Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"So when you extend thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to others, you’re not thinking, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” You’re thinking, “May you understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” This is an attitude you can extend to all beings, without hypocrisy, regardless of how they’ve behaved in the past. Now, in some cases — where people have been particularly cruel — this may be difficult. You might feel that justice requires that they suffer first before they change their ways. But you have to remind yourself that people rarely see the connection between their misbehavior and their suffering, so wishing for them to suffer — even when it seems to serve the cause of justice — would rarely foster the causes for true happiness in the world. It’s better to wish that people come to their senses and have a change of heart on their own, and that you’d be willing to aid them in that process in whatever way you can. After all, wouldn’t you...

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

"So for the sake of your own freedom, you’ve got to let go of any ill will based on the horrible things that people have done. You remind yourself that it’s for your own true well-being that you’re developing these thoughts [of mettā]. You want to be able to trust yourself so that you don’t do or say or think unskillful things around people who are difficult. After all, you live in a world where almost everybody is difficult one way or another. If you were to wait for the world to be happy and peaceful, with everybody behaving nicely, and only then you would meditate, or then you would be able to get your mind to settle down, you would die first." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Heart Set on Goodwill"

"You’ve got to develop the brahmavihāras, all four of them, [including equanimity], both toward other people and toward yourself. You have goodwill [mettā] for them. You have compassion and empathetic joy, but you realize that there are times when their behavior is their behavior, and you can’t do much about it. Or even if you could do something about it, you’d lose your focus. It might be misdirected, especially if you still have that same problem within yourself." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Be Self-Centered" (Meditations11)

"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...

"All too often we feel that when other people are misbehaving, it gives us license to misbehave in return. Or we’re afraid that if we let them “walk all over us,” they’ll get used to treating us like a doormat. So we feel we have to show that we’re not doormats. There’s a passage in the Canon where one of the asuras basically says, “If people see that you’re not fighting back when they mistreat you, then they’ll think that you’re weak and they’ll mistreat you even more.” And Sakka, the king of the devas replies, “No. How they see you is not the issue. The issue is your own behavior, because that becomes your karma. If other people misbehave and you misbehave in response, then that misbehavior becomes yours. If they think you’re weak, then they know nothing of the Dhamma” — because you have to remember that qualities like goodwill [mettā], patience, equanimity, and kindness are forms of strength. There’s that story where Lady Vedehika is famous for being kind, generous, and mild...

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"