Equanimity (noun) – mental or emotional stability
We are not our past. We can’t prepare ourself for a future we don’t know. What is showing up for us in this moment will soon become the past. Can we be present even if it means feeling and sitting with pain? hurt? anger? Just as ready and just as open to whatever comes next? In the wholeness and presence of this moment our experience is true and real. But in a breath or so, will it be the same? From one moment to the next, one day to the next we can feel opposing feelings and have opposing thoughts.
When we are trying to make internal shifts it stands to reason that our old story can sneak up on us and begin to play again. And so we ride the wave. But maybe this time we remember that we’ve been here before, and yet we haven’t. This is a new version of an old story. Ride it out. The next wave is coming. Whatever that will bring, can we be open to it? Can we stay open through the ups and downs? Embracing highs and lows with equal amounts of equanimity?
Pema chodron says:
…To stay with that shakiness – to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feelings of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge – that is that path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic – this is the spiritual path.
And so we discover that there is no such thing as certainty, that we can give our life’s journey wings and let it take us as it needs to without clipping the wings or creating a cage.
And so my thoughts go.
I am beginning to understand life to be far less black and white, less linear, less logical. My mind turns to nature and how the energy in the world of nature is circular or spiraling. It shifts and changes, it flows. So I have been trying to learn from nature. I’ve been trying to undo my conditioned response to the world to organize and make everything neat and perfect. I’ve been trying to move my body in ways that my body wants to move, and not hold it to an expectation that has nothing to do with the natural ebb and flow of what is within me. I’m learning, and I’m teaching. Trying to share this with my students to see if it rings true to others. I am practicing “going with the flow”. I am practicing opening and unfolding and retreating and resting as my body asks it of me. I am riding the waves rather than standing up against them.
I come back to this word again and again – equanimity. I know how to find it. Return home.