Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"There’s a real lightness that comes from being able to find happiness simply sitting here breathing. It means that your happiness is dependent on very few contingencies. The people with money, the people with investments, are the ones who have to read the newspapers every day to figure out what’s safe, what’s not safe out there in the world. But if your investment is in the skills of the mind, then no matter what the situation, you’re secure." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Wilderness Wealth"

"People tend to be pretty lax in their own behavior, but they have very strong demands for what other people should do. This is why we can’t get along. On the other hand, if you have strong ideas about what you should be doing, realizing that this is where your happiness lies, then it’s a lot easier to have equanimity with regard to other people — patience, endurance. As the Buddha said, if you develop these qualities, it’s beneficial for other people and it’s good for you, too. That’s because you’re going to need endurance, you’re going to need patience, you’re going to need equanimity in the training of your own mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Free from Fear"

"You have to be confident that even if the mind does get knocked off balance you can bring it back. Otherwise the practice would be full of fear all the time — afraid of tipping off too far to the left, too far to the right, toppling upside down. There’s only one way of learning what the balance point is, and that’s through experimenting. And you can experiment only when you’re not afraid. So you have to develop the confidence that even when you do go far off the path to one side or the other, you can pull yourself back. There’s always that new opportunity in the mind to give yourself a fresh start. In this way you can experiment and gain a sense of where the balance is because you know that no mistakes are fatal. You come back and you put yourself on the path again. You fall off… well, you put yourself back on the path again. Ajaan Mun once said at another point, “It’s normal for people to go off on the side.” You get stuck on the right side of the path looking at the flowers, s

"One of the definitions of maturity is being able to admit a mistake. If you don’t admit your mistakes, you’re never going to learn from them because you can’t even see them. That closes off all possibility of improvement. So that’s something we have to be equanimous about as well: the fact that we’ve made mistakes. We’ve done unskillful actions, but we have the opportunity right now to do something more skillful. We can learn." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Equanimity & Action"

"The Buddha often puts endurance together with another quality, which is goodwill [mettā] . No matter what other people do, you have to have goodwill for them. He talks about having goodwill as large as the Earth, as cool and as wide as the River Ganges. No one can make the Earth be without earth; no one can set the River Ganges on fire. Make it like space. People can try to write things in space, but it doesn’t stick. You can take a pen and wave it around in space, and the ink doesn’t hang there in the air because there’s nothing there for it to stick to. You want to have a mind like that. When people say things, it doesn’t reverberate, it doesn’t stick. Most of us have a mind like a big sheet of paper. If anybody has a pen anywhere nearby, it’s like a magnetic sheet of paper. It pulls the ink out of the pen and becomes an indelible stain. So when that happens, you have to remind yourself: Who are you going to blame? You’re the one who made your mind like magnetic paper. Try to m

"Sometimes we feel that if we push, push, push, then things will go faster, but there are a lot of things in this world that don’t respond well to pushing in that way, especially when the causes and effects are delicate, as they are with the breath and with the mind. In cases like that, you want to bring a more nurturing attitude, to be willing to sit with things as they develop slowly. It’s not the case that we’re just accepting things as they are and leaving them that way. We’re accepting them as they are with the purpose of figuring out the best way to develop them in the right direction. That will depend a lot on them, not just on our own sense of wanting them to move fast. It’s like growing rice or any kind of plant. You want the plant to be a certain height because you know when it gets that tall it’s going to bear fruit or grains. But all you’ve got is this little tiny, tiny plant in the ground. What are you going to do? If you pull on it to stretch it and mak

"Aging comes, illness comes, death comes. We see this all around us, and we have to remind ourselves: This is normal. Our problem is that we see it as normal for other people but not normal for ourselves. We constantly think that we’re an exception. It’s like that cartoon in the New Yorker: Three death-figures [grim reapers]. One of them is lying on the ground on its back, and one of the other ones is saying, “You never think it’s going to happen to you.” But once there’s birth there’s going to be aging, there’s going to be illness, there’s going to be death. These things are normal for everybody. If we want to learn how not to suffer from them, we have to keep our minds normal in their presence." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Normalcy"

"Most of us spend our lives feeding off our moods, looking for happy moods because those are the fun ones to feed on. But once you’ve put the mind in a position of feeding off its moods, you find that it’s got a lot of other things to feed on as well, such as depression or sorrow. Once you create that kind of mouth and stomach for the mind, hoping to feed off the good moods, it’s open to take in the sad moods as well. This happens in your daily life and in your meditation, too. The reason we keep doing this is because we feel that moods at least create the spice of life. If the mind didn’t have moods, we’d feel like we were robots. The idea of a mind without moods sounds like oatmeal nothing added to it, i.e. pretty miserable, pretty dull. But stop and think about the dangers of our moods. They can induce us to do all kinds of unskillful things. If we get really depressed, we get apathetic. Nothing seems to matter — you lose any sense of concern for the results of you

"The Buddha never said nirvana is the ultimate equanimity. He said it’s the ultimate happiness. You don’t turn your mind into a resigned oatmeal [dull or plain] kind of state. You find that by letting go, things open up immensely. No limits of space or time. And no need to put in any effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Soiled, Oily Rag (Three Perceptions in Context)"

"About a year after I returned to America, I was teaching meditation to a group up in Orange County and I gave my first interviews. One of the people in the retreat started her interview out by saying, “Buddhism: It’s all about love isn’t it?” I was taken aback. I said, “Well, no, it’s all about freedom.” She was taken aback. We come from a culture in which love is very highly valued — not only as a social virtue, but also as a religious one. So it’s a little shocking when we come to another tradition where it’s not valued so highly. The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity — and to us it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha’s teachings is put in the service of freedom. As the Buddha once said, all of his teachings have a single taste: the taste of release. This means that all of his teachings on goodwill on the one hand, and equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment on the other, are all put in the service of freedom — realizing, on the one ha