Meditation for Happiness

OLLI

Fall 2024

Day 4

Equanimity

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breathe

Agenda

• Review of Buddhist philosophy ideas
• Review of Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Sympathetic Joy
• Discussion
• Equanimity
• What it is/What it isn’t
• Difficulties
• Short practice
• Strategies
• Discuss
• Longer guided meditation
• Thank you

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Buddhist Philosophy Big Ideas

The Four Divine Abodes

Buddhism…

Gives us concrete strategies for how to deal with our minds.

Dealing with our minds helps us look at our conditioning, which helps us get back to our natural states of kind, compassionate, and loving to all people.

We set intentions to do this – we try really hard. We implement these strategies imperfectly.

Any and every step we take has the possibility of opening up more, accepting more, loving more.

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Who said it?

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

The Hole in the Road

Discussion

Discussion Guidelines

• Speak about yourself only.
• Don’t give each other advice. Practice mindful listening.
• Recognize there are only a few people in the room, but many more online. Further, the recording of this session will be available in a library.
• Take home learning, but don’t identify anyone when you talk about it later. Observe the confidentiality of our space.
• We are all growing. Celebrate the victories.

Questions/Comments

• How’s your practice going?
• Did you find a key to unlock metta? Find compassion or sympathetic joy?
• What difficulties did you have?
• What feelings came up?
• What went well?
• Would you continue to try it out?
• What questions arose for you? Either about practice or about philosophy in general?

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Equanimity

Upekkha: Equanimity

• Even-heartedness, temperance, impartiality
• An increasing ability to keep our loving-kindness in any situation.
• An ability to abide with what is, serenity
• Balance or stillness
• Calm or nonreactivity
• Last to develop: a sense of faith in yourself that you can handle whatever comes up

Upekkha: Equanimity

An ability to stay with big emotions, knowing when you ride them out, there is peacefulness on the other side.

Equanimity: �Responsive not Reactive��Three Tenets�Not Knowing�Bearing Witness�Compassionate Action��Balanced with whatever comes up.

Equanimity: Difficulties

• Opposite: craving, aversion, attachment of any kind; reactivity
• Near Enemy: indifference, aloofness, overly intellectual
• Remedy: loving kindness
• Helpful phrases: “It is this.” or “This too belongs.”
• We forgive reality for being what it is; we don’t want it to be other than what it is; full acceptance.

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Short practice

Equanimity: Strategies

• Understanding vulnerability and how we protect ourselves with defenses.
• Examining our beliefs
• Regulating emotions

VULNERABILITY

“I hate uncertainty. I hate not knowing. I can’t stand opening myself to getting hurt or disappointed. It’s excruciating.”

Brene Brown

Daring Greatly

“Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement.

Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose;

the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.”

“We must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability.”

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“But when I grew up and left home, I began once more to be hammered into tight, tidy spaces of traditional expectation. I learned to conform to roles and wear all sorts of masks that hid my real self.”

Sue Monk Kidd

When the Heart Waits

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“As we attempt to adapt to and protect ourselves from the wounds and realities of life, we each create a unique variety of defense structures – patterns of thinking, behaving, and relating designed to protect the ego.”

Sue Monk Kidd

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This is the ego itself.”

Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth

“[The ego] consists of thought and emotion,

of a bundle of memories you identify with as ‘me and my story,’

of habitual roles you play without knowing it,

of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance.

It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, a success or failure.”

Eckhart Tolle

“We may like to think that we’re individuals living out our own unique truth, but more often we’re scripts written collectively by society, family, church, job, friends, and traditions. Sometimes our life becomes a matter of simply playing the various roles for which we’ve been scripted – playing them out perfectly, in the right sequence, in full costume and mask.”

Sue Monk Kidd

False Selves/

Vulnerability Avoidance Skills

• People Pleaser/Good Girl or Boy
• Overachiever/Perform/Perfect
• Victim
• Martyr (Then I’ll do it…)
• Control Freak
• Party Animal/Angry Activist/Clove-smoking poet/Corporate Climber
• The Tin Man (cut off from feelings)
• Chicken Little (afraid of the world)

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SCARCITY AND THE FEAR OF BEING ORDINARY

• Never enough culture – we live in a never enough culture. What does that do to our beliefs about ourselves?
• Constant assessing and comparing our lives to the lives of others.
• Social media influence – We compare our lives to the unreality presented by other people in their feeds.
• 24-hour pressure – We used to be able to escape bullying when we got home; now, cyberbullying happens 24 hours each day.

It’s all about protecting ourselves from being too vulnerable – from being too hurt.

We all create defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from pain and discomfort.

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• This is suffering.

Hurt people hurt other people.

WE CAN LIVE ANOTHER WAY.

WE CAN LIVE ANOTHER WAY

“And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for second, timeless, larger life.”

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Rilke, I Love My Being’s Dark Hours

JUNG’S INDIVIDUATION

• “Who we think we are is only a limited function of the ego, that thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul.”

JUNG’S INDIVIDUATION

“…the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be – what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego.”

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JUNG’S = BUDDHA = MASLOW

• Jung’s Individuation is similar to Maslow’s Self-Actualization is similar to the goal of the Buddha:
• “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.” (Dogen)
• When we deal with the stuff in our own heads and hearts, we are no longer divided within ourselves. We let go of stories that get in the way of connecting.
• We are able to be our True Selves (The Self or No Self) in all situations – comfortable in our own skins, no matter the context.
• That’s equanimity.

Step by step, we grow equanimity…

“We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation…marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.” 

Pema Chodron

Step by step, we grow equanimity…

“Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream.

We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.”

This is equanimity.

The Three Tenets

1. Not Knowing
• Observing the self in order to drop our preconceived notions of others – our biases, fears, beliefs.
• Purifying the mind.
2. Bearing Witness
• Deep listening and observing the other to know what they want and need.
3. Compassionate Action
• What is the right action based on your observations of self and other?
• Only need to do the next right thing – the very next right thing.

Staying with Emotions

Staying with Emotions

Grief

Grief

Grief

Grief

Compassion

Metta

Self-Care

Fun

Staying with Emotions

So, continue to examine your beliefs, work with your thoughts, and feel your feelings in the quest for equanimity and a meaningful life.

Questions/Comments

James Hollis

MEDITATION RX

Keep Practicing!

Be kind and compassionate to yourself and others, even the difficult people – maybe especially the difficult people.

Choose joy more often.

Little by little, equanimity will arrive.

Keep in touch!

Saltwater4breakfast.com

Guided Meditation: Mountain