Meditating each day in 2021 has increased my awareness of a mental muscle called Equanimity.
You know how you get anxious, then you get anxious or upset about being anxious? Or, you get sick, and then you get sick about being sick? Or you get annoyed and you find the annoyance very frustrating?
Equanimity is a mental stance that breaks that feedback loop. You get anxious, and you notice the anxiety and don’t brace against it. You get sick, or you feel pain, and you notice the sickness or the pain, and don’t brace against it or have a strong secondary mental opinion about it. You feel annoyed and you notice the arrival of annoyance into your immediate experience.
You basically make room for reality and stop trying to control it so much.
I’m finding that as I’ve gotten better at it on the inside, I’m getting better at it outside myself too.
Yesterday at work two things happened where this was helpful. The first was that a coworker was very upset and I listened to him while he calmed down. He was shaking, swearing, and physically near the edge of out of control. His intensity made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t register too much concern about my discomfort; I just noticed it and kept listening to him. Noticing it allowed me to think that I’d prefer to just keep feeling uncomfortable rather than trying to do something to stop the discomfort, like agreeing with him too much in order to calm him down, or like being aggressive in response or alternatively escaping the situation (fight or flight). As he settled down and began kind of feeling ashamed of being worked up, I noticed again my discomfort with his being ashamed and then was able to choose not to be overly worried about that, and rather just to notice that it made me uncomfortable but that I didn’t need to address my discomfort by trying to make him feel at ease.
Then I was talking to a different coworker who I like and who is smart and he was telling me somewhat cautiously about some of the conspiratorially things he believes about the pandemic. I again noticed myself feeling uncomfortable: an arrogant attitude toward him for his believing differently from me; a feeling of discomfort about my own arrogant attitude; awareness that he was being cautious because he was not wanting me to think he was a moron and was trying to be reasonable in his expression about this stuff and just kind of explaining why he wasn’t planning on getting a vaccine, in a private conversation, because I had asked why (in other words he wasn’t preaching the theories to me). I felt a lot of desire to respond to my various discomforts by signaling false interest in his theories, even though they didn’t really interest me because of my past experience being disappointed in the veracity of these claims once I investigate them myself, and I felt an impulse to respond to my fear that I may seem arrogant by signaling more acceptance of his views than was sincere.
My equanimity muscle strength helped me instead just remain in a steady state noticing my discomfort and staying in the moment, hearing him, which allowed the conversation to come and go without my saying anything that would lead to future issues (like a follow up conversation in which I will experience more annoyance and more discomfort).
So, this is equanimity. It’s the opposite of having anxiety about anxiety, or feeling discomfort about discomfort.
It’s doing conscious noticing of emotional reactions and resolving not to amplify their meaning, nor to discount them. Don’t hold on to positive things or negative things; don’t resist positive things or negative things.
Take a little less ownership of the waves of experience, because they aren’t you; you are the thing that is noticing the waves.