Equanimity

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

"The truth of my experience," reports Joan Halifax, Roshi, "is that the tender balance of equanimity can be easily lost."

And so it is. For sometime now I have felt a disturbance of my own equanimity. Some call it anxiety. Or stress. Or being out of balance. Life feels like it is about stepping up and down on the point of a pin. We need to be steady, trusting, caring, and careful.

Our Zen practice helps us develop this skill. We sit with whatever comes up, residing calmly in its midst.

I like to think of it as being like a duck floating in a pond. Serene, the duck floats smiling in the sun and shade. Then dark clouds. Wind. Water rises and falls. If we have equanimity, we continue to float, rising and falling with the wind and water. If we don't, we rock, we feel fear, we worry, and maybe we even argue with the storm.

This ability to stay present in the midst of turmoil, emotional hurt, sadness, fear or anger, is a function of faith in the impermanence of all things. If we can reside in it, release our feelings in it, and have faith in the very moment we are in, no problem.

In fact, for a duck who resides in equanimity, there is no storm in the midst of a storm. Storm exists only outside of itself, in relation to something else, like placid wind.

Halifax-roshi presents a meditation: "All beings are owners of their karma. Their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them."

I take this to mean that I both create and assign meaning to my own reality. Know this: we all lose our footing, no one is exempt. Disturbed? Rocking about on the lake? Take a breath. Change the reality and expectation, shift the meaning, move the focus off the disturbance and onto a response to it.

So, I float today. I do my fast walk, my grocery shopping, my laundry, my dishes, and I type this note to you. Zen is a beautiful thing.

Be well.

Quotes from Halifax, Joan, "Being with Dying", 2008.