Leaning into Pain Requires Equanimity. It can be developed.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Yesterday I wrote about the value of leaning into and exploring emotional pain when it’s present. I wrote about that in the context of recovery from addiction related behaviors. In Buddhism, the ability to lean into and be present to unpleasant, difficult or painful experiences is consciously developed. This ability to turn towards and investigate painful experience is called equanimity.
Equanimity means something like balance or grounded-ness in relationship to pleasure and pain. Built into the entirety of Buddhist practice and philosophy is the acknowledgment that life involves constant cycles of pleasant and unpleasant experience. The first noble truths in Buddhism is an explicit acknowledgment of aging, sickness, death, disappointment, loss and having to contend with uncertainty, difficulty and unsatisfactoriness as a part of life. It’s not the whole of life experience, but it is a significant part of it. Life is difficult, it’s painful sometimes and it doesn’t always give us what we want. The encouragement in a Buddhist approach to life is to acknowledge and normalize the difficulties and develop a capacity to be as present with pain as we are to pleasure.
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In fact, it goes a little deeper than that. Really, the message of equanimity is to be unswayed, not just by aversion to pain but also by the compelling nature of pleasure. Especially the kind of pleasure involved in addiction related behaviors. The concept of the famous “middle way” in Buddhism is defined as not falling into either of two extremes. The first is self denial and extreme renunciation, the kinds we might see in extreme aesthetic spiritual practices. This was considered veering off the path. On the other side is overindulgence in pleasure, the kind we might see in addiction. Addiction is also off the path.
What allows us to stay on the middle path between these two extremes? Equanimity a grounded-ness in the face of the pendulum swing of life’s pleasure and pains. It is the ability to stay present and responsive (as opposed to (unconscious and reactive) as pleasure and pain moves through our lives. It’s an ability to resist unconscious impulses to push away pain and grasp after pleasure. It’s a rather counter-intuitive way to be with life. But it is at the very core of what it means to be sober. Not pushing away pain and not running after pleasure. Simply relating to life on its own terms without following the prompts of pleasure and pain is equanimity.
Tomorrow: more about equanimity.