Equanimity

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Every single moment has a feeling tone to it: pleasure, pain or neutrality, and each of those tones is accompanied by an automatic reaction:

If it is pleasurable – we cling and grasp, not wanting it to end.
If it is painful – we respond with aversion or anger. doing anything to escape the moment.
If it is neutral – we drift off – remembering pleasure or fearing the next painful moment. 

Most of our lives, we are ricocheting between joy and despair (or denial).

Equanimity is the spaciousness that allows us to be present fully with all the different changing experiences of our lives. It allows us to feel pleasure fully with clinging, to feel pain fully without condemning and to feel neutral experiences while being present. We learn to trust in life’s rhythms.

As we sit in moments of uncertainity or stress, can we come back to the balance of equanimity? Trusting that life’s rhythms will carry us through. I hope you will take a few minutes to listen to today’s free meditation and explore equanimity for yourself.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”  ~Viktor Frankl