Why Calm Doesn’t Mean Boring (And How Your Passion Can Stay)

We rethink equanimity as a spacious, caring capacity that holds intensity without dulling life. We link Vedana—pleasant, unpleasant, neutral—as a direct gateway to balance, recovery, and frictionless experience across emotions and daily moments.

• equanimity not apathy or indifference
• the myth that calm cancels passion
• Vedana as the second foundation of mindfulness
• noticing feeling tone to create space
• shifting from neutralizing emotions to widening capacity
• frictionless experience and reduced defensive energy
• a working definition that includes recovery
• recovery speed as a marker of dynamic balance

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Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

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Transcript

What Equanimity Is Not

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When you use the word equanimity, what do you not mean by equanimity?

Myths About Passion And Calm

SPEAKER_01 0:06

I think that's a great place to start. And you alluded to this in the introduction, as I'm sure many of your listeners understand, at least intellectually, the classic near enemies of equanimity in Buddhist philosophy are indifference or apathy. So I definitely don't mean indifference or apathy. But I find this is one of those things where people nod their heads, they understand that idea, but somehow emotionally still cling to the idea that equanimity means completely even tempered in the middle experience, and that it doesn't expand and contract like a bellows to hold arousal, to hold heartbreak, to hold excitement or passion. I love this with some of my younger students who are very nervous that to choose equanimity is to forego passion and how terrible that would be. And I agree with them completely that to choose equanimity is not to forego passion or any of the emotions or qualities of life that make it juicy and rich.

Defining Equanimity’s Core

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Yeah, I had subscribed to that myth for a long time, thinking that equanimity was sort of always staying in the middle and that there was no room for the arousal or the full spectrum of life or the passion. Now that we're kind of sensing into what equanimity is not, like how would you describe what it is? I've heard so many different definitions over the years. Gil Fransdale has called it a caring perspective. Sharon Salzberg over the years has had a few different definitions. How would you describe what it is where it does include room for passion and the range of human emotion?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

I think in this context with you, we can get a little Buddhist geeky together. Is that okay?

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah.

Feeling Tone And Vedana 101

Space Around Experience

Practice: Noticing Feeling Tone

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Which I don't typically do in my interviews for the book, but I would love it if we could do that a little bit here. You know well, and I think a lot of your listeners know that in addition to the object of our awareness, the sense experience, every object has a valence, what we call Vedana in Buddhist philosophy, a feeling tone. Very simple, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Really, I think from a Buddhist perspective, a lot of the way equanimity functions is not getting caught in the feeling tone. We often get derailed by the feeling tone. We get attached to the pleasant, we reject the unpleasant, and we space out with the neutral. And when we do that, we lose balance and perspective, what Gil Franste was talking about. So in many ways, on a more subtle unpacking level, that's where we lose equanimity. The object, the experience itself can be pleasant, unpleasant, it can be boring, neutral, it can be very big or very small. We're equanimous as long as we put space around it. As I unpack it, the mechanics of it and get more granular, it seems to be that rather than make the space bigger around the object, the tendency is to make the object more neutral. You know, that's where we get dull. So what equanimity asks us to do is to put bigger space, ever-increasing space around our experience. That way we stay on balance, we stay present, we don't lose perspective, wisdom, which are kind of key components, again, as Gil said, to equanimity.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

And do you find that adding that space or spaciousness around, say, the object, whether it feels pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, that that is in its own ways sort of like an antidote to our reaction of dulling something, that by adding space, it allows more room for the richness of the object?

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yeah, I think so. And I think just the simple practice of paying attention to this second foundation of mindfulness, the simply raising awareness that this is often happening. Our reaction to feeling tone is typically happening under the threshold of awareness. So simply raising that level of awareness to include feeling tone almost in and of itself creates space. Just simply being, as it were, mindful of the second foundation is a powerful doorway to equanimity.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

I once did a like a week-long retreat at Spirit Rock on Vedana, which really helped me open my eyes to how much I don't notice my reactions to pleasant and unpleasant and neutral, and did find much greater spaciousness unfolding over the days of the retreat. It sounds like what you're saying is that this practice of paying attention to feeling tones, the second foundation of mindfulness, is a very helpful primary gateway towards really cultivating equanimity. I've never heard them directly linked so much before. I always think of equanimity being the tenth ring of a 10-ring ladder. And, you know, Vedana as being the second rings. So do you feel like Vedana is more direct gateway towards equanimity practice?

Frictionless Experience And Energy

SPEAKER_01 6:21

I do. And I don't know if anyone will agree with me, but I did come to that understanding in the course of studying and writing the book and talking to a lot of different teachers, not just Buddhist teachers. As you know, I kind of explored all the Abrahamic religions and their perspective to equanimity. And a lot of teachers, I would say, especially Shin Zen Young, who's an outlier in some ways, and also is really dialed into the idea of equanimity lately. He's been writing and talking a lot about equanimity. And he sees it as being with experience without friction. Shenzhen loves math and physics, and he loves those kinds of examples. I think it is in line with what how most other people think about equanimity. We're not siphoning off energy by defending, guarding against, arguing with our experience. It's a kind of frictionless. And a great gateway to that is Vedana, because that's where we start defending against and arguing with our experience, is right there at Feeling Tone.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Do you have like a pithy one or two sentence definition of equanimity?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yeah, I did. And now, of course, it's just like completely flown out of my mind.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

There's so much space, it just flew.

Recovery Time And Dynamic Balance

Tolerating Intensity And Returning

SPEAKER_01 7:56

I think it is the capacity to fully hold all of life's experience without collapsing into overwhelm or numbing out. One of the reasons I hesitate always with the elevator pitch for equanimity that is totally reasonable to ask, and everyone does, it makes a lot of sense to me. Again, I'll share this with you because I feel like we can get into the nuance here. Sometimes we completely foreclose on aversion, attachment, and spacing out with awareness. Other times we recover more quickly, and they both count for equanimity. So I think it's unreasonable to set an ideal based on a pithy definition of equanimity that we will open to the full range of experience moment by moment, because none of us do. In many moments, we collapse, we attach, we reject. And there haven't been that many papers written on it. An important one came out of a group at Harvard led by Gael Debord and other people. They were talking about a concept called effective chronology in relationship to equanimity. And I think this is another really important way to put our arms around the idea. And that simply is how quickly do we recover? So this is the dynamic dimension of equanimity. It's not static. We're not just this big, wide open space all the time. Well, maybe enlightened people are, but I don't know about that. Speaking for myself, I'm not this big, wide open space in which everything arises and passes without the slightest disturbance. That sounds lovely, but that's not how I live. What I do see is that I can tolerate greater intensity, not all of it, and also that I recover my balance more quickly. And they both feel related to equanimity to me.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Yeah, I think even just in how you answered that question, illustrated how you're able to dance with being off balance and then finding your way. I'm that way too when people ask me to define what mindfulness is. Even though I'm a quote unquote mindfulness teacher, I might have ten different answers depending on the day or who it's asking or what the context is.