From Frustration to Equanimity: Finding Inner Peace Amidst Life's Traffic Jams
A Familiar Occurence.
The light has cycled twice, yet you're only a few car lengths further forward.
Each time the cycle changes in the other direction, a never-ending flood of cars crams into the road. You see there will be no space for you when the light turns green again.
Even though you left the house plenty early, you are still stewing. As you grip the wheel tighter, you start tapping your fingers and fidgeting in your seat. Your mind starts spinning with restlessness.
"Ugh. Why am I stuck here?!"
As your heartbeat speeds up, you begin calculating how late you will be. You curse the drivers filling the road and how they are in your way.
But after a few more cycles, you get to go, and the traffic starts moving past the problematic light. It was a relatively minor delay on your overall trip, but still, the damage has been done.
You are worked up and spend the next several hours irritated and short-tempered.
But what if there was a different option in situations like this? What if you could have gone through that situation, not denying your frustration but not getting stuck in it either?
Equanimity - The Practice of Momentary Liberation.
In Buddhism, this concept is called Equanimity, and it is the essence of the entire path in many ways. It is a critical practice that leads to less suffering while allowing us to feel more connected with our lives.
As such, this is one of the most valuable skills for any Yogi to cultivate. It will pay huge dividends on the mat/cushion and daily life.
Equanimity is a lifelong practice to perfect, and this relatively short post will give you a taste of its meaning. I hope it will plant a seed that you will carry with you so that you can keep developing this skill.
Vedena: The Key to Understanding Equanimity.
To fully understand Equanimity, we must understand another Buddhist concept: Vedana.
Vedena is a fancy name for how something - anything - we come into contact with feels subjectively in our experience. It is often called Feeling Tone for this reason.
Vedana comes in three primary flavors: Pleasant, Unpleasant, and Neutral. And we have three typical conditioned responses to each of these when they arise.
We are drawn to and get attached to things that are pleasant.
We get irritated by and try to avoid things that are unpleasant.
And we tend to ignore or miss things that are neutral.
Obviously, there are many levels and intensities to these sorts of reactions. Still, these are three primary ways in which vedena will show up.
Equanimity is the practice of mastering our relationship with these flavors of experience. It is about learning the skill of releasing our conditioned reactions to them.
Back to the car.
To illustrate how this can work in action, let's go back to the traffic scenario at the start of this post.
If we were to approach this situation with the intention of Equanimity, the actual events would be much the same.
You would still be stuck at the light. The cars would still be pouring in. And importantly, you would still feel the initial anxiety at the situation.
But the difference would happen in how you respond to that initial anxiety.
Rather than feeding into it, amplifying the emotion, and getting more stressed, you would instead feel the emotion in your body. You would catch it, notice it as it starts, and see how it develops over time.
You would become even more aware of the reactivity and tension beginning to arise. But rather than adding to the reactivity and getting more stressed, you could invite the body to relax instead.
You would likely have to do this some number of times as the feeling kept coming up. But each time, the reaction would get less and less.
The unpleasantness would remain, but it would no longer be a problem.
When the light finally turned, rather than having the episode ruin your day, you would be able to let it go rather than have gotten stuck in it.
Putting It Into Practice
While learning Equanimity in daily life is possible, yoga and meditation can help us to practice it more directly.
Yin Yoga, in particular, can provide a mini-laboratory to watch feeling tone evolve in real-time.
Consider a challenging Yin Yoga pose such as dragon. For most practitioners, this will stir up intense sensations in the body and require a noticeable level of focus and effort to maintain.
A non-equanimous mind might get stirred up by these sensations and spin into a similar reaction to the traffic scenario. They might tighten the body even more, making the unpleasant feelings worse. They would start counting the seconds until the pose was over, and each one would feel like an eternity.
But by cultivating a sense of Equanimity, we can instead see these sensations for what they really are - just sensations. And we can learn to relax into the experience rather than fighting against them.
And to be clear, we would still feel the challenge of the pose. It is not as if it suddenly becomes easy or an enjoyable experience. But like the traffic scenario above, we could work within the experience rather than trying to escape it.
(A key point here is to always be safe. We should never try to relax through pain or ignore it - so be careful when working with this in your physical practice.)
But what about things that we like?
This is a more subtle reaction because there is nothing wrong with enjoying things on some level. We are not trying to numb ourselves, but it can become problematic when we attach too much to things.
An example might be leaving a savasana at the end of class. After several minutes of calm bliss, the teacher calls the class out of the pose. You grumble internally at the thought of having to leave your little cocoon.
Much of the calm quality you had just gained will have been lost.
But had you approached this situation with greater Equanimity, the shift would not have been so much of a problem. You might have felt the initial sting, but it would have disappeared from your having worked with it.
Neutral sensations present a more subtle challenge still. They call on us to look deeper.
Consider all the things you tune out of your awareness at any moment.
Can you notice to contact with your seat? How about the weight of the clothing on your body?
These aspects of our experience are always there, but we rarely notice them. Because they could be more interesting, we tune them out.
The equanimous mind chooses to tune into all these things and see them as equals.
How mastering vedena naturally leads to Equanimity.
The first step toward greater Equanimity is learning to see our feeling tones in real time.
At first, it makes the most sense to explore these ideas in a controlled setting - like meditation or yoga.
For a specific practice that I recommend, consider trying noting meditation. This method allows us to depersonalize our experience and see sense objects just as they are. Here is an instructional video from my YouTube:
I also have a guided meditation that focuses explicitly on working with Vedena:
Over time, as our skills sharpen, you can start to work with the practice more and more in your daily life.
The shadow Side - Indifference and Bypassing.
Like many practices, there is a possible shadow side to this work.
Equanimity can quickly morph into indifference, and paying attention to this is vital.
Equanimity is NOT dispassion.
An equanimous mind is even more connected with all the things that arise. In fact, Equanimity allows us to see our experience even more clearly than in our usual reactive way.
So if you find yourself trying to block out some aspect of your experience, understand that this is not the intention. Spiritual bypassing can be a real challenge, so try to be open to everything without getting stuck.
As I said earlier, be sure to recognize problematic sensations in your physical practice.
While there can be value in opening up to challenging sensations, we should never ignore pain in the body. Repeated pain can indicate damage, so tread carefully here - especially if you are new to this way of practicing.
The Joy of an Equanimous Mind.
As we near the end of this post, I want to emphasize again that this is a lifetime practice - not something learned from a single blog post.
I also make no claims to have perfected my sense of Equanimity. It is something that I work with every day, and I am still very much subject to my conditioned patterns and reactions.
But still, having taken on Equanimity as a core practice has been a significant key to living a more balanced and present life. It is a keystone practice for me. One that holds all of the others together
And like all practices, Equanimity is something that you can start right now.
If you'd like to practice with me right now, check out one of the dozens of free classes on my YouTube.
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