Talk On Equanimity From Day 6 Mt. Carmel Retreat (September 2019)

So tonight's talk,

Talk number six,

Whoa,

Talk number six is about equanimity.

You've heard me speaking about equanimity quite a few times during the last few days.

Equanimity essentially means an unshaken state of mind.

It's a peaceful state of mind.

It's an unperturbed state of mind.

It's a balanced state of mind.

It's a state of mind that's not shaken by the ups and downs of life.

And I'll explain in a little while something called the eight worldly winds.

It's unshaken by the eight worldly winds,

Which are praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

And fame and disrepute.

Another way we can understand fame and disrepute is social acceptance and social rejection.

So it's unshaken by these natural vicissitudes of life because everyone is blamed about something,

You know.

I can tell you stories of even the Buddha was blamed for things.

So in Pali,

The word for,

There's two words that are equivalent to equanimity.

In Pali,

The word is upekka.

And it literally means to look over,

To see,

To see with understanding,

To see with patience.

So it's,

That's one word for equanimity.

And there's another word that often is translated as equanimity.

And it's a long word.

I'll see if I can say it correctly.

Bear with me.

Tatra majahata tata.

Tatra majahata tata.

And this word is made up of a number of compound syllables.

Tatra means there.

And it sometimes refers to all things.

Majah means middle.

And tata means to stand or to pose.

So together,

Sometimes this word means to stand in the middle of all this.

To stand in the middle of all this.

Being in the middle.

Maintaining a sense of balance in the middle of the chaos.

And I think there was a film,

I can't remember what it was called,

But there was one shot of a Japanese Buddhist monk walking very slowly through the city streets of Japan.

I don't know what city it was.

It was a very busy city.

And the film,

He was walking,

It must have been very slowly,

He was just ringing a bell as he made steps.

Now he's walking really slowly through the middle of these busy city streets.

And they filmed it,

But then they sped up the film.

So everyone's kind of going like that and he's just kind of,

He's still looking like he's just walking really slowly.

And there's all this chaos around him.

That's kind of gives a sense of that standing,

Well,

He's not quite standing,

But he's poised in the middle of it all.

Unshaken by it all.

So in the Buddhist tradition,

This upeka means to go over to see,

To see with understanding,

To see clearly,

Not actually,

No,

To see clearly means is insight,

But to be balanced.

There are 10 ways that upeka is described in the sutras,

In the canon.

One way is described as,

Is as the way enlightened beings view the senses.

And here we mean sight,

Sound,

Smell,

Touch,

Taste,

And mind.

They view the senses free from attachment and aversion.

So they're neither drawn in nor they are repulsed,

They're just seeing things as they are.

Another way it's described in the sutras is as in a divine abode.

And we've talked about the abodes,

The divine abodes.

Remember love and kindness,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy,

And equanimity.

And in this case,

It's about relationships and it's mostly socially directed.

This equanimity as a divine abode is a socially directed meditative state,

Marked by transcending approval or resenting,

Resentment.

It's like neither attached or reverse,

Neither attracted or repulsed.

So it's equal,

It's steady.

It's looking on all living beings without preference or discrimination.

Another way it's described is as an enlightenment factor.

And I've talked to you,

I mentioned the seven factors of enlightenment at different times and I might go into details about this tonight and we'll do a meditation on this tomorrow.

The seven factors of awakening,

They go in a sequence.

The first three factors are related to insight meditation.

The next three factors are related to serenity meditation.

And the last factor is equanimity,

Which is both related to insight and serenity.

And I'll talk a little bit more about how it's related to insight tonight.

We've already mentioned how it's related to serenity when we,

It's a factor of the fourth jhana,

Remember that highly concentrated state.

So these factors,

They are mindfulness,

Which gives rise to investigation,

Which gives rise to energy,

Which gives rise to joy,

Which gives rise to tranquility,

Which gives rise to concentration.

And all those six factors culminate in equanimity.

I'll talk a little bit more about that hopefully later tonight.

Equanimity of energy is where there's a balance between extremes of overexertion and laxity.

You know that meditation we did this morning about settling the mind in this natural state,

The one we just focused on objects of the mind.

Usually I remember when Alan Wallace was teaching us this meditation,

It was about being balanced between overexcitation and laxity.

And here equanimity is similar in that it's not getting caught up in something,

Overexcited and overexerting into something,

Around something,

And nor is it being slack over not having any energy or not putting any energy into something.

The next way it's understood is equanimity about meditation experiences.

Somebody asked me about this the other night.

I think there was something about being attached to these pleasant feelings.

And in the case of serenity,

It's a detachment to the attainments of the jhanas.

And in the case of insight,

It's the type of composure that is necessary for enlightenment or awakening.

It's just balanced.

You might have these amazingly blissful experiences with the meditation practices and you don't get attached to them.

Or you might have profound insights and you don't get shaken around by that.

You don't get overexcited.

You maintain a sense of composure.

And that's equanimity.

Equanimity is also described as a feeling,

As neither pleasant or unpleasant.

And I just want to add here,

It's not the same as neither pleasant or unpleasant.

It's more of a refined quality.

It's more refined than simply not being attracted or,

Sorry,

Not pleasant,

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Because that experience of neither pleasant or unpleasant can be based on confusion.

Like it can be based on not knowing.

You're neither attracted to something and therefore neither having craving to grasp after it.

And also it's not horribly adverse.

It's not unpleasant,

So you're not pushing it away.

But you could be just confused.

Now equanimity is not that level of neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Equanimity is this sense of,

Here in this case it means a feeling that's kind of refined,

Unshaken.

It's not attractive,

It's not aversive.

There's a neutral feeling about it.

Someone will come and say to you,

Oh you just won the lottery.

And you go,

Oh yeah,

Okay.

That's pretty easy,

That's pretty interesting.

Interesting,

Oh,

I just won the lottery,

I just won 20 million dollars.

There's a couple of other ways that it's understood.

Equanimity as a specific neutrality about beautiful states of mind.

In particular they talk about tatra,

Maja,

Hatta,

Hatta,

Hatta,

Tatta as being not particularly swayed by beauty.

Like you might have beautiful states of mind.

Not talking about beauty as in something objective.

But beautiful states of mind.

You're unswayed by that and you're quite detached with equanimity.

And of course we've talked about how equanimity is understood as being present in the third jhana,

Remember the third jhana,

That third level of a state of concentration,

And the fourth jhana.

It's completely the factor of the fourth jhana.

Or completely the feature,

Sorry I shouldn't say factor,

The feature of the fourth jhana.

So equanimity is this sense,

It's a grounded sense of being stable and centred and emotionally balanced.

I was talking about the eight worldly winds.

With equanimity we're balanced with the eight worldly winds.

The eight worldly winds,

Praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

Fame and disrepute.

They're called winds because they blow us around.

We like praise and we don't like blame.

We seek,

Often we seek praise and we seek to avoid blame.

Preoccupies our attention.

We don't like pain and we like pleasure.

We're often seeking out,

Being swayed by pleasure and we're often avoiding pain.

Though in some cases people have pleasure with pain,

Masochists and so on.

We don't like praise and blame,

Loss and gain.

We don't like to lose things.

We like to gain things.

And also we like to be socially recognised.

We don't like,

We did mention the word shame the other day.

Shame is like this fear of rejection from the tribe basically.

Shame is really a painful emotion and we don't like to be rejected.

We like to be accepted.

It's hard wired for us to want to be accepted into the tribe.

So equanimity is based on understanding cause-effect relationships.

It's based on understanding that these eight worldly winds are a part of life.

Everyone experiences them and we can actually find a sense of balance within it.

It kind of transcends that.

We're just unshaken by the winds basically.

We're not blown around.

An analogy that I often use is an analogy of bamboo.

When I put up slides and I'm talking about equanimity in the workshops I run,

I have a lot of slides and one slide is this bamboo.

Bamboo is a really strong material.

And those of you who have been to Asia you've probably seen scaffolding made of,

Buildings are made of bamboo.

The scaffolding anyway.

It's really flexible as well.

That's a kind of a nice image of equanimity.

The worldly winds come along,

We kind of go with them and then we come back to resilience.

There's a real resilient quality amongst.

That's equanimity.

Another way you could explain equanimity is resilience to be honest.

So we don't like praise,

We don't like blame,

We don't like loss,

We like gain and so on.

And we spend a lot of time in our life trying to get one or the other,

One of these eight worldly winds and avoid the others,

They're opposites.

Do you agree with me?

When I used to see young people,

I still see young people now,

But when I was working as an adolescent mental health worker,

A lot of the time I just used to be talking about schoolyard social politics.

Just how to manage bullies,

How to manage people who are saying nasty things about you,

How to work with your attractions to people and so on.

And particularly people would get upset by having nasty things said about them.

And I used to bring out,

In regards to nasty things said about people,

I would refer to an analogy that I adapted from the hot coals analogy.

There's an analogy in the suitors of hot coals.

It refers to when someone picks up a hot coal and they throw it at you,

They burn their hands.

The Buddha's referring to anger here.

If someone picks up a hot coal,

It's like being really angry,

It hurts.

And you throw it,

It hurts the person who's throwing it,

Maybe even more than the person who's at the receiving end.

But for the teenagers I used to see,

I used to say the analogy of dog shit.

And I would say,

It's like when people are saying really horrible things about you that are really nasty things about you.

It's like they're picking up some dog shit,

Rolling it up in their hands and they're throwing it at you.

And I would ask them,

What are you going to do with that?

Are you going to go like this and get it splattered all over your shirt?

Or are you going to go like this,

Like Matrix style,

Kind of a moving out of the bullets fire and letting it go straight past?

They're like,

Oh yeah,

We do Matrix stuff.

So the analogy of the story is that,

Sorry,

The moral of the story is that when the person throws that dog shit,

Their hands are very smelly.

And if you can be balanced enough and flexible enough to get out of the road,

Then you're scot free.

You'll just go straight past you.

So what I was endeavoring to help them understand was a sense of equanimity about these things.

With the abodes,

We talked about the abodes the other night,

And I just briefly mentioned the near enemies and far enemies,

And I'll remind you what they are.

The near enemies are,

Well the far enemies are the direct opposite of these qualities.

Like the direct opposite of love and kindness is hatred.

The direct opposite of compassion is cruelty and masochism and sadism.

The direct opposite of appreciative joy is jealousy and envy.

And we also talked about the near enemies,

Near enemies being looking like those particular qualities but being forced for similes,

Being forced representations of them.

So the near enemy of love and kindness of course is this kind of codependency or subservience or over-attachment.

So coming to equanimity,

The near and far enemies of equanimity,

The far enemy is over-reactivity,

Making everything personal,

Personally,

Poor relationship boundaries.

And the near enemies,

Ones that are like a false facsimile of equanimity,

Is a kind of,

Someone has too many boundaries,

A disengaged aloofness,

A disengaged cut-offness.

People who are,

Even a sense of superiority,

That I'm unshaken by this,

You fall over and break your leg,

Oh that's your karma.

Got nothing to do with me.

And I think,

Did I mention,

I mentioned this so many times,

I can't remember if I mentioned you guys,

Sometimes I see people,

There was one time I saw a person who'd been in a relationship for about 10 years and their friend had dropped them or something,

Their relationship had broken up the day before and I was seeing this person and I said,

How are you feeling?

He said,

I'm alright,

I'm detached.

But in fact,

To me it seemed like denial.

So this near enemy of equanimity,

It looks like equanimity,

It looks really cool and you're really detached and yeah,

But it's the near enemy of it.

Equanimity is based on wisdom.

It's a wisdom quality.

It's about looking at cause-effect relationships,

Seeing how things work and it's this understanding that each and every individual is the owner of their actions,

They're heirs to their actions,

They're born of their action,

They're related to their action,

They're supported by their action,

Whatever actions they shall do,

Of those actions they shall be there and I'm just quoting part of the five recollections there but that last little recollection is actually some of the ways people cultivate equanimity in the Buddhist traditions by reflecting on the nature of actions,

The owners of actions and how that plays out in relationships when we're still talking about equanimity as a divine abode.

How that plays out in relationships is that there's an understanding that every individual is on their own life trajectory.

I'll tell you about the joke that I say,

Don't I?

Remember the joke?

How many meditators does it take to change the life of a person?

How many meditators?

One.

Yes?

One,

But it's got to want to change.

Yeah,

The life-grapes really want to change,

Yeah.

So that's the theme of this.

We all know,

Actually the next question I ask when I'm talking about equanimity on groups,

Which I haven't done that particular group for a long time but Amy was one of my dedicated students.

You came to how many?

Three or four groups or five groups?

It just kept coming.

The next question I would ask people would be,

Has anybody ever tried to change anybody else?

And everyone,

I can see people nodding in the audience,

Yeah.

And has anybody ever been successful at changing anybody else?

No.

So it's this understanding that people themselves need to change,

That each and every individual has to be responsible for their own thoughts,

Feelings and behaviours because nobody else will be responsible.

Nobody else can be.

I know this is particularly hard for parents.

I reckon there's a few parents here and we've had kids that happen to do things that we worry about and we want them to do differently or be differently.

And we want to help them but you and I know that we can't actually force them to change.

I'm thinking about my grandchildren.

The oldest,

One of my grandchildren is four and they are a little bit rebellious.

I think,

Come on,

Come on Nella,

Time to get ready to go,

Let's go.

So no,

No,

Not right now,

Not right now.

I can't force her to do anything.

She's just going to do it in her own timeframe.

And I remember my own son,

My eldest son who's now 38,

I remember a time when it was just he and I,

His mother had gone away somewhere and taken the middle boy and he and I were just together for two weeks or something.

And he was four years old,

I went to take him to preschool and they wouldn't accept him because he had conjunctivitis.

So I stopped what I was doing.

I counselled what I was going to do and I was just hanging out with him.

And we actually went and had pizza down by the river in Ballama.

But I was hanging out with him and he was coughing and he's got these really terrible eyes and I really wanted to change him but I couldn't do anything.

And he himself was,

You know,

He was quite happy.

He was happy just to be with Dad.

You know,

I put him on the back of my bike,

We went down the river and eating pizza by the river.

He's coughing and spluttering but he was happy.

And the point I'm making is that even though I wanted to change him,

I wanted to fix him,

He had to change through his own processes,

His own healing processes.

He had to get through this illness.

And that understanding is equivalent to equanimity.

No,

So it's not equivalent to equanimity.

It's the sort of understanding that gives rise to equanimity.

That people are on their own life trajectories.

We can't change anybody.

But we can influence people like,

I hope I'm having an influence by giving this talk for example.

But you yourself have to change.

So,

Equanimity is a wisdom factor,

Is a wisdom quality.

It arises from this sort of understanding.

Ah,

Not going too badly.

So you might ask,

How do we cultivate equanimity?

And can you just give me a minute?

I just want to,

I've been quite a quantum about a dry mouth for the last 20 minutes.

I'm just going to take a mouthful of water.

So there's a number of ways to cultivate equanimity.

And as demonstrated in those seven factors of awakening,

We have,

Well maybe I'll talk a little bit more about that right now.

Because it contains some of the ways we cultivate equanimity.

The seven factors of awakening again,

Mindfulness,

Investigation and effort.

They're the first three.

Because with mindfulness,

We begin to track experience.

We begin to be aware of experience.

We begin to be aware of experiences in our body,

Feelings,

Mind and life.

Basically,

Remember that's how we've been talking.

That's what I raved on about last night,

Remember?

Before Foundations of Mindfulness.

What we're seeing,

We're not only seeing the conditions of existence like impermanence,

The interdependence of experience and the unreliability of experience.

Not only are we seeing that,

But we're also seeing cause-effect relationships.

We're seeing when this happens,

That happens.

When this is,

That is.

When this is not,

That is not.

Do you remember that phrase?

When we begin to understand cause-effect relationships and we get an understanding.

The next factor actually that goes with mindfulness is investigation.

We're using investigation to look at what's happening and how it's happening.

With mindfulness and investigation,

We start to get quite energized.

We have a sense of zeal or enthusiasm.

We want to put effort towards what we're doing because we're cultivating wisdom.

We're cultivating an understanding of life.

If we wanted to pay attention to any particular thing,

We're cultivating an understanding of that particular thing.

It could be a particular habit you're involved in.

Say some of you may be smokers and you can see the cause-effect relationship.

You'll have an urge to have a cigarette,

Have a cigarette.

Then you feel really crappy because everything they say on those no smoking ads happens.

You get rejected.

So on and so forth.

With mindfulness,

You start to become aware of these various patterns and you're able to shift them around with investigation and so on.

You can see how this process is leading towards joy because you're able to release being caught up in suffering.

So the next factor is joy.

The next factor on the seven factors of awakening is joy.

We've talked a little bit about joy.

We talked about it as piety.

Remember that rapture?

There's a lot of causes for joy and I'll talk about that with some of you tomorrow.

One cause of joy is simply a concentrated state.

Is simply being secluded by obsessive desire,

Being secluded by aversion in the inner world,

Being secluded from mental thickness and dullness,

Being secluded from agitation and restlessness and worry,

And being secluded from paralyzing doubt.

The five hindrances to meditation.

When you are secluded from that and you've developed mindfulness,

Investigation,

Effort and energy beginning to be secluded from that,

With that wisdom,

Joy arises.

With joy then comes tranquility.

And if you're thinking about those factors,

Sorry,

The features of the jhanas,

Piety or joy is the feature of the first jhana.

The second jhana,

The feature is tranquility and happiness.

The feature is sukha,

Happiness.

But another feature is tranquility,

A deep tranquility.

When you're deeply tranquil,

I don't know if you guys can remember,

I feel like this when I do yoga nidra.

I wake up and come here and do some yoga and then there's these beautiful yoga ninjas with Lisa and Maureen and then I wake up really tranquil.

I'm not wake up,

Sorry,

I get up.

I get up after doing yoga really tranquil.

And I'm kind of slowed down a bit,

A lot.

And it's like my attention just goes,

Just gets absorbed really easily.

My attention comes closer together.

So tranquility is like a causative factor for concentration.

Then the accumulation of all that,

Concentration,

Also utilizing mindfulness,

Kalvan wisdom,

And so on,

All those factors that preceded it.

Then we have that deep experience of equanimity.

That's just a sequence of it.

The seven factors of awakening are directly opposite,

Or often portrayed as being directly opposite to the five hindrances,

To be honest.

They counteract the hindrances.

They also describe like branches on a tree.

They begin somewhere and they grow out and they branch out into other things.

So there's a sequence.

So that's one way.

One way we cultivate equanimity is through mindfulness.

Because mindfulness ultimately cultivates,

Mindfulness and investigation and energy,

Cultivates wisdom.

And equanimity is a wisdom factor.

And another way through to cultivate equanimity is with those serenity factors where you get more and more concentrated.

Your mind becomes very still,

Quiet,

Stable.

And that is another way of describing equanimity.

When I was talking about the four jhanas,

Just the other night,

This fourth jhana,

The fourth jhana is,

The main feature of it is equanimity.

And I'll actually describe,

You know how I was describing some of the things,

The analogies made of the jhanas and I didn't describe the fourth jhana?

I'll describe that now.

You remember me doing the similes,

The analogies?

Sorry.

Yep.

Okay.

So once again,

We have a simile.

Suppose a man were to be sitting covered from head down,

Sorry,

I'll start again.

Suppose a man were to be sitting covered from head down by a white cloth so there would be no part of his entire body not suffused or covered by the white cloth.

In the same way,

One sits suffusing one's body with the pure bright mind so that there is no part of one's entire body that is not suffused by a pure bright mind.

Now equanimity,

As far as a jhana is concerned,

Is represented by this brilliant luminous awareness.

And also this kind of grounded sense of being stable,

Still quiet.

The sheet is luminous,

That refers to being luminously aware,

Brightly aware,

Brightness.

But it's also kind of insulating you or insulating the practitioner against the ups and downs of the world.

They're not caught up in the world,

They're not entangled in the world.

So that's how that simile is portrayed,

If that makes sense.

That's why we use that simile covered with a luminous cloth and it pervades one's body everywhere.

So at a very kind of mundane level,

Some of the ways we also cultivate equanimity is just by watching things,

By observing things.

If I can restrain from being freaked out or having anxiety,

Sometimes when I watch Donald Trump on TV,

I shake my head and think,

God,

This guy's just creating,

He's digging a hole for himself really.

And when you watch the politicians doing what they do around election time,

Very,

Yeah.

But to be honest,

Often I'll go and sit at an aeroplane in an airport or a train station or something like that and just watch the interaction of play,

Which is,

To be honest,

It's a part of interdependence.

But seeing life,

Watching cause-effect relationships,

Noticing things,

Being aware of my own cause-effect,

My internal cause-effect relationships,

What happens when I think this and when I do that and so on,

And understanding that,

But also understanding the world out there.

It's a good way of cultivating equanimity.

Another way we can cultivate equanimity is with reflections,

Just reflecting on things,

Contemplating things.

So I mentioned before those five recollections and that fifth recollection is I am the owner of my actions,

Heir to my actions,

Born of my actions,

And so on.

So thinking that through,

An exercise we'll do tomorrow will be,

I'll invite you to come and invite you to think about or reflect upon a neutral person.

So do you remember how in the four heart quality or the four divine abodes,

I mentioned that there's particular types of people that we think about for the particular types of abodes.

For example,

With love and kindness,

The particular individual we think about is someone who can bring a smile to her heart,

Someone we feel respectful towards or have a warm feeling towards.

The individual that we think about or reflect on for compassion is someone who is suffering.

Remember that?

The individual that we think about for the divine abode of appreciative joy is someone who has joy,

Someone who is virtuous and someone who has a lot of integrity,

For example,

Or someone who is skillful in something.

So we actually begin to empathize with their joy and we can appreciate their qualities.

The person we think of when we're cultivating equanimity is someone we have relatively neutral feelings towards.

We're not greatly attracted to them and we're not greatly adverse to them.

They're just someone.

So tomorrow I'll ask you to think of a neutral person.

And it could be someone who lives down the road,

A neighbor.

It could even be someone here.

I mean,

You're probably feeling quite warmly towards some people here unless you've got into the vipassana bhantatta thing.

If you've never met these people or you've never talked to them,

People here in this room,

You may have kind of a mild attraction towards them but reasonably neutral.

So you might choose someone here.

So one way we cultivate equanimity is by reflecting on a neutral person and thinking about all the factors that have come to make them what they are.

Getting a sense of,

They come from a particular genetic background,

They're human,

They've had social upbringing and so on and so forth.

All these causes and conditions have come together to produce this person as they are,

Including their decisions,

Including the actions they've made,

Including the decisions they've made sometimes wise and sometimes not so wise.

So they are what they are because of all those things coming together.

What you might come to is this sense of matter of factness.

This is just the way it is.

This person is the way they are because of this stuff.

It is just the way it is.

In many respects,

That's equanimity.

Then I'll invite you to apply that to yourself.

I am the way I am because of a number of things coming together,

Including my decisions,

But it's not all my decisions.

Many of the things that have come together are completely beyond my control.

Like I've inherited,

I've got a condition,

I've got a heart condition.

I smoked when I was a teenager,

But otherwise I'm pretty fit.

Have a healthy life,

I ride a bike.

You wouldn't think that I'd have a heart condition,

But I do.

I'm the oldest of my generation.

I'm the oldest of the males in my family on both sides,

My mother's side and my father's side.

They all died before about 59,

63.

So I'm going pretty good.

I have a condition that I've got something called lipoprotein A,

For those of you who are medically oriented.

It's a high level.

It calcifies my arteries.

It gives deposits calcium in my arteries,

And so they get blocked.

My right coronary artery is completely blocked.

So it's quite helpful to think that I could die any moment.

I carry around these little pills.

My GP says,

Carry around those pills.

They might save your life one day.

So I carry them around when I go walking around the lip.

I've got them on my pocket.

The reason I'm saying this is that I didn't choose to have this.

It's just happened.

It's the way it is.

I can struggle with it,

Or I could be a economist about it.

I try to be a economist about it.

Not all our conditions are based on karma.

The word for karma literally means actions.

Often people will say,

Oh,

It's your bad karma.

You've been born with that condition.

That's your bad karma.

It sort of is,

But not really.

It's a different kind of formulation.

So I'm telling you about how we can cultivate equanimity.

Are you getting a good idea about it so far?

Yeah.

Okay.

It also supports for equanimity.

And these supports are basically.

.

.

The first one is having a life of virtue and integrity.

Being blameless in your actions.

When we live with integrity,

We can have a sense of confidence about our words and our actions.

When we're living with integrity,

When we're living ethically,

Basically,

But it's possibly more than just ethically.

It's about making wise decisions and acting on principles.

We can feel proud.

Proud's not the right word.

We can feel stable and centered.

If someone blames us,

We know we've done the best.

It wasn't our intention about doing something.

So blamelessness.

Another support comes from faith.

Another support for equanimity comes from faith.

Faith here refers to confidence.

Faith and trust are kind of similar.

Faith,

Trust,

And confidence,

They're all sort of similar.

Faith means that you are confident in a path of action because you've seen this path of action work positively before,

So you're confident it'll work in a particular way again.

Trust is a little bit different.

Trust is more like,

I could tell you that Maureen and Lisa's classes of yoga are really great.

Even though you've never experienced their yoga classes,

You could develop a trust that they're really good because they're coming from someone who you trust,

They're coming highly recommended.

In this context,

Is trust something that only exists between people?

Trust exists between people,

Yes,

But it's not necessarily.

It's trust.

It's faith in a process,

Really.

It's trust in a process.

It's not like we're thinking,

I trust my wife,

My partner,

For all sorts of things.

It's not that sort of trust.

I guess it could describe it like that.

You trust a car to take you from point A to point B.

That's true.

A certain make and model.

You take that sense of trust and faith and you make it at a higher level in terms of one's life directions.

That then becomes a support for equanimity.

It's a little bit different than trusting a car will get you from A to B.

We're talking about trust in the practice,

For example.

We have,

The word trust,

The word faith,

In Pali it's sadha.

It's called sadha.

Some of you may have heard that term,

Sadha.

Sadha has two syllables,

Sad and da,

DHA.

DHA means to place,

Da,

To put,

To place.

Sad means heart.

So where you place your heart,

Where you put your heart.

It's interesting.

So when you have confidence in something,

When you have faith in something,

Then people might say things to you or even do things to you,

But you can remain unshaken because you have confidence in something.

Does that make sense?

This is a foundation.

These are the supports.

Another support is the well-developed mind,

Which we've talked about,

The development of calm and concentrated,

Focused and mindful states of mind,

Mindful skills.

The fourth support is a sense of wellbeing.

This means not overlooking the little things,

The simple things in life,

Like going out in the back patio and having a cup of tea in the afternoon and enjoying that or going for a walk and sitting on one of the seats up there with a view and just kind of enjoying that or really enjoying the soup that we had the other night.

Just the simple things in life,

Having a sense of wellbeing.

This is another support.

Another support is understanding or wisdom,

Which I've talked about.

Wisdom can be cultivated in many ways.

I mentioned just observing life,

Going to the marketplace,

For example,

As long as we're not caught up in the chaos of things,

Just sit back and watch.

It's really,

Really lovely to sit back and watch things,

Just to notice things.

You know,

I've talked about these other supports.

Another support is understanding that people are responsible for their own decisions.

Even when I talk about equanimity,

I'll give an example of how I had to cultivate equanimity when I was in Thailand as a monk because I got quite ill.

Also we have to cultivate equanimity when we're challenged with difficult circumstances.

Also as therapists,

We have to cultivate equanimity.

We have to be unshaken by praise and blame,

I suppose,

Because sometimes people want us to fix them up,

Cure them.

Obviously we can't do that.

Other times people say,

You're the greatest therapist I've ever met.

Obviously I don't want to be sucked in by that.

I hear some laughter in the audience.

Some of us are very familiar with this.

It's about being stable and centered and being unshaken by the praise and the blame and being unshaken by the loss and the gain.

Sometimes I know clients sack me.

Every one of us have been sacked,

I think.

All of us therapists here,

Anyway.

It hurts a little bit,

But the more it happens,

Sometimes it still hurts even when it's happening again.

The thing is you need a sense of equanimity about that.

When people come to see you and they don't change.

.

.

Some of you have heard me talk about this joke.

I'll say it again.

There was a joke.

One day I'll find it.

It was like a laugh and a comic or something like that.

That was about this person's lying on a couch and they're in a psychiatrist's office and the psychiatrist is there.

You see around the walls there's certificates of psychiatry and diplomas of therapy and all this other stuff.

The caption down below,

It says,

Brief interactive therapy.

You know this one here.

The psychiatrist is standing over the patient on the lounge and saying,

Snap out of it.

It doesn't work like that.

People don't change when you tell them to change.

Just get better.

Why are you worrying?

Stop thinking like that.

That's not going to work.

Equanimity is very important in that.

I was thinking about one thing that happened to me in my life when I was 24.

No,

I was 25.

My eldest son was just little.

I was working as a shatoo therapist in George Street.

I had a clinic in George Street in Sydney.

I was going to workshops.

There was all sorts of things happening.

I was going to some communication workshops and there was a man who set up some sort of center in the building where I was.

I was going to some of his workshops.

I wasn't quite sure about him.

He was very impressive.

He looked like he had a lot of power and insight and so on.

I won't tell you his name because I don't want to get too detailed about it.

He did have training with Scientology.

He'd come from a Scientologist background.

He talked about learning some skills,

Like psychic skills.

He talked about how one time when he wanted to make people feel uncomfortable,

He would imagine putting spiders in their lap.

And people would start to feel uncomfortable.

Still I was uncertain about this man.

And then something happened and we had a bit of a confrontation.

I went to a meeting he held.

He gave a little talk to something and I went up and I was talking to him.

He started to do things in my aura.

It was really weird.

I went away feeling really confused.

I was 25.

He was probably in the late 50s I think.

I just felt really out of sorts and confused and uncertain what to do.

So I eventually went on retreat.

I was going to go on retreat anyway,

But I went on retreat to what Buddha Dharma.

Many of you know what Buddha Dharma itself is.

I just went into a hut there and I just spent a week there by myself.

I mean there were other people in the temple.

I had to get back to the refuges.

The refuges of the Buddha Dharma Sangha that I was talking about.

Coming back to something that's really meaningful.

I really had to just get back to that and I remembered getting back to it.

When I got back to it,

When I could establish my confidence again,

My faith,

My refuge,

Then the week was over and I went out and I met up with him again.

He was powerless with me.

I realized it was only the power that I gave him that he have power over me.

It was only what I believed he had was the effect that he would have on me.

So I gave him no power and he had no effect on me.

The way I felt was equanimous.

There was this,

That was his story and this is my story.

Just as a matter of interest,

This person ended up developing a kind of a cult type thing in Sydney and I read in the newspaper some years later that he had sexually abused some of the children of,

It was kind of like a cult membership and he ended up going to jail.

I don't even know if he's alive still.

So I think that's an interesting story.

You agree?

I hope it helps.

Can you think of any times you've needed to cultivate equanimity?

Okay,

So I think that's about it.