I recently returned from a whole bunch of movement. I was at the annual American Rendezvous event in Somerville MA, followed by taking the Level 2 ADAPT Coach Certification course. Immediately followed by some just-for-fun hard work at Vandrar Hem.

This morning I sat down on the concrete for meditation and it was sublime. 10, 15, or maybe even 20 minutes of simply sitting and breathing. Weeks of continuously have a “next thing” on the schedule every minute of every day is its own type of exhausting. This morning I was recharging via stillness. But completely still (like being totally active) is not the correct state.

What I had failed to cultivate in my recent travels was equanimity.

Too often, equanimity is described as a practice or technique that aims at the production of something – usually a state of stillness. Other proposed aims include a ‘countercultural’ refashioning of the self: eg, ‘to disarm the way we define ourselves in terms of achievements, fame, praise, and what we’re told should make us happy’, as the meditation teacher Christina Feldman and the psychologist Willem Kuyken put it in Mindfulness (2019); or being compassionate and caring instead of discriminatory and judgmental.

~ Michael Uebel, from Equanimity is not stillness – it is a mobility of the mind

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