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Showing posts with the label Stress

Don't develop equanimity around the fact that you’ve got greed, aversion, and delusion, thinking that 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.

"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 not that you say, “I don’t care which happens, whether it’s stress or not stress.” You do care. You care so much that you’re really willing to learn, to put in all the time and effort required to learn.

"Look at the Buddha’s teaching on the four noble truths. You treat the cause of stress differently from the path to the end of stress. You try to abandon the cause and to develop the path. It’s not that you say, “I don’t care which happens, whether it’s stress or not stress.” You do care. You care so much that you’re really willing to learn, to put in all the time and effort required to learn." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Equanimity Isn’t Apathy"