Concentration, Equanimity, and Love

Concentration, Equanimity, and Love

• The Path of Practice
• "Point" of practice: to keep going.  To the point of no return; complete faith and confidence in practice.
• Faith in the path, in transformation, in the community, in common goodness.
• Practice as a hinge.  The door will swing open.
• Practice as our refuge.
• Practice changes our behavior before our minds change with it.  Let the mind follow the body.
• Mindfulness = Presence (concentration, observance) + Equanimity (acceptance)
• First Noble Truth (Buddhism)
• Sense of incompletion, dis-ease, dukkha.  "Something is missing."
• The temptation: to look elsewhere for what is missing.
• The solution: look here and now.  Presence.
• "Peace comes from within; do not seek it without."
• The solution: cultivating equanimity.
• Equanimity
• Equanimity: "gazing upon without interference"; not fighting with your experience, nor attaching to it; existing in harmony with reality
• "Don't fight with yourself at any level."
• "We influence a lot, but we control nothing."
• Pleasure and pain are not governable.  Acceptance of this.
• "We are connected, but there is space."
• Acknowledging the poignancy of our lives without identifying too deeply with the melodramas; with stability.
• Inner spirit of non-violence, wu-wei.
• Equanimity = separating from the affective valence of our perspective
• Reworking how body/mind relate to pleasure/pain
• Not about erasing liking/disliking, but opening to loving, opening the heart to what we would otherwise reject.
• Finding center.
• Commitment to make peace with the human condition.
• Not wiping out preferences, but not being swayed by them, not acting them out.
• Psychological self-distancing
• Disidentification
• Opposite of self-immersed reflection, enmeshment
• Listening to yourself from perspective of a good friend
• Equanimity takes intention and energy.  Work involved!  Worth it.
• Feel the imperfection of the moment.  This is not a bug of nature, but a feature of it.  Soften around it.  Cultivate equanimity.
• Space is being made!  Make peace.
• Equanimity with pleasure = deeper enjoyment/satisfaction
• Concentration
• Samādhi: unification factors of mind/attention (concentration)
• Enlightenment: lack of friction between experience and mind
• Equanimity and concentration; concentration is a facet of letting go.
• Counters restlessness.
• Becoming "satisfied enough" with the present that we don't seek further stimulation.
• Samādhi gives us refuge from change.  Slows things down.  Protection from the flow/torrents of change.  Stability through slowing attention.
• Turns a philosophy into a path.
• Learning to digest life's intensities in the moment.
• Equanimity = boundlessness of mind = infinite space = love.

• Quotes
• "Meditation never pretends that things are different than they are."
• "Suffering almost always feels necessary.  Is it?"
• "Love is co-created."
• "We are unafraid to acknowledge and confront suffering, the human condition what is true for us." (as mindfulness practitioners/Buddhists)
• "This life is more than enough."
• "Come for the pace, stay for the war."

• Practice
• Utilize samādhi for concentration, to slow, to become present.
• Notice equanimity arising, lack of friction between you and present experience.
• Look for the stability here.  How does it feel to connect with what is without identifying too deeply with it?
• Remember: connection and space go hand-in-hand.  "We are connected, but there is space."

Notes from MARC Day of Mindfulness: "Concentration, Equanimity, and Love," led by Matthew Brensilver, July 28, 2018.