Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"There are some ideas about equanimity going around that give it a bad name. One is the idea that if you fight your negative emotions, fight your defilements, it’s going to be stressful — and the Buddha taught us not to cause stress, right? — so we shouldn’t put up a fight. That’s what they say. They tell you to develop equanimity around the fact that you’ve got greed, aversion, and delusion. These emotions come and go, and you learn to be okay with that, and learn to let go of any desire for anything better than this. As Ajaan Lee would say, that’s letting go like a pauper. You don’t have anything and you tell yourself, “Well, I’ll just let go of all that wealth that somebody else has.” You don’t gain anything from that, and you stay poor. You could also call it the equanimity of a loser, except that when you don’t even put up a fight, it’s hard to say that you’ve lost." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Equanimity of a Winner" (Meditations11)

"It’s interesting that Ajaan Lee focuses on what other people say as one of the tests for a mind that’s really at peace. The Buddha makes a similar point in one of the Dhammapada verses. “If, when other people say harsh things to you and you don’t reverberate — like a cracked gong — that’s a sign that you’ve attained true peace of mind.” This might seem strange. Why does the test lie in how you react to what other people say? The mind is very sensitive to this issue. We learn very early in our lives that our happiness is going to depend on how other people treat us. As children, we’re surrounded by people a lot more powerful than we are, so there’s always a sense of fear built into our relationships to the people around us. We become sensitive to other people’s moods, sensitive to what they might do, what they might say. As a result, our center of gravity is placed outside because we’re afraid of them, and we try to put up a wall outside ourselves to protect ourselves from them....

"Here at the monastery, there’s a rhythm that’s very different from the rhythm of lay life. And the difference is paradoxical. On the one hand, the day seems very long, especially when you’re new here and are new to the meditation. There’s nothing much to fill up the day. In fact, the length of the day sometimes seems threatening. But as you begin to get better at the meditation, you begin to notice the other side of the difference, which is that the days go very fast because there are not so many sharp ups and downs from day to day to day, and the days are pretty much the same. After a while, a week, a month, several months, a year, seems go very fast. In lay life, people talk about having a good day, as if that were the biggest unit of time they can think about. Whereas here, life goes in larger seasons, larger cycles. And it’s useful for getting perspective on your mind, because the mind has a lot of ups and downs. We can ride the ups and downs like a roller coaster, and in rid...

"You learn how not to get fazed by criticism, especially from the people you respect. This doesn’t mean that you brush it off, simply that you don’t react emotionally. That allows you to look at the criticism to see exactly where it’s right: “How can I benefit from the criticism?” Then you can develop the attitude that Ajaan Lee talks about, where you can take anything that the world throws at you and see that it’s got its good side as well as its bad. No matter how good it may seem in terms of the world, it has its bad side. Wealth, fame, praise: Those things you’ve got to watch out for. At the same time, the things that the world says are bad have their good side as well. Material loss, loss of status, criticism: You can learn from loss, you can learn from criticism, but you learn best when you’re not reacting, when you can develop this sense of just knowing that whatever’s there is simply there. You’re not getting carried away by all the embroidery that you tend to add to these...