How do we understand Equanimity?

Equanimity means: calmness, motionlessness, no-movement, controlled. Equanimity has to do with your attitude. Equanimity is about balance. There are immense highlights but no extremes. There is no extreme anger and there is no extreme gentleness. Everybody is treated the same way; everyone seen in the same light.

An attitude of Equanimity does not change the world. The world will always present us with extremes, and opportunities to get sucked into its extremes. We cannot control much of what the world feeds us in terms of experience-so we are basically obliged to accept the input of extremes. But we can control how we react to the input. An attitude of equanimity is simply a filter through which all reactions are processed and levelled out, or equalised. Once we have acquired the art of equanimity we are not anymore in the helpless position to automatically react to, and take to heart, the extremes of the input that the world presents-we react evenly, with calmness, without feeling extremely grieved, without feeling extremely excite, without feeling extremely happy or angry.

This is the Happiness of the Way, the narrow line running in the middle of the extremes of life. It is not like being dead; it is an entering into a whole new dimension of existence. Looking from the outside in serenity and equanimity may seem boringly dead, but its world you cannot speak of if you have not yet lived it.

If one's attitude is wrong, it is hard to grow spiritually.