Live Session Summary, Sunday, May 10, 2026: It was good to be with you for our live session today. The theme of the session was ‘Cultivating equanimity to meet these difficult times with balance and peace.’
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from the live session:
I reviewed some of the main elements of the four ‘divine abodes’ (Brahma Viharas)—the Buddha’s heart practices of loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.
These qualities are described as unconditional since when they are present in their authentic form, all beings are included in our wishes of happiness and peace and nothing is expected in return; and immeasurable, in that there is no limit to the number or range of people who are included in our wishes for their well-being.
We all have the potential to cultivate these qualities. Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg said, ‘Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are the results of what we do with our minds. We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.” (Salzberg, ’Loving-kindness’, p89)
I focused on the fourth of the heart practices, equanimity, as a powerful support in difficult times. Equanimity is a quality of steadiness, balance, and evenness of heart and mind that helps us meet the ups and downs of life—life’s ‘ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows’—without being swept up or overwhelmed in strong emotions and mind states.
Teaching on equanimity, the Buddha said, ‘Just as a rocky mountain is not moved by storms, so sights, sounds, tastes, smells, contacts and ideas, whether desirable or undesirable, will never stir one of steady nature, whose mind is firm and free.’
Some other descriptions of equanimity from Buddhist teachers include:
• ‘Equanimity describes a complete openness to experience, without being lost in reactions of love and hate.’ (Shaila Catherine)
• ‘A simple definition of equanimity… is the capacity to not be caught up with what happens to us.’ (Gil Fronsdal, Tricycle, Winter 2005)
• ‘Equanimity is a spacious stillness of the mind, a radiant calm that allows us to be present fully with all the different changing experiences that constitute our world and our lives.’ (Salzberg, ‘Loving-kindness’, p139)
Equanimity helps balance the other three heart qualities, preventing loving-kindness from becoming attachment, compassion from becoming pity, appreciative joy from becoming an unbalanced exuberance, and as equanimity deepens we avoid the tendency for non-attachment to become indifference.
It is the nature of life that we will all inevitably experience joys and sorrows and a range of other pleasant and unpleasant conditions. Our happiness and freedom depend not on getting more of the pleasant and less of the unpleasant, but on meeting the ups and downs of life with balance and steadiness, and without craving, aversion, or delusion.
The Buddha said the world spins around eight ‘worldly winds’ or conditions—pleasure and pain, success and failure, gain and loss, and praise and blame. We will all experience these conditions in our life. The untrained person, or ‘uninstructed worldling’, will be happy when they experience pleasant feelings, gain, success, and praise, and will be unhappy when they experience pain, loss, failure, and blame.
A dedicated dharma practitioner, or ‘well-instructed follower’ of the teachings will experience pain and pleasure, gain and loss, success and failure, and praise and blame and will see them all as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not ‘me’ or ‘mine’, and doesn’t cling to the pleasant or fight against the unpleasant. The difference in response between the trained and untrained person is the difference between freedom and suffering.
The equanimity phrases I shared in the meditation were: ‘Breathing in, I calm my body; breathing out, I calm my mind.’ ‘May I be balanced. May I be at peace.’ ‘May I learn to see the arising and passing of all things with equanimity and peace.’
The poems I shared were; ‘Fluent’ by John O’Donohue; ‘Prayer of Shantideva; and an excerpt from Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace is this moment without judgment.’
Wishing you a good week ahead and see you for our next regular Sunday live session on May 24 at 9am eastern and for a special two-hour session on Saturday, June 6, 12-2 pm eastern on ‘The power of cultivating equanimity in these challenging times.’ Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
