Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"When we come to the meditation, the Buddha says that when there’s householder distress, you should try to cure it with renunciate distress. That’s a step a lot of us would like to skip. Renunciate distress there is realizing that there is a goal that other people have attained, it is possible, but you’re not there yet, and you think about all that needs to be done. Some people find this so discouraging that they aim for equanimity as something halfway between householder and renunciate joy, but they’re actually going back to householder equanimity. They comfort themselves with the idea that “Maybe there’s nothing to attain” or “If I try to have an attainment, I’m creating suffering and stress for myself right now. I’m getting upset over something I can’t see, so I might as well learn how to accept the way things are.” They try to anesthetize themselves to the distress, and end up with a very calm state, but again, it isn’t solidly based. It needs constant shoring up. You see th...

"Through the practice of meditation, find which spot is your spot in the body, the spot that you can keep calm, the spot where you feel at home. Learn to treasure that spot. Learn to keep after it, keep looking after it. And when necessary, learn to hide out there. As that passage on equanimity reminds us, there are certain times where it’s simply the force of karma that the situations are going to be bad. There’s not much you can do about them. But the important things are that you maintain your equanimity and learn how to hide out. Come out when there are times you actually can make a difference, so that you don’t waste your energy on unnecessary battles." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Hunker Down"

"To maintain its health, the mind needs its own place to rest: not just resting in sleep, resting with alertness, awareness. That kind of place requires several skills. One is the skill of just being able to be quiet. Another is the skill of being able to cut away your interest in things outside. Some people find this to be the scary part of the meditation. We’ve been taught to believe that our goodness consists of our being concerned about things outside, and here we are telling ourselves that, for the time being, those things don’t matter. As they say in the forest tradition, the sky could be falling but we’re going to stay right here and not let it get to us, because we need a part of the mind that things don’t get to. That’s our sanity. That’s our safety. So learn how to find a spot inside where you’re at ease with the breath and learn how to protect it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No One in Charge" (Meditations9)

"Sometimes we’re told that in our practice of meditation, and in our approach to practice of the Buddha’s teachings as a whole, we shouldn’t be attached to results. Now, this statement can be taken in a wrong way and a right way. The wrong way would be that we don’t care about the results, that we just do what we want to do and let the chips fall where they may, convinced in the rightness of our intentions. That’s a recipe for disaster, because one of the first things we have to learn is that we can’t totally trust our intentions. After all, we’re here to learn what our intentions are, and the best way for testing them is to see how they bear out in action, what results they give. If something seems like a good intention, you follow it, and then you watch to see what the results are. Many times the results turn out different from what you expected, in which case there was something wrong with the intention. It wasn’t skillful enough. So this statement of not being attached to the ...

"The more limited, the more narrow our concerns are, the bigger the sufferings in life are going to seem, and the more overwhelming. If we’re going to work on them, we have to make sure they don’t seem so overwhelming. We have to make our mind larger than they are so they don’t consume all our attention. Think about other beings: They have their sufferings as well. They want happiness as well. So in one sense, we’re all in this together, and you have to think about how your sufferings fit in with the rest of the sufferings of the world. To what extent are you actually causing other people to suffer? Also, remember that there are a lot of people out there who are suffering a lot more than you are right now. Even though you don’t feel their sufferings, at least it’s important to remember them to get a sense of perspective on where you are and what your problems are so that you can tackle them with more confidence — realizing as you’re sitting here meditating, it’s not just your iss...

"The second form of right resolve is to get rid of ill-will, which is the desire to see other people suffer. You have to look at why you would want them to suffer, and how you justify that desire to yourself. Go down the list of people you would like to see suffer and ask yourself: “What would you gain from their suffering?” There may be thoughts of revenge or thoughts of justice, you might say. It’s not fair that these people get away with all the horrible things they’re doing in the world. But why do you have to get involved in that? Why do you have to be the one who’s passing judgment on others in that way? It enflames the mind. There’s no real happiness there at all. And it leads you eventually to doing unskillful things. When the Buddha talks about developing thoughts of goodwill [mettā], it’s precisely because you need that motivation to nourish your own good actions. You want to be happy and you realize your happiness cannot depend on the misery of other people. So you ha...

"The teachings on equanimity are there to teach you about action — to take a mature attitude toward your actions, seeing where you’ve made a mistake, where things are not going well, and what you can do to change. 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. So equanimity is not just acceptance and it’s not just passivity. It’s directly related to appropriate attention. If there’s something wrong, look at your intentions. If there’s something wrong, look at what you’re doing. Your intentions may be good, but the means may be wrong. Or your intention may be corrupted and, in that case, no matter how goo...

"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"

"When you leave meditation, don’t really leave it. Try to think of the attitudes you’ve developed. You’ve had to develop some patience, you’ve had to develop some equanimity, some kindness for yourself. You’ve had to develop the ability to hold your thoughts in check, to exercise some restraint. Well, try to bring these qualities into your day-to-day interactions with other people. Learn some restraint, learn some equanimity. If you’ve been meditating properly, you’ve developed these skills. But don’t just leave them on the meditation cushion. Take them along with you. See your interactions at work, your interactions at home, as part of the practice, as your opportunity to spread some of the goodness of the meditation around. What this comes down to is that goodness shouldn’t be just for one individual. And if it’s really good, it’s not. The effects should spread around. Even though each of us has to work on his or her own karma, work on straightening out his or her own mind, deal...

"Often as you meditate you try to tell yourself, “Don’t react. Just be equanimous. Don’t get excited. Don’t get worked up about things.” And then you try to convince yourself that that’s what’s actually happening. You see ideals of what an enlightened person is like — very calm, peaceful, equanimous — and you try to clone the calm, to clone the equanimity. Remember, though, that Right Cloning is not one of the factors of the Path." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Suppressed Emotions"

"So equanimity means realizing that when things can’t be forced, you’ve got to step back. Whatever you can’t control, you let it take its own time, to develop or go away at its own pace. You focus your efforts instead on the skillfulness of your present intentions, which may require patience and equanimity, doing your best to put as much positive energy into the situation, and not getting upset because the results are not immediate. The important point is that you be secure in your confidence that as long as you put in positive energy, there will have to be positive results — if not right now, then someplace down the line. That’s what you control, the fact that you’re putting in positive energy, putting in skillful intentions right now. As for when these things will bear fruit, that’s up to them, that’s up to the jagged rhythm in the whole mix of your karma. So it’s important that you understand what equanimity means. It doesn’t mean that you’re totally non-reactive ...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"To maintain its health, the mind needs its own place to rest: not just resting in sleep, resting with alertness, awareness. That kind of place requires several skills. One is the skill of just being able to be quiet. Another is the skill of being able to cut away your interest in things outside. Some people find this to be the scary part of the meditation. We’ve been taught to believe that our goodness consists of our being concerned about things outside, and here we are telling ourselves that, for the time being, those things don’t matter. As they say in the forest tradition, the sky could be falling but we’re going to stay right here and not let it get to us, because we need a part of the mind that things don’t get to. That’s our sanity. That’s our safety. So learn how to find a spot inside where you’re at ease with the breath and learn how to protect it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No One in Charge" (Meditations9)

"Equanimity rests on the confidence that as long as you put in positive energy with positive intentions, positive results will have to come out at some point. So it’s important that that’s what you’re careful about: the intentions you’re putting into the whole process right now, making sure that they’re skillful, not being pushed around by greed, or anger, delusion, impatience, or fear. Try to take nourishment from your confidence in the principle of karma, in the principle of action: that skillful actions will lead to good results. Maybe you can’t get the results you want right now, but you can put in good energy right now. Try to develop as much skillfulness in your attitude as you can. That’s what’s important. That’s what we’re trying to develop as we meditate. Remember, the word for meditation in Pali is development. We’re trying to develop skillful attitudes, skillful intentions. Focus your energy there." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Rhythm of Kamma"

“To maintain its health, the mind needs its own place to rest: not just resting in sleep, resting with alertness, awareness. That kind of place requires several skills. One is the skill of just being able to be quiet. Another is the skill of being able to cut away your interest in things outside. Some people find this to be the scary part of the meditation. We’ve been taught to believe that our goodness consists of our being concerned about things outside, and here we are telling ourselves that, for the time being, those things don’t matter. As they say in the forest tradition, the sky could be falling but we’re going to stay right here and not let it get to us, because we need a part of the mind that things don’t get to. That’s our sanity. That’s our safety.” ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu “No One in Charge”

"Someone once asked Ajaan Fuang what kind of food he liked. And his answer was, “The food in front of me.” And that’s the attitude you’ve got to take toward your meditation. What kind of breath do you like? Well, learn to like the breath in front of you. What kind of meditation do you like? Learn to like the meditation you’re doing right now. Don’t worry about what yesterday’s meditation was like, whether it was better than today’s or worse or whatever. It’s gone, it’s past. You want to be on good terms with what you’ve got right here. That’s the essence of the meditation, learning how to relate to what’s right here right now in such a way that you’re causing yourself the least suffering and actually working toward a stable happiness. Even though a good part of the practice is aimed at the future — there is a goal at the end of the path, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — but a large part of that goal there in the future lies in learning how to relate well to what you’ve got ...

"And equanimity, too, is something you have to will — the ability to stay unperturbed with the things you like and the things you don’t like; not getting excited when things go well, not getting depressed when they don’t. In other words, you train yourself to have a certain amount of independence. Discernment is needed to perfect and understand this quality, and the equanimity helps foster the discernment, allowing you to see things more clearly, as well. The two qualities go hand-in-hand. There are times in the meditation where you do simply have to sit and watch. Some of your defilements really will go away just when you watch them — but not all of them. One of the points of developing equanimity is so you begin to see where the difference lies. So the Buddha is not recommending a blanket passivity here. He’s telling you to develop equanimity when it’s appropriate. You develop equanimity when you need to see things that you don’t yet understand. When you understand, sometimes eq...

"You want to remind yourself that no matter what comes up [in the meditation], you’re not going to let yourself get shaken. And as to whatever narratives you have regarding this person or that, you’re not going to let them get in the way, because the best narrative-dissolver is thoughts of goodwill [mettā], followed by thoughts of equanimity. That chant we have, “All beings are the owners of their actions, heir to actions,” is not meant to be indifference. But it does point you to something, which is that the extent to which we have involvement with other people, it comes down to what karma are we taking out of that involvement? Because every relationship has to end. What karma do you have as a result of the relationship? That’s the question. And it’s an impersonal question. We tend to think that so much of our happiness depends on being with this person or that, and having this situation and that situation with that person. And it gets very personal. It also gets very entanglin...