"I Have No Equanimity About This": Embracing Emotions on the Path to Inner Peace
It's been a tough summer. One by one, I've watched my closest friends grapple with a relentless parade of challenges - illnesses, surgeries, heartbreaking breakups, and mental health crises. Each week seemed to bring a new tragedy, another friend in need of support.
Last week, I sat with “Sarah,” a dear friend who's weathered more than her fair share of storms this year. As we talked about the latest in a series of personal setbacks, she said, "I have no equanimity about this. I am so sad."
Her words struck me. As a yoga practitioner, I've often emphasized the importance of equanimity and non-reactivity. But in that moment, I realized how often these concepts are misunderstood, even within yoga circles.
Sarah's statement got me thinking: What if equanimity isn't about not feeling our emotions? What if it's actually about how we respond to them?
In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, equanimity is described as an unwavering inner steadiness and composure. It's the ability to remain balanced and unshaken in the face of life's ups and downs, successes and failures, or the push and pull of different desires. Imagine a crystal-clear lake, its surface perfectly still, able to transparently reflect reality without any distortions. This is the mind in a state of equanimity.
But somewhere along the way, this concept has often been misconstrued to mean that we shouldn't feel, especially when it comes to "negative" emotions like fear, anger, or sadness.
Emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, are an integral part of the human experience. They're not good or bad, positive or negative - they're morally neutral. Emotions simply are. And most importantly, they're temporary.
The real essence of equanimity lies not in the absence of emotions, but in how we relate to them. It's about creating a space between the feeling and our response to it. In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali discusses how through diligent practice and letting go of attachments, we can calm the mind's turbulence. This leads to a state of profound equilibrium - but that doesn’t mean we won’t have feelings.
When we're triggered by strong emotions, our minds and bodies can get hijacked. In those heated moments, our rational prefrontal cortex goes temporarily offline as the limbic system's fight-or-flight response takes over. Our judgment becomes clouded, often leading us to act in ways we may later regret.
Equanimity allows us to re-engage our ability to think clearly and make wise choices, rather than being driven purely by emotional impulses. It's the antidote to mindlessly perpetuating cycles of unhappiness and conflict born from knee-jerk reactivity.
This doesn't mean suppressing or avoiding our feelings. Instead, it's about holding our emotions in a "tender awaring presence," as I like to call it. It's about allowing the feelings to arise, crest, and eventually pass like waves, without getting completely entangled in them. With equanimity, we can hold difficult emotions in this gentle awareness, responding to provocations with more clarity instead of just reactive aversion or hostility.
Returning to my friend Sarah, her sadness in the face of numerous personal tragedies doesn't indicate a lack of equanimity. It shows that she's human, capable of deep feeling and empathy. Her equanimity isn't measured by the absence of sadness, but by how she chooses to be present with that sadness, how she responds to it, and how she moves forward despite it.
In our yoga practice, both on and off the mat, we're not aiming to become emotionless beings. We're learning to stay centered and present, not getting thrown off balance by the inevitable waves of thoughts, emotions, and circumstances we encounter. It's about developing the skill to not let our fluctuating mental states and knee-jerk reactions run the show.
So the next time you find yourself in the grip of a strong emotion, remember: feeling isn't the opposite of equanimity. Your emotions don't make you less enlightened or somehow inferior. They make you beautifully, perfectly human. Equanimity is about how you dance with those feelings - how you stay present, how you respond, and how you continue to move forward on your path.
In the end, true equanimity isn't about reaching a state where nothing affects you. It's about developing the inner strength and wisdom to embrace all of life's experiences - the joyful and the painful - with an open heart and a steady mind. It's learning to be that calm, clear lake, reflecting reality without distortion, yet still containing depths of feeling and experience. It's in this space that we find real freedom, balance, and peace.
