The Eight Worldly Winds: (In Buddhist traditions) Gain and Loss. Pleasure and Pain. Praise and Blame. Fame and Disrepute. Equanimity lets a person watch these shifting conditions pass by without letting emotional storms control their actions.
True equanimity cares deeply while staying non-reactive. This doesn't mean doing nothing - it means creating the clear mental state needed to make wise decisions. It's the liberating quality that allows us to keep our hearts open and balanced, quiet and steady, in the midst of life's inevitable vagaries. We don't scream "Foul!" when things don't go our way and we don't sit there with a self-satisfied look on our faces, nodding smugly, when we get what we want because we don't know what we want, most of the time, and even when we get it we're just going to want more. If that's not frustrating enough sometimes when we get what we want it doesn't work out in our favor in a real meaningful way.
I'm reading a Mark Twain novella right now which is centered around a dude named Satan. Not that Satan, who we all can agree is a pretty bad dude, but a nephew named after his uncle. Nephew Satan is slumming around on earth, really quite dismissive of humans and their often cruel, self-centered natures, always preferring the company of animals who he believes have purity in their actions and intentions. In the course of his wanderings he befriends three young boys and tries to teach them that all of our actions mean something in the long run, that if we get what we want that it may cause incalculable suffering later on. As an example, he tells the boys that one of their friends is going to sneak out of the house one evening and then drown in the river while attempting unsuccessfully to save a child who was swept into the current. The boys are bereft and ask Satan what they can do to change the course of events so that their friend stays alive. Satan agrees to do this but only if they will allow him to show them how their friend's life will play out in this changed reality. The friend contracts polio and lives for many years, bedridden and in pain, trapped in an iron lung and the small girl is forced into a life of prostitution when her parents are killed in a train accident. The lesson is we are not assured that if we let our puny human minds decide the future will improve. It is the reminder that we need to stay present and enjoy every minute, doing the best we can to be good, decent people, certain in the knowledge that life is unspooling in a manner that we'll never be able to comprehend.
Equanimity is a profound quality of strength and evenness of mind undisturbed by emotional upheavals. The ability to maintain an inner balance and calm, no matter what may be happening around us. We try to strengthen our observation skills so that we may see and understand the whole situation instead of one little part. The Pali word is upekkha which means "balance" and it refers to our ability to arrest the mind before it falls into extremes.
"When you listen to the voices in your head, do you hear words of fear and judgment and stories that cause inner conflict and struggle? Or do you hear words of support, unconditional love, and self-acceptance?"
The Toltecs
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