Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Learning from What You Do… I was talking the other day with a Buddhist scholar whose idea was that the end of suffering is simply learning to be equanimous all the time. He didn’t believe that nibbana had anything to do more than just that: a state of equanimity. There’s nothing transcendent, nothing outside the realm of what we normally know in our senses: That’s what …
- Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad… The calming factors are calm, concentration, and equanimity. When the mind is antsy, ask yourself: What kinds of fabrications will calm you down? Where is, as the Buddha says, the potential for calm right now? Where is the potential for solidity in the mind right now? Where is the potential for equanimity? Ferret those things out and you’ll find the mind gets a …
- Heedfulness & Confidence… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These qualities are all skills that we can develop. And then these skills enable us to deal with whatever comes up in a way that doesn’t cause suffering for ourselves or other people. So we should have some confidence in them as we develop them. Now the question is, how do we make …
- Positive Right Speech… Right resolve is that, given how suffering is caused, you want to resolve on renunciation, resolve on non-ill will—in other words, goodwill or equanimity—and harmlessness—compassion. You want *that *to be reflected in your speech as well. The Buddha says that these principles are reflected in four kinds of speech. Right speech is defined in negative terms: in terms of not …
- Sending Happiness… What kinds of mistakes would you like not to make again? And then as motivation to stick with that determination, develop goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, with the emphasis on the goodwill: wishing happiness for others, the people you’ve wronged, to remind yourself that you don’t want to wrong them again. Then wish happiness for all beings, because you don’t …
- Be Bigger Than Your PainsEvery evening we chant the chant on the sublime abidings—immeasurable goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—because for the most part, our goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity have measures. They have limits. We need practice in going beyond those limits. The more limited, the more narrow our concerns are, the bigger the sufferings in life are going to seem, and the more …
- The Brightness of Life… There really is no happiness in the world, and contentment lies in just admitting that fact and basically giving up on the search for happiness and learning how to be equanimous and unaffected by anything. That’s the best that can be expected. There is no transcendent. There’s nothing unconditioned. It’s just a matter learning how to accept where you are. That …
- Skillful Effort… As the Buddha himself said, there are two kinds of causes of suffering, the ones that will go away if you simply watch them with equanimity, and those that will go away only when you exert a fabrication or sankhara against them. That phrase, “exerting a sankhara,” sounds kind of strange, but it’s actually pointing us to where some very useful tools are …
- Meaning Through Perfections… Dealing with other people, you have to develop a lot of goodwill and equanimity—those are perfections. As you’re meeting up with challenges, you have to develop the perfection of determination, the perfections of persistence and endurance, the perfection of truthfulness. Every way in which you develop good qualities like this, you’re taking one more step toward awakening. The important thing, though …
- How to Use the Three Perceptions… Or even just the equanimity you can develop as you see that things are arising and passing away and arising and passing away. There’s a certain equanimity that comes from that and you can latch on to that. So you’ve got to test it. You have to ask yourself, “Okay, is this constant? Does it really meet all the criteria?” Because nibbana …
- Mindreading… You can think thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of equanimity: These are soothing. You can work with the breath in a way that feels good for the body, relaxing the tension in different parts of the body. It provides you with a sense of fullness and ease. The sense of calm, the sense of fullness is useful not only when the mind …
- Mindfulness the Seamstress… The non-reactivity is equanimity combined with endurance. And you want to develop these skills before you do breath meditation, because you’re going to be trying to notice things. As you’re developing these skills, you’re getting good use of mindfulness, keeping in mind that image: either earth or water or fire or wind or space. The way the Buddha explains space …
- Attention to Your Potentials… There are qualities that sustain concentration, that sustain equanimity. You want to look for them. In some cases, he tells you outright. In terms of mindfulness, the sustaining qualities are what he calls purified virtue and views made straight. In other words, you straighten out your views in terms of what’s skillful, what’s not, and then you make sure that your virtue …
- Worth… things like generosity and virtue, persistence, patience, discernment, goodwill, and equanimity. Renunciation, truthfulness, determination. These are all qualities that the heart needs. And they’re things that stick with you, in this life on into the next life. This is where you look for value: your value as a person. Of course, it’s not something anyone else can measure, and it has only …
- Anumodana… People talk a lot about goodwill, a lot about compassion, a lot about equanimity. Empathetic joy gets pushed off, yet it’s an important attitude to develop. When you see other people doing good—not only that, but they’re also reaping the results of having done good—you realize that there’s no reason for jealousy, no reason for resentment. As the Buddha …
- A Diffuse Light… Then you calm things down with calm, concentration, and equanimity. It’s that active analysis of qualities that helps you see fabrication, while the more passive ones help you to calm fabrication down. You see the body and the mind working together in this way for the sake of a very stable, solid awareness. That allows you to pick up insights in areas that …
- Cleaning up Your Personal Environment… When you realize that your true happiness doesn’t have to conflict with anyone else’s true happiness, that thought in and of itself makes a lot easier to develop the right view that goes along with thoughts of universal goodwill, universal compassion, universal empathetic joy, universal equanimity. There’s no reason to wish anybody ill. If you see anyone you’re able to …
- Filling in the Buddha’s Outline… focusing on the parts of the body that seem more calm and getting the mind more concentrated, developing an attitude of equanimity. So you’ve got to read the situation. What’s needed right now? The Buddha makes a comparison with trying to get a fire going. If the fire is too strong, you’ve got to put ashes on it. If it’s …
- Balanced Breathing… After all, some of the things you’re bringing to consummation are tranquility, serenity, equanimity, contentment. Those are not tense qualities. One of the basic skills you need to learn in the meditation is how to work persistently and just keep at it, keep at it, but not get tense about it. When you can find that proper balance, you can stay with the …
- Self-starting… This is one of those passages in the Canon that show definitively that when the Buddha’s talking about mindfulness, he’s not talking about a nice broad, accepting, equanimous mind state. You’re not equanimous about the fire on your head. You want to put it out as quickly as you can. So what are your tools? You want to have them sharpened …
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