Last week my friend
and I taught a retreat at the Omega Institute, a fun mix of meditation, inquiry, movement and nondual sky gazing, aka half-naps on the grass. Good times had by all, with a glorious dance party finale.I thought I’d try something new and share a shortened version of a talk I gave on the retreat. It’s about the skill of equanimity, pretty much my favorite topic. The audio this week is the meditation I guided right afterwards. The meditation is 28 minutes long - listen to some or all of it, and let me know in the comments how it lands. As a bonus for paying subscribers, we’ve included a link where you can listen to the full talk as well as the meditation. (If you’d like access to everything and a paid subscription is out of reach, no problem, just email us at info@jeffwarren.org.)
Enjoy!
Jeff
I love equanimity.
I'm obsessed with it.
I'm so obsessed with equanimity that I can feel my excitement of talking about equanimity rise up and want to take me off into an exaggerated rant. So instead I'm going to breathe out …
… ahhhhhhhhh …
… and rest back.
Rest in this more spacious awareness.
Tracking that urgency.
Feeling it peak, and then … It's like a slow unwinding.
It’s like … oh, I can wait. I don’t have to start compulsively blurting verbiage. And the intensity of the impulse begins to lessen.
That’s what equanimity looks like in action.
I’d never heard of equanimity before I started meditating. I had heard of it in terms of balance and impartiality. But not equanimity as a relationship to sensory experience.
My teacher Shinzen Young describes equanimity as a lack of push and pull. For him, the opposite of equanimity is a kind of coagulation or fixation.
We’re in this a lot.
We like this, we don't like that. We don't want that sound. If only this were a little different.
In the mind it comes up as judgment, blocking, fixation. In the body it’s gripping, bracing, resisting. In all the senses.
By contrast, equanimity is a kind of smoothness in the circuits. It’s something you get a feel for. Equanimity is allowing.
Some people get very confused by this because they think equanimity sounds like indifference to how the world is. But equanimity’s focus is only the moment.
We allow things as they are in the moment, because what’s in the moment is already a done deal. There’s nothing we can do about this current configuration. It's already happening.
The present moment is a culmination of numberless causes and conditions fruitioning right now exactly as it is – meaning exactly this feeling of whatever's going on in your body, a little bit of discomfort, some excitement, some boredom, agitation – exactly these thoughts in the mind, wondering about lunch, about all the things happening in the world, happening in this room.
Equanimity says: there it is, it’s here. However much we may wish it otherwise.
It’s very sane.
In that allowing, we plant a seed of acceptance. We can also plant a seed of appreciation, and a seed of being present.
Those seeds begin to inform all future moments. We find we can stay present in more social intensities, and relational intensities, and political intensities. Instead of having to run away from them, or not look at them, or escape from them. All the million ways – the different habits – we have of trying to push and pull on our situations.
From this equanimous place … well, in Buddhism they say “right action” is more likely to arise. A more appropriate response, one that comes from a centered, clear, and available seeing of what's actually here.
…
When I started out I think I overemphasized the openness of equanimity – the letting things move through you, without getting hooked. That is a big part of it.
But equanimity is also about stability.
It's relaxing so much, letting go so much, allowing so fully … that you drop down and into your embodiment.
So when you're sitting with someone suffering in front of you, there's a sense of being able to stay there. Not only because you're open, but also because you're grounded.
That’s the training. Again and again, we sit with what's here, with what's comfortable and what's uncomfortable. Our equanimity grows. It’s a numbers game after that. Day after day, hour after hour, year after year.
In this guided meditation, we’ll start with the experience of equanimity, how to find it in relation to our present moment, in our relationship to sound, to what's happening in our bodies, and so on. And then from there, we’ll explore equanimity as one of the four Buddhist virtues or cultivations known as the Brahmavihārās. This is equanimity as a form of love, where we repeat specific accepting phrases, similar to what we do in a loving kindness or a compassion practice.
Let's practice.
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Quick note—
Our next live gathering, The Lounge, will happen this Wednesday, June 25, hosted by
. We’ll listen to the week’s Home Base meditation together, and then hang out, sharing reflections, making connections, being human. It’s like a book club, but for meditation. No prep, no pressure—just come as you are. Click on the date below to register (open to paying subscribers):Weds, June 25 at 8:30 - 9 PM EST
(to see the time in your time zone, click here)
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Being Human Takes Practice – New York
November 14-16, 2025
Art of Living Retreat Center, North Carolina
This retreat explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about resistance and delusion. It teaches us about healing stuck emotions and expanding stuck views. It teaches us mercy and forgiveness, majesty and humility. It teaches us about how we relate to other people and to ourselves.
All this and more happens when we sit and do nothing. It’s mind-blowing. It makes me want to weep. Maybe you will weep too, or laugh uproariously, or pass out in a patch of drool. Who can say?
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