Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. The moment we get what we want, we also get anxious about losing what we just got. It's a packaged deal. Does that mean wanting to be happy is an inherently flawed goal? Well, that depends...
If we are not skillful in our pursuit of happiness, we actually create a vicious cycle of suffering by our attempts to end it. If our source of happiness is rooted in what the Buddha called Worldly Concerns, such as seeking sense pleasures and avoiding unpleasant sensations, attachment to wealth and praise, or aversion to loss and blame, then we may gain temporary happiness, but it will be accompanied by fear, restlessness, and concern, all of which make us miserable.
A life spent seeking pleasure and avoiding unpleasantness starts resembling an exhausting battlefield. And if we let compliments get to our heads, we allow criticisms break our hearts. Even if our happiness comes from achieving temporary peace of mind, we are still at risk of losing it to greed, hatred, and ignorance.
Let's consider a different definition of happiness... something less dependent on unstable, fleeting, fragile or unpredictable circumstances, and more closely related to equanimity, which is not associated with the absence of challenges, it's the ability to remain calm and serene despite adversity. Equanimity is synonymous with composure, which is a state of being balanced, collected,
and in control of yourself. So, whenever I lose my cool [it does happen from time to time], I immediately check to see if I accidentally stepped in one of those Worldly Concerns the Buddha was talking about, such as attachment or aversion. And sure enough, without fail, it always turns out that I have. So, I scrape it off, I acknowledge where I veered off my intended path of equanimity, and I regain composure. This doesn't mean I don't care about what goes on in the world.
Equanimity is not insensitivity nor apathy. It means my efforts to make the world a better place remain undisturbed by complications, disappointments, and setbacks. Think of it like working diligently to pay off debt while monthly bills and unexpected expenses slow us down. Equanimity means making peace with the fact that the debt will always be there, but we continue making payments without losing sight of the progress already made.
Little by little, we get closer to a state in which nothing that arises, internally or externally, makes us agitated. Equanimity is sustainable and dependent solely on our mind's ability to return to the middle path, where nothing and no one can disturb it. Now, doesn't THAT sound like a very happy life, by the new definition of the word? In our monthly discussion group, instead of comparing life to paying off debt, we compared it to being in a beautiful garden.
And this metaphor caused quite a stir, because what one person considers a weed that needs to be removed from the garden, someone else thinks is a beautiful plant species that ought to be cherished and protected. Another person expressed the suffering they experience by never being able to pull out all the weeds because they keep growing back. And the Buddha's reflection is that suffering is caused by the very thought that all the weeds need to be pulled out.
Some are necessary to teach us certain lessons, or perhaps we simply benefit from the physical exercise of squatting down to pull out the weeds and then getting back up. There is such a delicate distinction between what the Buddha called Skillful Discernment and what we call Judgment. It's bigger than simply thinking: Flower=Good. Weed=Bad. It's about determining whether something is beneficial or detrimental.
And that's when someone in the group mentioned a flower bed by his front door, in which something he considered a weed was growing rapidly and out of control. He thought the gardener needed to pull it out of the garden, but his wife later explained it will be pleasantly fragrant when in bloom, so it needed to only be trimmed, not uprooted. And then balance was restored. Balance and composure go hand-in-hand.
If you lose one, check the other, and you'll find that a minor adjustment makes a big difference. So, pretend you are given one life to live... Would you spend it pursuing happiness the way you have been, or would you aim for equanimity? The amount of work is the same, but the experience is completely different. We can either suffer in unison or be equanimous together. The choice is ours. Let's make it wisely.
Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Buddhist Boot Camp, Faithfully Religionless, and the Opposite of Namaste. For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼