‘Developing the Factors of Equanimity’ from Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson

While complete equanimity is an uncommon state for both the mind and the brain, a basic sense of it can be experienced in everyday life and developed with practice. The underlying neural factors we’ve explored suggest a number of ways to encourage this process.

Understanding

Recognize the fleeting nature of rewards and that they usually aren’t actually all that great. See, too, that painful experiences are transient and usually not that awful. Neither pleasure nor pain is worth claiming as your own or identifying with. Further, consider how every event is determined by countless preceding factors so that things can not be any other way. This is not fatalism or despair: you can take action to make the future different. But even then, remember that most of the factors that shape the future are out of your hands. You can do everything right, and still the glass will break, the project will go nowhere, you’ll catch the flu, or a friend will remain upset.

Intention

Keep reminding yourself of the important reasons for equanimity: you want more freedom from craving and the suffering it brings. Routinely recall your intention to be aware of the feeling tone, to be spacious around it, and to let it be whatever it is without reacting to it. To help hold this in mind, put a little sticky note with “equanimity” on it near your computer or telephone, or use a picture of a beautiful, tranquil setting.

Steadiness of Mind

As your mind grows steadier, pay particular attention to the neutral feeling tone. Stimuli that evoke a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone stir up more brain activity than neutral tones do, because there is more to think about and respond to. Since your brain doesn’t naturally stay engaged with neutral stimuli, you must make a conscious effort to sustain attention to them. Through sensitizing yourself to the neutral aspects of experience, your mind will become more comfortable staying with them, and less inclined to seek rewards or scan for threats. In time, the neutral tone can become, as my teacher Christina Feldman puts it, a “doorway to the eventless”-an entry into the stillness of the ground of being, which never changes and is always the same.

Spacious Awareness

Imagine the contents of your mind coming and going in a vast open space of awareness, like shooting stars. The feeling tones of experience are just more contents moving through this space. Boundless space surrounds them-dwarfing them, untroubled by them, unaffected by their passing. The space of awareness allows every content of mind to be or not to be, to come and to go. Thoughts are just thoughts, sounds are just sounds, situations are just situations, and people are just being themselves. As Ajahn Sumedho said during a talk at Chithurst Monastery, “Trust in awareness, in being awake, rather than in transient and unstable conditions” (2006).

Tranquility

This involves not acting based on the feeling tone, For example, you don’t automatically move toward something just because it is pleasant. In the words of the Third Zen Patriarch: “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences”. Set aside a period of your day—even just a minute long—to consciously release preferences for or against anything. Then extend this practice to more and more of your day. Your actions will be guided increasingly by your values and virtues, not by desires that are reactions to positive or negative feeling tones. Tranquility involves parasympathetic activation. Make a list of situations that trigger strong greed or hatred (broadly defined) in you, arranged from mild triggers all the way up to your equivalent of a four-alarm fire. Then, starting with the easier situations and working your way up the list, deliberately focus on bringing greater tranquility to them.

Inner peace can definitely be sustained in difficult circumstances. Here are two examples that are worlds apart, yet have aspects of equanimity in common:

Think of Joe Montana playing football, guiding the 49ers downfield while 300-pound defensive linemen rushed to crush him to the ground. His teammates said that the crazier and more desperate the game got, the cooler Joe became. My wife and I used to joke: Three minutes left in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, eighty yards to go for the game-winning touchdown—Joe’s got them right where he wants them!

And consider Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint who passed away in 1950. Toward the end of his life, he developed cancer in his arm. Although this must have been very painful, he remained serene and loving throughout his final days. One time he looked down with a beautiful smile and said simply, “Poor arm.”

Buddhism has a metaphor for the different conditions in life. They’re called the Eight Worldly Winds: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and ill repute. As you develop greater equanimity, these winds have less effect on your mind. Your happiness becomes increasingly unconditional, not based on catching a good breeze instead of a bad one.

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From Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson