"Enlightenment is intimacy with all things"

Dōgen

Dear friends,

Something is very noticeable in people who have practiced for a while. A teacher, or someone in our community who has been meditating for decades, or even in ourselves in a moment of clarity. It’s tough to name at first. It’s a kind of steadiness, but not the steadiness of someone who is distant. If anything, these practitioners feel more. They are more present, more attuned, more able to be with what is difficult. The steadiness seems to be what allows the feeling, rather than what replaces it. 

This month our theme is Upekkhā: The Mind That Can Hold Everything. The fourth and last brahmavihāra. And probably the one that's most often misunderstood.

The ground that makes full presence possible

There is a false version of equanimity that is really just distance. A practitioner has become so settled, so composed, that life stops landing altogether. The stability is might be real, but it has been gained by closing something down. The Buddhist tradition has a name for that. The Visuddhimagga calls it the near enemy of upekkhā: indifference arising from delusion. It can look like peace from the outside. On the inside though, it is a quiet contraction. Aversion that has learned to feel like acceptance.

Genuine upekkhā works differently. It is the quality of a mind that can be fully present to whatever is arising - pleasant, unpleasant, joyful, difficult - without being destabilized. The stability enables presence. This is why upekkhā is placed at the end of the brahmavihāra sequence. Mettā without ground can become clinging. Karuṇā without ground can collapse into anguish. Muditā without ground tips into exuberance. Upekkhā is what allows all three to remain open across the full range of experience.

The Buddha describes a practitioner who has learned to meet the full field of experience - everything seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled, and thought - without compulsive reaching or turning away. The whole field of experience, received as it comes. There is no hidden agenda in this quality of presence. Something difficult arises and it is met. Something beautiful arises and it is known as beautiful. Everything is simply received.

This is the equanimity that holds everything. It holds it all because it has learned to receive it all.

Mahā-upekkhā: Boundless impartiality

The Mahāyāna tradition offers another angle worth looking at. Mahā-upekkhā, great equanimity, extends the quality beyond personal composure into something more like radical impartiality. At this scale, upekkhā is the inability to rank beings, to treat one life as more significant than another, to separate the world into those whose suffering matters and those whose suffering can be set aside. 

This is care that has become so spacious it has no bounds. It is the ground for an engagement that includes everyone, without exception.

In practice, mahā-upekkhā doesn't mean we respond to everyone identically. A parent's upekkhā toward their own child and toward a stranger will look different. But at a basic level, at the level of recognition, no being is dispensable. No one is too far away or too difficult to include. This quality matures slowly, through the same patient work we do as practitioners.

Working with upekkhā this month

Some invitations for practice:

1) When you feel contraction arising in the face of difficulty, pause and investigate. Genuine equanimity feels open. Indifference feels quiet but closed. They are easy to confuse until you have learned to distinguish them from the inside.

2) In formal practice, let the body and breath establish themselves first, then bring a receptive awareness to whatever is present. Sensation, emotion, thought, sound. Practice meeting each arising with simple recognition, receiving fully without being swept away.

3) Notice where equanimity is already present in your ordinary life. Someone says something that would usually sting, and today it reaches you differently. A difficult situation that might have destabilized you six months ago finds you more settled now. These are signs of what is already developing. Worth acknowledging.

A helpful reframe

The brahmavihāras are often taught as four separate qualities, but the Buddha described them as deeply interwoven, each one requiring and sustaining the others. What we find at the end of this arc is that upekkhā was always already the ground beneath the other three. We had to practice the others first to discover what was holding them.

The heart that has developed genuine equanimity doesn't feel less. It finds that it can afford to feel more, because it has learned, slowly, through practice, that it will not be diminished by what it meets.

This is what the training is for. 

May we find the ground beneath everything that arises and may that ground be warm. 

With love,

Adam

Resident Guiding Teacher

Mountain Stream Meditation