This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Seven Supporting Factors of Equanimity - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
The topic for today is equanimity. Over the years, when times are challenging—either locally, nationally, or internationally—people have come to me and said, “Gil, please give a talk on equanimity.” It’s the go-to thing that people are requesting.
When I discovered equanimity for myself, it was on retreat. I was quite surprised to discover it and to understand how sweet it is. It involves a tremendous clarity, and it’s powerful. It’s an amazing thing. I had no idea until then that equanimity was a thing—a particular state that we can experience, a particular way the mind operates that can be known. If I had thought about equanimity before, I thought it was like an admonition, like, “Stay calm, don’t be reactive now,” or something you had to do. “Okay, I’ve got to be equanimous.” But to discover on retreat, as the mind got very settled and peaceful, that there arose this particular state of mind, this activity of the mind that is known as equanimity, and how beautiful it was—that was a great source of joy for me.
The word for equanimity in Pāli1, the ancient language, is upekkhā2. It’s a word that means something like “to watch over,” to have an overview of something, to get the big picture. It’s not a few times that if we have the bigger picture of what’s happening, we’re going to be much more forgiving in the situation, much less reactive.
If someone is being unnecessarily snappy, irritated, and irritable, you might think, “What is going on here? This is my friend or my colleague I’ve known for a long time.” It’s easy to get self-righteous or upset or critical, thinking, “This person’s doing me wrong.” But then someone tells you, “So-and-so just lost a very close relative, and they have all these personal challenges right now.” Oh, now you have the bigger picture. You understand more why the person is emotionally challenged. So, you think, “Okay, let’s give this person lots of permission. Let’s just hold this person with care and kindness and not take it so personally that the person is attacking me by being snappy.”
There are lots of situations like this where we do this, or maybe we don’t do it because we don’t have the overview. Maybe you’re in the market checkout, and there are lots of lines. You see one place where the line is kind of short, and it’s clear that you’re right there, ready to be the next person in line, and someone slips right in front of you. “How could they do that? They could have seen me! This is offensive.” And then you think, “So many times people don’t see me, and I should give this person a piece of my mind. This is not how good people operate.” But then somehow, maybe you start a conversation with the person, and you discover that they’ve been critically ill for a year, and this is their first time out. The person’s exhausted and tired, just barely able to manage to get their food and get out of there. They don’t really see what’s going on around them; they just saw the gap and stepped into it to cope. They didn’t have the bigger picture. But when you hear the story about this person’s challenges, you think, “Oh, please, of course, you can be in front of me, no problem.” As soon as you know more, you have the bigger picture.
One of the remarkable things that happened to me many years ago was that I did a retreat with Stephen Levine, who was one of the pioneers of the modern hospice movement. He wrote a very impactful book at the time called Who Dies? about death and dying. I did a weekend workshop with him, a brilliant man, very insightful and attuned to people. It was a death and dying workshop up in Marin. Before the event was going to start, all these people were milling around outside in the courtyard. I don’t know exactly how to describe how I was viewing everyone, but I think at the minimum, I had this view that these were just everyday, ordinary people. It might have been a little worse than that.
Then we went into the workshop for the weekend, and the primary way in which Stephen Levine worked was he invited people to come up and speak about their challenges around death and dying. Then he would engage them in a transformative way very quickly. It was remarkable what the two days were like. The people who spoke, who were these ordinary, everyday people, had these dramatic, difficult, challenging experiences. Some of them were literally dying while they were there. Some people had just lost their young child or baby. Some people had been in accidents and war zones. They were ordinary, everyday people with this huge, painful, difficult time. And I thought, “Gil, you just viewed all of them as ordinary, everyday people who don’t have any suffering.” And I said, “Wow, I take people for granted.” Who knows when I’m walking down the street what suffering, what background, what challenges these people have? Maybe everyone has some kind of serious challenge or background. Let’s not take people for granted anymore. Let’s not assume that everyone is just an ordinary folk. Everyone has an emotional depth and background and conditions that I don’t know. That provides an overview, a different attitude to how to be with people that lends itself to not being immediately reactive, judgmental, or operating on preferences and bias.
This idea of an overview, an equanimity from seeing a bigger picture, is one way to understand it. The other word that’s used for equanimity is a very ordinary set of three words strung together into a compound that sounds sophisticated if you don’t know Pāli. It’s the words for “standing in the middle of all this.” It’s more of a sense of having a balance, being in a balanced standing position, being able to take a stand and not be pushed around. This comes from being somehow emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically strong. There’s some kind of inner stability, inner balance, that if someone comes and says something unkind to you, or if someone praises you, that’s not going to tip you over one way or the other. You’re kind of rooted in a certain way. That rootedness means that you’re not prone to being pushed around by what’s called the “winds of the world”—praise and blame, success and failure, and things like that.
So these are the two primary backgrounds for equanimity. What they both do is they protect us from a reactive mind. In my vocabulary, “reactive” is a response in the mind which is on automatic pilot, that happens before we’ve decided anything. We just automatically react to a situation rather than respond. A response can be more thoughtful, more considerate, more balanced, more coming from a deeper place. Reactivity is kind of like a surface reaction that, after it happens, we realize we’ve done it. Equanimity protects us from this reactivity, which keeps the mind calmer. One of the natures of reactivity is that it agitates the mind, and an agitated mind is more likely to be reactive, which keeps it going. Some people unfortunately seem to live in reactivity. And sometimes what people are reacting to, and I’ve certainly seen this in myself, is myself. I have a thought, I have an idea, and that just gets me agitated automatically. And then that agitation leads to another and another, and it goes on and on.
Equanimity is to come to a place where we’re not prone to be reactive. We might have all kinds of feelings and responses that arise, but all those feelings and responses are held in a wider field, rather than generating an automatic response.
So how is equanimity brought about? How do we find ourselves to be equanimous? If someone tells you, “Be equanimous,” what do you do? There was a time, as I indicated at the beginning, where if someone told me, “Gil, be equanimous,” I would have reacted to that. One reaction is “no.” The other reaction would be, “Okay, I’ve got to get to work. This is something to do.” But I think that equanimity is not something we do, but something that we build, something that we create the conditions for, so that it’s there to support us. It’s not a doing. If it’s a doing, it’s probably not going to work. If we try too much to be equanimous, it’s probably not equanimity. But equanimity is almost like a byproduct of a way of living, a way of practicing, a way of being that we want to put in place. In doing so, equanimity can become stronger and stronger.
There are seven things that I think of that are the conditions for the arising, the appearance, the establishing of equanimity.
Live an ethical life. In the Buddha’s teachings, an ethical life is a life that does not involve any intentional harming of anybody else. If there’s no intentional wanting to harm someone through our body, speech, and mind, then that gives birth, according to the Buddha, to the bliss of blamelessness. No one has anything to blame you for based on what you’ve actually done. Of course, people will blame you anyway, but you know that your inner life was clean. You know that you were dedicated to non-harming. Even though you may have inadvertently caused harm or offended someone, you at least have the equanimity, the balance, that you have nothing to apologize for in your intention. You don’t have to worry that someone’s going to find out what you did because you had unkind thoughts or did something unethical. There is a tremendous value in living harmlessly, dedicated to a life without hostility. To take refuge in that, to value that, is so important. So if someone does blame you, or if something you do accidentally causes some harm, you at least don’t have to worry about your intention. You can feel good about yourself on the inside. You might not feel good about the consequences, and you might want to do something to alleviate the problem, but there’s some balance or non-reactivity there.
Have confidence (saddhā). The second support for equanimity is often translated from Pāli as faith (saddhā3), but I like the word “confidence.” Confidence in the practice, confidence in the Dharma, confidence in the purpose of this practice. When there’s a confidence about how to live, a confidence about a practice we have to engage with this life, then we know we have inner resources and an inner direction that will support us in any circumstance. Even though we don’t understand what to do in a situation, we know that the practice is always there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a situation where I did not know what to do, but I’ve come to trust that in those circumstances, I can always be mindful. And if I’m mindful, somehow things seem to work out in a way I couldn’t have predicted. If I had not been mindful, I would have been caught up in my reactivity, my fears, my agitated mind. But with faith and confidence in mindfulness, I can stay somehow balanced and calm, non-reactive, and realize, “Okay, we have time here. Let’s just be present.”
Develop the mind and heart. Your inner life is malleable; it can change and grow for the better, or it can develop in ways that are harmful to you and the world. It can become a beautiful inner life, or it can be a fairly ugly one, full of hostility, hatred, and greed. So, we develop a good, strong, well-balanced inner life. We cultivate mindfulness so it becomes strong. We cultivate concentration, calm, and stability so they become strong. Not that they have to be strongly present all the time, but so that they are available to turn on when they’re needed. Sometimes I’m in a situation where it feels like, “Okay, now I’ve got to really be mindful, really be present for this,” and I can kind of turn on the mindfulness muscle. It’s like pulling the curtains from the mind, so I’m not so caught up in my thoughts and fantasies but am really seeing, knowing, recognizing, and tuning in to the details of the present moment.
Cultivate happiness and well-being. This is one of the goals that is inherent and explicit in the Buddhist path to liberation. On the way of this path is to become happier, to have more joy, to have an inner life that you’re glad to have. This is, of course, a little bit challenging to hear for some people who are quite challenged, sad, grieving, depressed, angry, or hurt. The Dharma is here to support them, to hold it all in a wise and compassionate way, but in the process, it is supposed to slowly help people develop an inner capacity for happiness and well-being. In the Dharma, we’re supposed to become our own friend, so that our mind, rather than being an enemy, is our best friend. One of the great treasures of Dharma practice is to discover that there’s a sense of joy and happiness that can arise for no good reason. In the Dharma, we discover that our happiness doesn’t have to depend on the world being a particular way. The harmonious working of the inner life itself produces happiness and well-being.
Develop wisdom. Have some good, street-smart understanding of what goes on in this world. I acquired some wisdom from the Stephen Levine workshop. It wasn’t so much about my own relationship to death and dying, but rather a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the challenges that human beings have. That wisdom gave me more ability to hold people with equanimity and care. For example, hospice workers will often warn the family of a dying person that in the last week, the person may become very hostile and angry toward the people they have loved the most. This is a known phase. You don’t have to take it personally. When it happens, the family can understand, “Okay, we know why this is here. This is not the culmination of our 40-year relationship; this is just chemicals operating in their system.” That wisdom allows for equanimity.
Practice non-clinging. Have the wisdom to recognize when you do cling and to know how to let go. It’s very different to be angry and hold on to it tight versus being angry and just letting it move through us. We don’t have to justify anger or condemn it necessarily. If we’re not clinging to it, then we may be more balanced with it, equanimously angry. “Look at that, there’s anger. Well, let’s see how this goes,” rather than immediately getting on the angry bandwagon. To learn something about clinging contributes a lot to our capacity for equanimity because most loss of equanimity, most reactivity, involves some clinging to something.
Realize the absence of clinging. This is the final support: the absence of holding on to fixed ideas about life, ourselves, who we are, who we’re supposed to be, or what is right and wrong. When something happens in the world, it doesn’t hit some attachment we have. The example given in the teachings of the Buddha is that conceit is like the banner that an army troop carries with it into battle, announcing it’s there so everyone can attack. But without the flag of conceit, nothing can be attacked. It’s like a closed window: the neighbor’s baseball will break it. An open window: it goes right through and lands on the living room floor, causing no damage. There is a deep letting go that is possible, which the Dharma teaches. That deep letting go means that we’re not holding up panes of glass that the world can strike.
The principle here is that equanimity is not something we do, because then it’s probably not equanimity. Rather, it’s a condition that we have supported and grown and come to appreciate. Equanimity makes room in the heart and the mind for the best qualities inside of us to come to the forefront. It allows for the goodness we have inside us to grow. Part of what we’re doing in Dharma practice is growing our inner life so that it becomes a beautiful, valuable inner life that is here to support the well-being and happiness of all.
Questioner: I’ve been thinking about equanimity in the context of what’s going on right now in the world, and particularly the news that we got last night that we seem to be starting yet another war, our country that I’m a citizen of. I came into this very troubled by that. I listen to your talk, and everything you said is correct, it makes sense, and yet I’m struggling a little bit with how I can reconcile a deep sense of compassion and a feeling of wanting to alleviate the suffering that we seem to be on the brink of with all the stuff you just talked about. Could you give some guidance on how to hold this?
Gil Fronsdal: First, I want to say I appreciate very much your compassion and desire to alleviate suffering in the world. That’s a beautiful quality, and I hope people will act on that. I hope you will act on that in some way. I hope you have the wisdom to know what’s appropriate for you to do. Sometimes we can’t directly address the big things in the world that we read about in the newspaper, but we can be changed by it, so that we can put more energy or effort into where we can make a difference. It might be that if you offer your care and support for a neighboring child, you might be preventing World War III. Who knows how this kid’s going to grow up? But it’s possible that the one person who was really kind and supportive changed the whole direction of that person’s life.
But to figure out what to do, absolutely. The more interesting reflection of what you’re saying is, what’s the complex ecology in you? It’s one thing to be equanimous. It’s another thing to have no equanimity, to be caught in fear, distress, anger, confusion. To be caught in the grip of that. The desire to do good in the world, to be compassionate and alleviate suffering, takes a very different shape depending on which of those two ways your mind is. The chances are, from the tone of your voice and the way your face looked, there’s a lot of extra going on here for you that’s not needed. So, not to let that be unconscious, so that it creates a strength of distress and pushing, like something needs to happen here that’s being pushed by fear, distress, and anger. That’s what deep equanimity helps us to find. And then we find that, and maybe settle those things, heal those things. And then maybe when we do engage in compassionate care for the world, we do it in a way that’s more effective. And one of the ways it can be more effective is we become the example of what we want the world to have.
Questioner: I may be saying the same thing that the gentleman just did, but it seems like with practice, compassion is essential, and so is equanimity. And that I need to just keep finding a balance between those. When I find I’ve gone so much with compassion that I’m overwhelmed, then I need to go back and work more on equanimity.
Gil Fronsdal: Equanimity and compassion may both be expressions of something deeper that we develop. So what we’re doing in the Dharma practice is trying to get back to the roots that are deeper down. We don’t want to be too quick to call upon equanimity as the response to the world, or too quick to call on compassion. We might not be quite ready. So we want to develop a strong practice which creates the inner stability, the inner quiet, the inner mindfulness, so that we can actually start seeing the roots of what’s deeper inside. It’s those roots that have to be somehow transformed. Without knowing ourselves down to the depths, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Questioner: I drove by a church the other day, and there was a big banner that said, “Immigrants and refugees welcomed here.” And it seemed like it wasn’t a wild action; it was a loving action. And if we’re very committed to ethics and compassion, sometimes I just really feel like in a very calm, loving way, it would just seem like a group that I really love that’s devoted to those things…
Gil Fronsdal: Yes, very nice. I love the Quakers and different churches that are involved in social action. That’s their mission, to be involved in social action, and I think it’s fantastic.
Pāli: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Pāli Canon, or Tipiṭaka, and is the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism. ↩
Upekkhā: A Pāli word meaning equanimity, non-attachment, even-mindedness, or letting go. It is one of the Four Sublime States (Brahmavihāras). ↩
Saddhā: A Pāli word often translated as faith, but more accurately understood as confidence or conviction based on understanding and experience, rather than blind belief. ↩