It’s been a roller coaster of a year. Between finishing up my coursework for my doctoral program and some challenges on the work front, I found it easy to feel on the edge emotionally and spiritually at several points throughout the past ten months. In the little time I have for pleasure reading, I picked up a book called Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius. In their book, they describe the Buddhist philosophy of equanimity. The idea of equanimity is that we should create a space around experience so that we don’t have to react to it. Experiences both good and bad are going to trigger a neural response but equanimity teaches us that we are not required to react emotionally to that neural response. In many ways, this reminds me of the great Dr. Viktor Frankl’s statement from Man’s Search for Meaning where he suggests that the last of the human freedoms is “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
So how do we cultivate equanimity in the face of trials? A few thoughts:
