Awareness and Equanimity

“How was your morning?”

“Terrific! I woke up before the alarm. I often do this. It was 5:30am. The house was quiet. I made myself a little coffee and toast, read the morning paper…”

“Tell me more please, about that time just after you woke up and the thought “What time is it?”"

“This is the best time of my day! The body felt very relaxed and refreshed. The mind was very calm and peaceful. The best time of my day.”

“Then what happens?”

“Well, one thing leads to another. Life situations come up. They make me excited, anxious, frustrated, depressed… you know, the full catastrophe!”

“… and you want to practice meditation to remove this from your life, so that you can feel like it is early morning all the time, the best time of your day?”

“Yes, otherwise what is the point of the practice?”

“This is a causal universe comprising of polar opposites. Constant movement, constant change. If there are relaxed, peaceful sensations, there are bound to be tense, turbulent sensations. One validates the existence of the other. Experiencing this duality is the nature of this existence.”

“So what is the point of meditating?”

“To develop awareness and equanimity. Awareness is the ability to perceive things, people, places, situations exactly as they are without adding or subtracting. Equanimity is the ability to remain objective. Nobody else can be held accountable for these two qualities. Nobody else should be able to control these. They are truly your responsibility. Like two wings of a bird, they are best when equally strong.”

“How does this relate to the ‘full catastrophe’?”

“Perhaps you know some highly sentimental people. Slightest discomfort, there is agony. Any sign of joy, there is frenzied excitement. A word out of place and the resentment lasts for decades. This happens even if the life situation is happening to another being. They are swept away by the emotion and suffer greatly by the harmful effects of this, without necessarily being of any benefit to the situation from which it arose. This is when the awareness wing is disproportionately larger than the equanimity wing.”

“So you have met my mother-in-law?”

“… Then are there those who appear very calm, level headed, in control, and yet they feel nothing. They are absolutely desensitized to the very essence of life. Unnatural people. Machine hearts and machine minds that only function as mechanical bio-computers, processing, analyzing, evaluating… and unable to feel. Birds sing, flowers blossom, sun rays dance on the river and still there is no feeling of joy. To be living and never truly alive is perhaps the greatest suffering of all. This is when equanimity is disproportionally larger than awareness.”

“What you say is clear. I see the benefits of developing both qualities. I am at my best, most creative, helpful and content when I am in this place within. But there seems to be a catch. If I practice meditation with the desire to cultivate awareness and equanimity, won’t this desire itself disturb the equanimity?”

“Yes, it will. Be desireless, as you are when brushing your teeth. Once you know of the benefits of brushing your teeth, you simply brush your teeth; no drama. Same with meditation. Otherwise the same game of craving pleasant sensations and aversion from unpleasant ones get reinforced. The practice is to observe (awareness) objectively (equanimity). There is no need for desire.”

by Bhaskar Goswami, Founder of BODHI

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