Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Goal Orientation… Just learn how to have some equanimity to back it up. As Ajaan Fuang would say, “Goodwill without equanimity is a source of suffering.” So have your goals, but learn how to have an intelligent relationship to your goals. Learn to have a good orientation toward your goals. After all, life is based on finding meaning in our actions. We have to have purpose …
- Virtues Bright & Neither Dark nor Bright… It’s a way of showing compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity—equanimity in the sense that you realize there are some things you would like to gain, but the only way you could gain them would be by taking the precepts, so you realize you have to give them up. With empathetic joy, you see other people are wealthy and you’re not wealthy, but …
- The Larger View… This is also why we have the chant spreading goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, extending these thoughts, these attitudes, to all beings. Because again, it helps us to see the larger picture: We’re all suffering. We all want happiness and yet we’re all doing stupid things, some more stupid than others, but all our actions are based on our desire to …
- Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna… States of right concentration all the way up through the dimension of nothingness are called perception attainments, and the different levels of jhāna are defined by the feeling tone—pleasure and rapture in the first jhāna, more pleasure and rapture in the second, just pleasure in the third, and equanimity in the fourth. So you’re dealing directly with these three fabrications. You get …
- Furnishing Your Home for the Mind… You have to develop equanimity for the areas you can’t change, so that you can focus your efforts on areas where you can be of benefit. either for yourself or others. Otherwise, you keep pushing against a brick wall with nothing to show for it except the pattern of the bricks on your hands. So equanimity’s what brings wisdom into your goodwill …
- Time Well Spent… There’s equanimity when things don’t go well—but it’s not the kind of equanimity that just gives up. It’s the kind where, if you have to make a retreat, it’s a strategic retreat, so that when things get better, conditions get better, you can continue with your work. All the perfections get developed as part of the path. Then …
- Bringing Right resolve… If you can’t help them, you have to develop equanimity. The same for yourself: There are some areas where you can’t change the conditions of your life that are causing hardship, but you can learn how not to suffer because of it. So you develop equanimity for the conditions you can’t change, and you focus your compassion on the areas where …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… Finally, to counteract the effects of past bad actions, the Buddha tells you to develop a mind that’s unlimited—in other words, your goodwill and your equanimity are unlimited. You train yourself to wish for the happiness of everybody, no matter who. No matter how good they’ve been, no matter how bad they’ve been, you tell yourself you don’t want …
- Bare Attention… He calls it equanimity. Even equanimity, here, is a fabricated state of mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to respond to anything. You’re just going to watch. That’s a very strong intention right there. And sometimes, that’s all you need to deal with whatever is coming up. Sometimes it’s all you can do with whatever …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… We start out the meditation with that chant—thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of empathetic joy, thoughts of equanimity for everyone—as a way of disentangling ourselves from the narratives of the day and the narratives of our lives. Whatever anyone has done to us, we have goodwill for them. Anyone who we know is suffering right now, we have compassion. As …
- The Noble Pursuit of Happiness… goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. That’s one of the reasons why we have that chant at the beginning of every meditation to remind ourselves that all four of these form our motivation. And these are the implications of that motivation: that we want to be aboveboard about our desire for happiness, or true well-being—a happiness that lasts, a happiness that …
- When Aging Closes In… They were able to deal with the illness with a lot more equanimity—and to deal with the pain without being overcome by the pain—again because of their practice. So the practice does a lot for you as the body grows ill, even as it dies. And it will grow sick and die: There’s no guarantee that because your mind is in …
- Right View… Or being equanimous: Some people think that you’re not doing anything at all when you’re equanimous, because there are no likes or dislikes, but to be equanimous, as the Buddha said, is also a kind of doing. You can get stuck on it, i.e., you keep doing it over and over again. When you see it as an action, that’s …
- Adult Dhamma… As one tradition would say, just be totally passive and aware, very equanimous, and just let your old sankharas burn away. And above all, don’t think. Or if you are going to think, they say, learn how to think the way we think. And they have huge volumes of philosophy you have to learn, to squeeze your mind into their mold, after which …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… Ananda, going through a list of the different stages of concentration, starting with the fourth jhana and going higher, talking about how when you get to the highest level of concentration, you realize there’s a pure state of equanimity. As long as you’re attached to that equanimity, you won’t be able to gain awakening. But if you learn to see that …
- Warm Your Heart… If not, that’s when you have to develop equanimity. But you still mean them no harm. That changes our relationship to the people around us in pretty radical ways. A lot of times, we treat the people we like well; and the people we don’t like, we don’t treat them well. We have to learn how to imagine ourselves as different …
- How to Feed Mindfulness… As the Buddha said, if you can develop an attitude of limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, that’ll mitigate the results of your past bad actions. If you can train yourself so that the mind isn’t overcome by pleasure, isn’t overcome by pain—in other words, you don’t let these feelings get in the way of your seeing what …
- A Sense of Yourself… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill and equanimity. You can take that list and ask yourself, “Where are you lacking?” If you don’t know about what it means to “lack” in these qualities, you can think about the practices of the people you’ve admired in the past. How do you stack up against them in terms of these qualities …
- Goodwill Plus… calm, concentration, equanimity. It’s in learning how to understand goodwill or compassion or empathetic joy or equanimity as fashioned states that you’re going to learn how to go beyond them. But for most of us, the issue is not going beyond them, the issue is getting there. So focus first on learning how to put together a state of goodwill, through the …
- The Mind's Immune System… As for the ignorance obsession that tends to hang around neutral feelings, you can cut through it with the fourth jhana, where the mind settles down to a state of neither pleasure nor pain — total equanimity. “Purity of equanimity and mindfulness,” it’s called. Total, full-body awareness, like a white cloth covering the body from head to toe. There’s no ignorance obsession …
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