what grows our courage. So taking on a manageable challenge and noticing that you’ve managed it, and allowing that learning to sink in before you go back to your comfort zone. It’s stretching gradually that allows courage to grow.
Why are we practicing like this anyway? These practices are purifications of the heart. Taking on these practices, orienting the heart towards compassion and kindness and joy—when we do that, when we orient in that way, what we’re doing is we’re surfacing everything that impedes those qualities from being expressed. We’re getting to know all of the blockages in the heart that keep goodwill from flowing, that keep the heart from being expansive and courageous.
As we set the intention towards kindness and see hostility arise, bringing that hostility into the light of awareness gives it a chance to dissolve. As we bring compassion, turn the attention, set our aspiration towards compassion and see cruelty arise, shining the light of awareness on that helps to soften it over time. Same thing with setting our intention for joy and having a feeling of threat or envy or lack arise. And of course, when we set our intention for equanimity, what comes up is reactivity. Seeing all of the ways that… dropping in the question, “Can I be okay with things just as they are?” Sometimes the answer is going to be, “Oh, hell no!” Just obviously. We all have an edge to our equanimity, and as we practice in this way, we’re just mapping the terrain of the heart. We’re getting to know where there’s reactivity, where there’s rejection of reality, where there’s fighting with the Dharma.
When we practice in this way, we’re not trying to manufacture these feelings. They’re already potentials that are implicit in the heart. We don’t need to implant the ability to be kind; we already have that potential. All we’re doing is turning the attention to it, and the attention nurtures it, develops it. As we see the opposite of these qualities arise, it gives us an opportunity to get to know those as well. The thing is, as we really feel into what cruelty feels like, it doesn’t feel great. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. The desire for other people to suffer, that is a suffering state. As we feel into kindness and compassion, when they’re present, they’re states of non-suffering. The heart will want to choose non-suffering.
We’re bringing all of our pettiness, all of our vindictiveness, all of our envy up to the surface and getting to know it, getting to make friends with it. Not wishing it away, but just seeing, “Right, this doesn’t serve me. I don’t need to be afraid of it. I don’t need to push it away. I can just shine the light of awareness on it. That’s literally all I need to do.” The more I can see how painful it is to live in a state of lack or envy or vindictiveness, the more the heart will just naturally prefer to live in a state of generosity and kindness and connection and delight.
We’re not trying to make these things happen. We’re just appreciating them when they’re present, and we’re noticing the unpleasantness of literally any alternative to them. The Buddha said, “All Dharma has the same taste: the taste of freedom. Just like all of the great oceans have the same taste: the taste of salt.” Once we get the taste for freedom as expressed in the heart that’s kind and caring and delighted and spacious, there’s nothing else we want to taste anymore.
As we practice in this way, as we get to know our pettiness and vindictiveness and all of the other things that impede the heart’s brilliance, we’re becoming better friends to ourselves. We’re becoming better friends to the world. We’re becoming better able to respond wisely.
A teacher, I’m blanking on his name, he studied for decades, 50 years, before starting to teach. One of his students asked him once, “What’s the point of a lifetime of practice? Why have you devoted so many decades of this finite life to this?” He said, “The point of a lifetime of practice is an appropriate response.” Sharon Salzberg said the same thing more succinctly: “We don’t practice meditation to get better at meditation. We practice to get better at life.”
We’re getting to know the potential of the heart to be radiant, to be magnificent. As we orient to that potential more and more, we’re more able to respond appropriately. And this world needs all of the appropriate responses it can get right now.
As we come to the end of this series, everything that comes together is of the nature to disperse. As we disperse, just reflecting back on all of the benefit that has been generated, all of the goodness that has been brought into being through your engagement with this course. The interest that led you to sign up, the determination and persistence that led you to show up, and any moments of calm or kindness or clarity—all of those are seeds of goodness. When those sprout and ripen and bear the fruit of happiness, may that fruit be shared with all beings everywhere. May this practice be for the benefit of all beings. May all beings be free.
Thank you for your practice, everyone.
Brahmavihara: The four “sublime states” or “divine abodes” in Buddhism: Metta (loving-kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy), and Upekkha (equanimity). ↩
Mudita: A Pali word meaning sympathetic or altruistic joy; the happiness felt in another’s good fortune. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, and active interest in others. ↩
Eight Worldly Winds: A Buddhist teaching describing eight paired, opposing conditions that humans face in life: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and obscurity. ↩