Equanimity Includes Everything

Emily Horn teaches equanimity as upekkhā, using Thich Nhat Hanh’s preferred translation—inclusion—exploring:

* How befriending pain and steadying over and over earns back your own trust

* Why non-preferencing is an engaged state rather than a passive one

* Why acceptance is not the same as condoning harm

* How a kind of mini-death has to happen before equanimity can take its shape.

This teaching was recorded during a previous iteration of the Heartful Jhāna training series. To join the next live one, become a Hardcore member of the Pragmatic Dharma App.

💬 Transcript

Emily Horn: I just want to invite you to just sense into — so, may equanimity arise, just a general kind of invitation. And then with mindfulness, if you’re up for it in this moment, like, what’s happening and what are you sensing? Just kind of as an indication to what happens when we incline to equanimity.

You know, sometimes for me even confusion can arise as part of the landscape, because equanimity can be a term that — I don’t know about you all, but I didn’t learn until later in life. We’ve talked about it before, and we’re still in that landscape of translation and the vibe of concepts.

Like, what is the vibe of it? Like, what’s the experience of equanimity, right? Our cognitive minds, you know, that is what for me can bring up that sense of confusion. Like, what is it, trying to map the concept onto the experience? And that can be useful, to have a conceptual kind of overlay, so we can start there. And inclusion is Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of upekkhā, equanimity in the Buddhist tradition. Inclusion.

And if you sense into what you already know and what you already kind of have practiced with the heart space, inclusion to me has that sense of, like, with loving kindness and metta we’re befriending. Something can arise in our experience, or we come in contact with something, and it’s like that first move of the heart could be, “Okay, let me see if I can be willing to befriend whatever this is,” even if it’s just a little bit, just a little bit.

Like, okay, that curiosity, that warmth, however you might describe that sense of, oh, befriend. Huh. Okay. And then you all know, as we settle in and practice and as we move about our lives, they’re not disconnected. And so we encounter, even though we have the intention to befriend, we’ll encounter really, some painful — I don’t even have the right concept for how intense it can be in our lives, in our practice. But pain, right? Pain on a spectrum.