Equanimity – Week 3 of 40 Days To Personal Revolution
- -
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” – Carl Jung
There are so many tricky things we cannot change – traffic, the flu, annoying bosses, tube delays, rain, burst boilers, children’s tantrums, the ladder in our tights etc etc – and we can spend the day enraged at each disappointment and inconvenience. Equanimity is choosing not to.
Baron Baptiste says: “Equanimity is the art of meeting life as it meets you – calmly, without drama or fuss.”
Buddha taught that throughout our lives we should expect to encounter four specific joys and their opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. However, rather than just accepting that this is life – for everyone – we often take things personally, as if something is deeply wrong with us. Equanimity releases us from unrealistic expectations about what life should be.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Hamlet, William Shakespeare
When we feel victim to circumstance – we often reach for support in bad habits, drinking, eating…comfort food. Sugar has never been so readily available and yet we know that eating processed and refined foods encourages disease. So why do we reach for it anyway?
Baron Baptiste describes this:
“We are living out our our legacy of distraction. It is easier to distract ourselves and go along with the status quo than to feel the discomfort of growth and change.“
The fifth and sixth of Baron Baptiste’s Laws relate specifically to Equanimity:
Law 5 – Shift Your Vision
- Look at the usual things with fresh eyes.
- See that most of your obstacles are created within your own heart.
- Intention is an awareness that directs your energy and the energy of the universe in a certain direction.
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Tibetans believe that between our two eyes is a third eye (the pineal gland). This is the source of our spiritual vision. They teach that though existing in all of us, in most, it is non functioning. Through spiritual practise it begins to activate. As our spiritual vision awakens we can see what has blinded our true vision and what has seemed the fault of others might be a mirror of our own hidden barriers. Then we can set new intentions.
Intention sparks a re-creation of events, and circumstances begin to organise toward their own fulfilment. Right intention leads us to the realm of flow, or vinyasa.
Baron Baptiste says:
“How can you know if an intent is from your pure heart? If you can honestly look at yourself in the cosmic mirror and feel at ease with your conscience, then it is pure.”
Law 6 – Drop what you know
- Giving up the need to be right or to control creates space for life to unfold.
- We don’t change by thinking; we change by being and doing with pure intent.
- Ask questions – they expand the horizons. Our already known answers constrain us.
It is really easy to become so absorbed in learning from external sources that we drown out our internal wisdom. Obsessing about what teachers/authority figures say and comparison with our peers can be distracting from seeing new opportunities suited especially for our true selves.
A story..
Two men, one a professor of philosophy, the other a sannyasin, were lost in the forest on a dark stormy night. The sounds of the wild animals were chilling and the darkness dense. The storm grew stronger and the thunder louder and suddenly lightening lit the sky up like the midday sun. The professor was looking up into the sky, watching the lightning and intensely analysing their situation, and he didn’t see the path through the forest which was lit up in that moment. The sannyasin was watching the path and thus saw the way home.