Equanimity

Jealousy is universal. Our colleague gets a promotion and we think, “They don’t deserve that!” Our friend finds a great partner and we think, “What about me?” From time to time we all have these feelings. Here we look at the different types of jealousy, and how we can overcome...

Overview of the Practices for Developing Bodhichitta through Equalizing and Exchanging Our Attitudes about Self and Others Equalizing and exchanging our attitudes about self and others is one of the two methods for working ourselves up to an actual state of mind and heart of...

Introduction I would like to speak about a problem that is quite typical among Westerners, which is the problem of a negative attitude toward ourselves, low self-esteem. It can go even to the extreme of not only not liking ourselves, but even hating ourselves. It’s very...

Introduction If we want to summarize the Buddhist teachings in one word that would describe what Buddha was trying to impart to us, I think that word would be “realism.” Realism means seeing clearly what is reality, and getting rid of our unawareness and confusion about that....

Review Today is our second session of the seven-part cause and effect meditation for generating bodhichitta. Yesterday, as an introduction, we looked at some of the factors that are involved in generating the bodhichitta aim. We focused primarily on the conventional...

Equalizing and Exchanging Self with Others We’ve been discussing the Seven Point Mind Training by the Kadam Geshe Chekawa who lived in the twelfth century. So far, we’ve covered the first two points: the preliminaries and the actual training in deepest bodhichitta. Now, we’re...

Review We began our discussion of how to equalize our attitudes about ourselves, with the aim of helping us to overcome disturbing emotions directed at ourselves. The strongest disturbing emotion for many of us is a feeling of low self-esteem and a negative attitude toward...

The Need for an Equal Attitude toward Everyone In order to develop compassion it’s necessary to purify and train the mind and the heart. The definition of compassion is the attitude with which you wish everybody to be free from their problems and unhappiness. The attitude with...

Review We were speaking about the initial and intermediate level motivations in the lam-rim process for self-development on the spiritual path. And we saw that on the initial scope, or with the initial scope, we are aiming for better rebirths. We want to avoid worse rebirths...

The next step is called the development of “uncommon Mahayana equanimity” (thun-mong ma-yin-pa’i btang-snyom). This is the type of equanimity that we develop in equalizing and exchanging our attitude of ourselves and others. When we talk about equalizing our attitude toward...