This blogpost was written for the Cultivating Emotional Balance monthly newsletter.
Cultivating and maintaining equanimity is a tough call for many reasons—including the fact that the term itself is somewhat difficult to understand. It does evoke the idea of mental evenness, but how exactly that evenness is supposed to come about is often not quite clear. To make matters worse, this evenness can be misperceived as aloofness or lack of emotion. As a translator, I’ve actually seen “equanimity” being mistranslated into other languages as “indifference”—and what an unhealthy and unrealistic ideal it would then appear to be!
The working definition of equanimity I’ve been introduced to many years ago describes it as a “state of mind that is equally free from neurotic attachment, aversion and indifference”. This state or attitude might be applied to other beings (which translates into equanimity as one of the four virtues of the heart, or the four immeasurables), or towards the different experiences that we have. In either case, what emerges is an image of a person that is profoundly rooted in inner calm and is yet free of aloof insensitivity; responsive and yet centred, warm-hearted and yet not desperately clinging at anything. I find it helpful to play with these words and actually envision equanimity as a quality that I can, through practice, come to embody on a deeper and deeper level. What would a truly evolved and equanimous version of me be like?
The key to equanimity, always implicitly present in equanimity-themed meditations, is wise discernment: discernment of interdependence, discernment of our deeper equality, and, quite importantly, discernment of our ability to both accept the situation (as something that has ripened as a result of multiple causes and conditions) and to continue steering it in the right direction through introducing more of the necessary causes and conditions. Deeply linked to wisdom (“an exceptional level of common sense”, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein), equanimity is a powerful ideal that, sometimes through mere recollection, can help us ground ourselves and continue moving towards greater emotional balance.