Equanimity: embodied and enraged

some thoughts and very intense feelings that are ultimately fine

This past week has been absolutely brutal. Renee Nicole Good was murdered, on top of the shootings in Portland, after the attack on Venezuela. For me, it was also the first week of classes and a good time to have a mini-meltdown.

I’ve been holding support groups for organizers the past few months. Last week, someone asked me what “equanimity” meant. I posted a note about the “JOY AND ELATION” at this question, partially because we were talking at all. More on this soon.

To me, equanimity is always situational. It allows people to respond to stimuli without collapsing, escalating, or abandoning one’s values.

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Equanimity toward this, now

Personal wants versus group requests.

In last week’s group, I said I felt determined to do what I was doing before: what I can. This week I really went for it.

For months, I’ve been articulating my dream of a small container. I aspire to be a person of integrity. My words mean something not just here, but in person. Small containers are how repair, consent, and accountability stay possible.

From the beginning, this confused the group. It came from a few different groups in the area, not one, something I did not realize at initial offer. It’s not like they wear uniforms. It’s all very fluid.

This mixed group was thinking: Go big! Doors open! Why small?

Because small, in these authoritarian times, in this geographically dispersed city, with all this surveillance and fear helps active organizers feel more okay to be vulnerable. Group dialogue and cohesion could still happen with dispersed interest groups. That’s the end goal, anyway. A quilt of mutual aid pods.

But the group requested a format that explicitly disallows discussion. It certainly makes the group easy to run.

(This is why there was glee in my note about getting to share a heart practice, an immeasurable quality I just feel is at least a good word to know…The group forbids discussion, “class,” and has chastised suggested reading in the chat.)

I prefer active, ongoing consent. This group prefers a leader that announces decisions and assumes consent if there is no dissent. This is fairly horrifying to me, but as their container holder, I invited dissent over the wide-open door policy. Silence.

Okay, let’s open it up.

Our group is now almost 3x its old size. I’ve dealt with administrative community issues, like event blasting and whether there can be smaller support circles within this larger one. I also dealt with someone posting violence-adjacent calls to action. Community defense is important, I said, and not for this space.

Psychological first aid with a stranger I’ve never met ended with their thanks and my complete overwhelm. I returned to the open sanctuary advocates. My request for help managing the influx was thoroughly and kindly tabled. It’s a busy day.

Most went out protesting Saturday. I’m so behind on work because I became an overnight community mental health manager. I sat at home stumbling through these words, feeling what arises and the weight of my soon-to-be 17-year-old cat son/bff Fischer on my lap.

I checked in on Sunday to talk about the group format. Sunday was another busy day.

I then penned a long response about the importance of dialogue and what I’d rather be doing. They’re important, but we need to talk, and anyone can facilitate what you’ve requested.

I sent my complaint to the wrong person in the support group.

Deep sigh.

But then the group met again. And I was reminded these are amazing people coming together in strange and scary times.

I believe courage and vulnerability are under-practiced qualities, so I told them about my overwhelm with the influx of the new people. I spoke about clinging, craving, egoism, discontent. I’m part of the circle too, and it’s quite nice to just be heard.

Can this be enough for now?

A drop in a sea of definitions

Equanimity makes room for frustration and all the other emotions, too.

I struggled with equanimity this week, but it shows up on so many lists for a reason. You do not need equanimity in still waters. You draw upon equanimity when your agency is threatened by the worldly winds of loss, pain, blame, and failure. Things like greed and fear and delusion.

Equanimity looks like choosing your exit while the building burns instead of pretending it’s not on fire or throwing yourself into the flames to prove something about yourself.

They want to meditate and get back to the churn. And support without alignment and forbidden dialogue is unsustainable for any group. A reader last week, one with several decades of experience, commented that groups that can’t dialogue are “forever doomed.”

But pushing my weird “care” agenda is making them avoidant and me send petty texts to the wrong people in very fucking hard weeks.

Are they just having really rewarding, transformative, soul-sustaining conversations without me? Maybe. But they’re still flowing into the chat. I assume they aren’t getting this from the people they volunteer alongside, if they are coming to a literal stranger for support.

There are many things I’m still learning. In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens frames his equanimity as a calm settledness. It is expansive.

My experience in the moment is one of having space around what I feel and thus having the agency to make decisions about how to react to what I am feeling.

When I am pissed, I can feel the energy of being pissed, but I am not trapped in a compulsory relationship with that energy. This settledness is an expression of wisdom in relation to all my emotions.

The first time I wrote about equanimity, it was in the context of the heart practices. I provided the emotional inventory exercise that helps me build toward a sense of emotional belonging, nonviolent communication, and deescalation.¹ I followed it with a take what it looks like as embodied practice.

My post on equanimity as a perfection was about the opposite of calm settledness: I wrote about the messy journey to the end of a game where I threw down the cards and declared us all dead. It landed with: you know what? It’s fine.

How lucky I was to play a game with friends.

Embodied and engaged

Can this be enough?

Equanimity is the compassion I have for my allies who operate on a different temporality. It’s also the wisdom to know the difficulty of working at any other pace than urgent. It’s just not in their repertoire.

That warrants significant compassion.

Equanimity is the compassion I have toward myself for feeling overwhelmed, speaking up, feeling disappointed and embarrassed. The wisdom to know the future holds more overwhelm but, right now, this is how things are.

Being housed, with healthy cats, with coffee and avocados, a job? Literal lights on? Running water?

“This” is excellent.

The accidental recipient of my indignant text about what I can offer the world as it burns and goes to war with itself, returned with a story of a place.

It simply outgrew me, so I started again with a new seed and grew a new garden.

Equanimity means seeing my limits, my wants, and still having heart to act with the intention to reduce suffering, including mine. That’s something like a definition.

Any equanimity practice on your end?

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Thank you for reading. If you liked this (hit the heart!), consider checking out

Equanimity for Adoptees

Equanimity and the Gulf of Weird Fantasies

the empire within justice coalitions

1. Let me save you a click. Everyday, I write down one thing I’m anxious about (positive, like excitement, or anxious, like dread), upset about, looking forward to, happy about, and grateful for. I find this emotional round robin quite helpful in remembering the wholeness of my inner landscape.