Ready for some formulas? Shinzen Young, the meditation teacher I blogged about earlier this week, offers some physical analogies for equanimity in his Five Ways to Know Yourself manual. It’s a comparison I find very compelling, because if you’re having trouble achieving this state emotionally or physically (and who doesn’t?), it can be helpful to look at similar processes in other models.

Developing equanimity is analogous to:

• reducing friction in a mechanical system (Equanimity =1/F);
• reducing viscosity in a hydrodynamic system (Equanimity =1/µ);
• reducing resistance in a DC circuit (Equanimity =1/R);
• reducing impedance in an AC circuit (Equanimity =1/Z);
• reducing stiffness in a spring (Equanimity =1/k); and
• A solution being thixotropic as opposed to rheopectic. (Thixotropic substances, such as paint, thin out when they get stirred. By way of contrast, rheopectic substances, such as corn starch, thicken up when they get stirred.)

Extending these metaphors, perfect equanimity would be analogous to “superconductivity” within all your sensory circuits. [p. 16-17]

I love that image of stirring a paint can.

What exactly is it, though? Shinzen explores it this way: “Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept that is frequently misunderstood and easily confused with suppression of feeling, apathy, or inexpressiveness.”

And here’s more:

In the physical world we say a person has lost balance if they fall to one side or another. In the same way, a person loses internal balance if they fall into one or the other of the following contrasting reactions:

• Suppression – A state of thought/feeling arises and we attempt to cope with it by stuffing it down, denying it, tightening around it, etc.

• Identification – A state of thought/feeling arises and we fixate on it, hold onto it inappropriately, not letting it arise, spread, and pass according to its natural rhythm.

Between suppression on one side and identification on the other lies a third possibility, the balanced state of non-self interference, namely, equanimity.

And if you read the Three Questions with Angela Jamison post, you’re hip to the idea of equanimity with an edge:

So what did equanimity look like for me this week? I had so many chances to work on this skill set:

• When my tax preparer, who has had my files for a couple weeks now, bailed on me on Monday — the morning taxes are due — and totally upended my already packed day (all this while I was in the middle of this Ayurvedic cleanse, which made it a bit more energetically challenging for me).
• When I found out that someone else has also used my social security number (!) to file their taxes, causing me to be unable to e-file. I am hoping this is an honest mistake and not identity theft.
• When I wanted to write this post Monday night but ran out of both time and energy.
• This morning, when I had some hideously bad cramps that had me KO’ed on the bathroom floor.

How has your week been? Any chances to work on equanimity?

I can’t say I was perfect this week, but I handled most things — especially the tax bail — much better than I might have otherwise. Rose circa 2009 would have lost it. Rose circa 2011 would have been really frustrated and pretty angry. Don’t get me wrong: Rose in April 2013 was deeply frustrated. I had to scramble to get a sub for my evening yoga class so that I could go to another tax preparer at the eleventh hour. But angry? I didn’t feel that internal heat of anger. In short, faced with a big obstacle, I acted — making calls, finding backups — far more than I reacted. Rose circa 2009 would have acted the same way, but would have reacted with as much, if not more, force, and would have dwelled on the unpleasantness of the situation.

Thinking last year about how to be motivated to have a solid, daily meditation practice — motivated on the level that my yoga practice motivates me, which is a high bar — I knew that what I needed to see would be concrete changes. In yoga, I have no end of moments I can point to and say, “I would have reacted this way/done things this way were it not for my yoga practice.” I needed the same thing in meditation.

I have plenty of examples these days. It’s not that my yoga practice hasn’t made me far less reactive overall — it has done wonders for me. But so far, meditation has helped make certain things — like the very conscious process of trying to not get wound up about frustrating matters in life — less effortful.

Now, about this morning’s post-castor-oil-purgation cramps, which had me on my bathroom floor for some time (I was trying to leave the bathroom to get back to bed to lie down, but I couldn’t make the seven steps to the bed). I tried to stay present and identify the sensations I was feeling, but that gave way to me just lying there, my mind wandering as I breathed with no strategy in mind at all. Shinzen has produced a lot of training materials about managing pain, and I’m curious about the techniques he teaches. Of the many changes I had at finding equanimity this week, I think I was most challenged by this one.

Don’t let this scare you away from an Ayurvedic cleanse, by the way. Everyone experiences the cleanse differently. The rest of the cleanse felt sparkling and light, and the effects are worth all the trouble of sticking to the regiment of a cleanse. I’d write more about this spring cleanse, but due to my work demands, time has not been my own since returning from Xinalani — and, as you can guess, I’ve been trying to maintain equanimity about that.

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