This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning!
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Slow Love (Season Two, Episode Six).
The method of this sit is modeled after Shinzen Young’s “See, Hear, Feel,” so if you respond well to it, feel free to dig deeper on your own!
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 4:15)
Hello again, my slow moving friend.
Thanks for taking some time out of your busy day of chasin ladies to move even slower and connect with yourself. It’s good to be with you.
Whether you are incessantly playing loud music, trying to protect your house, or in hot pursuit of someone to love, I hope that after our time together, you feel a little bit more spaciousness in your experience. A little bit more room for whatever is coming up in your experience, the good, the bad, and the slimy.
Today we’ll be continuing our practice of “equanimity.” Equanimity is a fancy little word that can pretty literally be translated to an “even mind,” and more loosely defined as “a sense of composure and calmness, even in a difficult situation.” Equanimity plays a prominent role in a variety of religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions, which sometimes emphasize that it is not a cool, detached, aloof kind of calm; being equanimous is not the same as being apathetic or disinterested. Rather, the idea is that equanimity is a warm, caring space of compassionate well-regard.
In my own experience though, trying too hard to be equanimous can really push you farther away from it. This can be true for meditation in general. Striving for something, exerting effort towards a specific imagined goal, can be really exhausting.
Sometimes we get what we want, and it creates conflict. We bump the volume on our music only to get bopped on the head, sent to a corner, and then smashed by a giant slug masquerading as a snail. Or we get not one, but a whole hillside of girlfriends smothering us in affection, only to have a grain of salt blown into our faces.
In my estimation, it’s not that it’s bad to want things. Knowing what you want is actually immensely powerful and there are many, really valuable and worthwhile dreams. But I do think that it’s important to take time to consider what you want, why you want it, and the lengths you’re willing to go to get it.
And even then, we often don’t get what we want. We are often dealing with circumstances in life that are less than ideal. And so it can be really helpful and important to have some ways of dealing with hard situations. One strategy is fight harder. But sometimes that isn’t enough. Or we decide that it isn’t worth the harm it might cause to someone else. So another strategy is: equanimity. You can “sit in the corner and think about your life.”
And in that space, when we slow down, sometimes we discover we were chasing the wrong thing, that we’re actually okay without it. Or, that if we’re desperately looking for a certain kind of love, we may be overlooking the love and support and friends who are trying to help us. Maybe we can’t emulate the spinning swords and sick beats of someone else, but we can find our own groove.
Equanimity is one word we can use to think about that space of softening in the midst of so much wanting. Taking a moment to connect with the things we do have, with the parts that are okay, and with the bigger picture that surrounds our intense thoughts, feelings, and difficulties. And it’s not about forcing those hard things to change, but about honoring the ways that we are already coping with them, and observing the ways that they change all on their own with time.
See, it’s simple. Just “try doing all that.”
No but for real. No getting it wrong. Whatever comes up comes up, and you can always walk away and try something else. But for now, let’s give it a go and see what happens.
