A Mind That Lets Go: Cultivating Equanimity (Part 1)
“Do everything with a mind that lets go.” -Ajahn Chah
It’s been just over two months since one of my best friends, Nate Olk, passed away. As I wrote about in a previous post, “Opening to Grief,” it was through a willingness to turn towards the grief that I was able to navigate this incredibly challenging period of time with more equanimity and ease.
Nate’s passing was yet another reminder how much the practices of mindfulness meditation, and the teachings of The Dharma, serve as profound supports during the most difficult periods of life. I was able to move through a very acute phase of grief quite quickly, not because external circumstances had changed but because I was accepting, rather than resisting, reality.
In the past few months, I have thought of Nate many times. Sometimes, when the memory of Nate arises there’s a feeling of sadness that accompanies the mental image of him. When this happens mindfulness can simply notice that “sadness is like this.” It can attune to where sadness is located in the body. It can offer feelings of compassion towards the tenderness of the heart that is felt along with grief.
Many times, when memories of Nate came to mind I felt a profound sense of gratitude for the many good times that we shared. Recalling the wild and hilarious adventures that we had, I often laughed out loud. I smiled to myself as I reflected upon what a generous, funny, and playful friend that he was.
However, as Nate’s birthday approached on August 20th, I was reminded of two important lessons: the ego can be very subtle at deceiving itself and grief comes in waves.
Just as the ego can subtly cling to pleasant experiences, and resist unpleasant ones, it also has a tendency to solidify around particular points of view. This is one function of the ego: it manufactures stories by stringing together various thoughts and images built upon sense impressions. The ego is most powerfully driven by a single purpose above all others: to avoid pain.
If you’re brutally honest with yourself, if you reflect upon the choices you make on a big level and a daily one: how much of your life is orientated around avoiding pain?
By this, I do not mean avoiding physical pain or even mild discomfort, such as avoiding material circumstances like a room that’s too hot. I’m referring to the fear, shame, and judgments that filter our perception of the world and subtly but regularly immobilize us from being willing to step into the unknown and take the steps we need to take to heal and to evolve into the best version of ourselves.
The depth psychologist Carl Jung understood that “there is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Jung envisioned the psychological and spiritual journey as a movement towards wholeness that called us to confront and integrate those shadow aspects of our psyche into a coherent Self. What holds so many of us back is that we are unwilling to sit with our emotional pain. Like a physical wound requires sunlight and oxygen to heal, our emotional wounds require our attention and compassion.
Psychotherapy offers many powerful tools for how to confront the darkness and to integrate it into a coherent Self so that we can make this journey towards wholeness. Therapy is a wonderful complementary approach to mindfulness meditation and the teachings of The Buddha. Every system is by its nature limited and I believe that most of us need an integrated, multi-system approach for our personal development and self-actualization. Personally, I have derived immense benefit from working with a skilled psychotherapist and ongoing work with her is an essential part of my own development.
How can mindfulness help us to evolve along the road to true healing and genuine happiness? Opening to challenging emotions is essential. Being willing to be with them and to offer compassion to them. It’s also imperative that we develop a quality of the heart-mind called equanimity.
Shinen Young’s secular mindfulness system defines equanimity as “the ability to welcome and allow sensory experience to come and go without push and pull.” Insight meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein refers to equanimity as a kind of nonreactive spaciousness of mind.
A mind with equanimity is spacious; it is balanced. It can simply notice that right now things are like this. Joy is like this. Grief is like this. Change is like this.
One source of our suffering is a mind that grasps. Through training our attention, we start to see how the mind clings to pleasant experiences and pushes away unpleasant ones. There’s this constant sense of pulling and pushing that keeps the heart-mind in a constant state of emotional reactivity. As Jack Kornfield puts it, “the unawakened mind makes war against the war things are.”
Instead of resisting reality when it’s unpleasant, or clinging to pleasant experiences in the vain hope that things will never change, cultivating equanimity is a more reliable path to genuine wellbeing.
The near enemy of equanimity is indifference or apathy. Here’s where the previously mentioned subtly of the ego becomes very tricky: it wants to slip into a space of resignation or apathy because it wants to short circuit discomfort, pain, and challenging emotions.
But actually, equanimity is a willingness to be present with our experience. This is how our practice actually leads us to freedom by teaching us how to stand our ground: finally, we start to get real with ourselves. We see through our own bullshit, not by escaping in delusional stories or distracting activities, but by carefully observing the arising and passing away of thoughts and feelings and how our mind is reacting to these constantly changing mental phenomena.
When Nate passed away, equanimity allowed me to honestly turn towards reality, to recognize that right now this is how things are; equanimity allowed me to open to the grief, to find space around it so that it could move through awareness. But a consistent commitment to mindfulness was necessary in order to notice the ways in which resistance was re-appearing. As Nate’s birthday approached I started to notice the ways in which aversion was arising: I detected a subtle reluctance to look at some of his old photos or to write a more heartfelt post on Facebook. Mindfulness could recognize that all-too-familiar story bubbling up beneath the surface: “I don’t want to go there right now.”
However, through our practice of closely paying attention to our moment to moment experience, we can clearly see how this is a losing strategy in the long run. What we resist persists.
When we see how the mind’s tendency to constantly cling to what’s pleasant and resist what’s unpleasant is a futile endeavor that only leaves us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and agitation, we start to let go.
In the second part of this post, I’ll talk about why letting go is at the heart of the spiritual path and how we can train our heart-minds to do so.