Equanimity

Transcript

So I’d like to talk to you about Equanimity. Even mindedness or as they say in Sanskrit, Upeksha.

I was thinking about this when I sat down to meditation just an hour ago thinking about Upeksha meditation on Upeksha.

Trying to let go of the word and bring the concept into my body so I could embody it, encoporate it and integrate it into my being. This is a quality that is such a wonderful quality to have.

I tried to describe it once to people and they were like “what do you mean, like internal peace?”

Not exactly because internal peace is a feeling, an emotion. What I am describing is a little bit moved farther away from our experience.

What I am talking about is a quality which is even when we might experience some emotions we still have the even mindedness. Even if we are intoxicated and overwhelmed with emotion, overwhelmed with anger and fear, or other emotions. Even being in love.

We can still maintain our balance, we are in balance within our minds. Even minded. Equanimity or yes with Upeksha. Imperturbability is also how it’s translated into English. Nothing can really get to you.

Nothing can perturb you, nothing can knock you off your balance or take you out of your fixedness of mind.

I was meditating on this and I start to get this memory, this memory of going to this event and was there with some wonderful people and I can tell that one of these women is very interested in me trying to make it very obvious.

At the time I was celibate, withdrawed from that aspect of life and not pursuing romantic relationships. And I guess at the end of the event and workshop I say good night to everyone and simply leave.

Its interesting because I go back to the experience in my mind and I try to inhabit the emotions, the feelings, the states of consciousness or manners of awareness I was having in those moments.

There is actually this push or pull from my identity because I get this little payoff. I say “Ok I have this payoff from my identity, from my ego. Perhaps this is saying I take pride in controlling my actions.”

As I walk out of the hall I have this little payoff and think good of myself. I did good, I resisted temptation. There’s a little voice in my head as I analyze this experience saying “That is not Upeksha.”

But it was Upeksha that night and it’s something a little more subtle. It was the other part, this space in my consciousness. We might use the word indifference but that sounds a little to close to apathy.

There is this space that allows free actions to take place that are not bound by our past habits or momentum. We have this little gap, the gap between reaction and response.

Of course reaction is something normally like an instant. Something that happens very quickly in a moment, we react just as something happens. But a response has a little stop gap, it might only be milliseconds in which we can decide to have something different happen.

That is the kind of space as we advance in our meditation that space, that gap widens. The space we might call upecha.

The space where we are free to make different decisions, where we don’t have to be bound.

The space that enables new patterns to emerge and so often as we find when we allow our minds to be blank or at rest for just a moment so often so many wonderful things, brilliant fractals delight the space that allows being to shine.

That is what emerges from Upeksha.