Upekkha: How to Stop Dancing on Strings Without Going Cold

A skinny mutt sits by the shop entrance, carefully watching every shopping bag go by.

Metta says: feed it.

Mudita says: feed it, and be glad it feels better.

Karuna says: feed it, it's suffering.

And upekkha? Equanimity, evenness of mind. What does equanimity say about this mutt? Feed it? Walk past with a perfectly even expression on your face?

It's a good question to start with when talking about the fourth brahmavihara. Because with equanimity, nothing is as obvious as it seems.

There are four brahmaviharas.

Metta — kindness.

Karuna — compassion.

Mudita — sympathetic joy, gladness for others.

Upekkha (upekkhā) — equanimity, evenness of mind.

And the further you climb this ladder, the less clear it gets what each one is and how to practise it.

With metta things are more or less clear: there are phrases, there's the Karaniya Metta Sutta. A great deal has been said about compassion. With sympathetic joy there's already a gap: people talk about it far less.

And equanimity is a complete mystery. How on earth do you pin it to a mutt by a shop door?

Equanimity may well be the one that guides all the others. Without it the other three very easily slide into emotion and stop being brahmaviharas.

Because the brahmaviharas aren't emotions. They're actions: of the mind, of speech, of the body. And a particular angle, a way of seeing the world that these actions flow from.

To understand why we need equanimity, we have to sort out empathy. There are very different ways to feel for others.

This is basic, natural empathy. Animals have it too.

You see someone suffering, and you feel bad yourself. Not in the same way, but bad. You see someone's joy, and you smile. A child in a café laughs out loud, and half the café can't help grinning. That's it.

It's simply there. It has nothing to do with the Dhamma, with what we practise. It doesn't need developing or suppressing. It's enough to notice it, be aware of it and accept it.

Everyone has it to a different degree. That's normal too.

This is empathy linked to wisdom: understanding another being and what they're going through right now.

You don't have to feel the same thing yourself. A good doctor understands the patient is in pain but doesn't writhe in pain alongside them. Thank goodness: otherwise who'd do the treating?

A clear understanding and remembering that another being feels too lies at the heart of the brahmaviharas. At least the first three:

With equanimity things are a bit different, and we'll get to that.

And this is where the trouble starts. There's a third kind, which can be called emotional, or learned, empathy.

It's the idea that in certain situations you're supposed to feel certain emotions. And those emotions sort of prove that you really are a caring, sympathetic person.

A familiar scene: at a funeral someone isn't crying, and people give them sideways looks. “Heartless, isn't he.” Though that person may be grieving more deeply than anyone, just quietly.

On top of animal and even cognitive empathy, emotional empathy often switches on. We start getting worked up about what we see. And the practice of the brahmaviharas sits very close to this.

The danger is always nearby:

These are unbalanced emotional states, and they have nothing to do with the brahmaviharas.

Equanimity says: to feel compassion doesn't mean to suffer yourself. Circumstances in someone else's life or your own don't require you to switch on emotions and wind them up to the limit. And behind that winding-up there's always a particular view of the world, a particular way of thinking.

An example. Someone has a go at you: yells, is rude, maybe even shoves you. What do you feel? Outrage, resentment, injustice.

But what do they grow from?

From a picture of the world we've been feeding in ourselves for years. And not only us. We learned to see the world like this: there's me, there are others, there are rules between us. If others don't behave the way I expect, that's a reason to signal to the rest of the pack: something unacceptable has happened.

And the only way to signal is with emotions.

These are social emotions. They exist for communication within the pack, and an animal pack at that. And most often to manipulate its members.

I feel resentment. Sincerely, otherwise the manipulation won't work. What's it for? So that justice wins. So that the villain gets punished.

Look at a child whose little brother hit him with a toy car. He doesn't just cry. He cries in Mum's direction. Loudly, with dramatic pauses, checking whether anyone's listening. Adults do exactly the same, only instead of Mum we have the group chat, colleagues or social media.

Or I see someone else being picked on. And I start feeling it too: this isn't right, something must be done. And if I do nothing, it starts gnawing at me inside.

It's important not to mix things up here. That gnawing isn't conscience. At least not the conscience the Dhamma talks about.

In Buddhism conscience is hiri and ottappa. They're usually translated as shame and fear of wrongdoing, which sounds rather neurotic. But in essence they're a quality of wisdom. We understand that a certain action leads to bad consequences, harms us and others. And we consciously avoid it.

Emotions may come up along the way. Or they may not.

Imagine someone who realises they've accidentally drunk poison. They might panic. Or they might calmly go and get their stomach pumped. What matters isn't whether they got scared, but that they understood and acted.

It's the same with Buddhist conscience. The main thing is understanding the harm and consciously deciding not to do it. Emotions are secondary.

Pangs of guilt are another story. A person didn't do what their culture or upbringing told them to, and they feel deep discomfort. And what they were told to do may even be harmful from a Buddhist point of view.

For example, in some culture it's normal to beat children. A man was raised like that: spare the rod, spoil the child. He didn't beat his son. And now guilt torments him.

That isn't conscience. It's a string someone pulled.

We need to learn to tell these subtle things apart in ourselves. Guilt drummed in by culture and upbringing has nothing to do with ethics, with telling good from bad. It's a tool society, family and so on use to steer an individual. Steer through painful emotions.

So here's the picture. I'm standing there, and strings run out from me in every direction. Family, culture, country, “decent people don't do that”. And each one pulls its own way.

See the trap?

If I stand up for the victim, I'll have to get emotional. It's a battle, after all.

If I don't, guilt eats at me. The mind isn't at peace again.

Whichever way you jerk, it hurts.

Samsara is often built precisely on these kinds of stretches. People are pulled between different sides so tight they can't move either way. Painful emotions everywhere. The mind becomes unmanageable: the limbic system, the old emotional part of the brain, works flat out and drowns out the prefrontal cortex, the very part responsible for reason. And the person simply stops thinking straight.

Remember what you said in your last big argument. And what you wish you'd said once you'd cooled down. That gap between the two versions is the limbic system at work.

The first three brahmaviharas, if you think about it, don't really lead out of these traps. They're about something else: they suggest what to do in a given situation, they talk about actions. But they don't solve the problem of constant emotional stretching itself.

For that you need the fourth. Upekkha.

Equanimity has to be understood very carefully and finely.

The first three brahmaviharas border on emotionality. The fourth borders on coldness, on indifference.

Lean that way, and we'll walk past the mutt by the shop without noticing it at all. As if it were a bin standing there. That's indifference. And from a Buddhist point of view, it's also delusion.

Equanimity isn't strings cut off along with your hands. It's freedom of choice: to react or not to react.

Say someone is having a go at another person right in front of you. If you practise equanimity deeply enough, you have freedom. You can step in. You can stay out of it. But either way the mind stays untouched.

You stay calm.

How is that even possible? Through a different view of the world. Not the one we're used to.

Emotional stretching is the result of a particular description of the world we've been caught in since childhood. Nobody caught us on purpose. The world just works like that: from childhood a person gets loaded with programs.

You must.

You mustn't.

This is sacred.

And that isn't.

That's how beliefs form. And they can be unconscious: we may not even know we have them. But they show themselves.

If someone touches what our hidden beliefs hold as important, let alone sacred, righteous anger flares up. Why? Because deep inside sits: this is sacred, you can't treat me like that. Or my country. Or my favourite band, my way of brewing tea, anything at all. Anger, rage — and we're caught.

Equanimity teaches you to see differently. It teaches you to let go of these beliefs.

And that's the hardest part.

There's a meme: if you see someone is wrong on the internet, the highest zen is not to reply. That's exactly about equanimity. No joke.

Everyone knows the feeling: it's one in the morning, you've already composed in your head the fifth paragraph of a reply to a stranger under a post nobody but the two of you will read. Your finger hovers over “send”. That itch — to do something, change something, change someone's mind — grows out of emotional hooks, out of beliefs, and ultimately out of self-views, out of the feeling of “I, mine, they hurt me”.

In practice you gradually learn to step out of this. How exactly — below. First it matters to grasp the essence as precisely as possible.

Kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy don't go anywhere. They become calm. And free.

Free, you see?

Someone walks down the street and sees a beggar asking for money. They give, because otherwise their conscience will gnaw at them. That person isn't free. In essence, they're being manipulated. That's not a kind person, it's a person without a choice. A slave to constructs planted in their head. A puppet whose “give” string got pulled.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't give to beggars. It means that as we move towards equanimity, a choice appears. You can give. You can not give. And either way the mind stays calm.

So what moves us then?

Back to the mutt by the shop. Before, a person fed it out of soft-heartedness and hung on those same stretched strings. Now there are no strings. On what basis will they feed it or not?

You can only see the answer once you're in equanimity. As long as all our actions are driven either by necessity or by emotion, we can't even imagine other options. But a person can do some things simply from a pure heart. Out of joy. Out of fullness.

You come out of the shop with a warm meat pie in your bag that you meant to eat on the way. The mutt looks at the bag as if you were old friends. You break off half, hand it over, feel glad and walk on.

And if there's no pie, you just walk on and silently wish the mutt well.

No drama. No guilt. No inner courtroom.

«Equanimity doesn't take away kindness. It takes the strings away from kindness.»

People often ask: metta isn't working, the more people I get to know, the worse it gets. Maybe go straight to equanimity?

The question back is simple: is equanimity really easier?

It's like saying: I can't seem to manage jogging, maybe I'll go straight for a marathon.

First, upekkha always rests on the other three brahmaviharas. If they aren't there at the moment equanimity seems to appear, it isn't equanimity. It's most likely just being tired of people, in a nice wrapper.

Second, and this is the main thing, equanimity requires stepping over everything you've considered absolutely sacred since childhood or since some point. So sacred that if someone touches it, they must be destroyed and hated. Righteous hatred.

And the whole world is often built on that.

And suddenly you come to see that “enemy” is just a word. Enemy or not — they're just people who also suffer in their own way. And who had their own reasons for acting the way they did.

The whole world is against this view. It will press on your emotions, push you towards hatred or desire. Advertising alone says it all.

There are very wise people. Someone spent a long time learning to think and really can. But some beliefs are so unshakeable for them that they can't step over them.

The idea of justice, for example. Or the idea that everyone has a right to this and that, and if it's violated, that's pure evil. Lovely things, it seems. But in fact it's a trap. With them a person can't look at the world evenly, calmly. They get involved, and the world catches them on that hook.

That's why equanimity requires incredibly fine, honest and often painful work on yourself. Painful not only because you have to tell yourself the truth. You also enter into a certain conflict with society.

Or rather, not a conflict. Being out of sync.

As social beings, people find it comfortable to be in sync with society. To hold the same beliefs as everyone else. Though it's far from certain that everyone's beliefs are the same. But the media spin it easily now: here's the right belief, we all hold it; those who share it are ours, the rest aren't, they're enemies. It happens in a flash.

Belonging to a camp is very cosy. Like sitting in your team's stand: everyone in the same scarves, everyone shouting the same thing, and you feel you belong. Here you have to step out of that cosiness.

The Son of Man, as they say, has nowhere to lay his head.

How to practise equanimity — with four short formulas and meditation — is covered in detail in «How to Stay Calm: Four Formulas of Equanimity».

The strings get pulled not during meditation but on ordinary days. Here's how it happens.

Your mother-in-law criticizes the soup

It used to ruin the whole evening. With equanimity you can hear it as: she has her own idea of soup. The soup is no worse for it, and the evening isn't spoiled.

A message from your boss at 11 p.m.

Your hand reaches to reply right away, your heart is pounding. Or you can notice the string, put the phone down and reply in the morning, calmly and to the point.

The news feed

Every headline pulls its own string: fear, anger, helplessness. Equanimity doesn't mean not knowing what's going on in the world. It means reading without turning into a puppet.

An adult son chooses a different career

Not the one his parents dreamed of. You can say what you think, once. After that it's his life and his consequences.

A friend doesn't pay back a loan

The anger makes sense. But you can decide what to do — remind them, agree on terms or let the money go — and stop replaying it for months.

And this isn't equanimity

«I don't care» when someone close is suffering. That's indifference: there's no kindness in it, the strings have just been cut together with the heart.

The strings aren't going anywhere. The world will pull on them again and again: through the news, through relatives, through the family chat, through the feeling of “but I must”.

The only difference is whether you twitch in response.

«Equanimity is when they're still pulling your strings. But you're no longer a puppet.»