Quotes About Equanimity

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

These four qualities are among the most beautiful and powerful states of consciousness we can experience. Together they are called in Pali, the language spoken by the Buddha, the brahma-viharas. Brahma means "heavenly." Vihara means "abode" or "home." By practicing these meditations, we establish love (Pali, metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha) as our home.

Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.

When we bring deep awareness to whatever's bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.

You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

Equanimity's strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can't control the world doesn't come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable.

Why be unhappy about something if you can do something about it? If you can't do anything about it, why be unhappy about it?

Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.

Can you imagine a mind state in which there is no bitter, condemning judgement of oneself or of others? This mind does not see the world in terms of good and bad,might and wrong, good and evil; it sees only 'suffering and the end of suffering.

When we can't let the moment in front of us be what it is (because we're afraid that if it's good, it'll end too soon; if it's bad, it'll go on forever; and if it's neutral, it'll bore us to tears), we're out of balance. Mindfulness restores that balance; we catch our habitual reactions of clinging, condemning, and zoning out, and let them go.

That's life: starting over, one breath at a time.

It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people.

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they're responsible for the other person's happiness or that they're going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it's not all up to you to make someone else happy.

He doesn't anger easily. This is good. (Takeshi) Yes, I'm more of a simmer slowly until it boils over and ruins everything kind of man. (Acheron)

It's best not to get too excited or too depressed by the ups and downs of life.

Leave life alone. Let it be.

When you observe yourself reacting to what are minor things in your life, you will find that the mechanism is the same as when major things seem to go wrong in your life and there is upset.

fear cannot exist when one is indifferent to life.

Be neither attracted nor repulsed is the message of Tantric Buddhism. Don't be drawn to something, don't run away from it. Just naturally accept whatever comes into life.

If you would have a successful life, less and less try to make things happen and more and more just let things happen.