Practice Thriving and Resilience: Skill 2: Meet both positive and negative events with equanimity

Each MCD Relationship Competency identifies 6 Skills, along with specific practices for learning each. For more context about MCD Relationship Competency 9: Thriving & Resilience, see Skill 1: Describe events using neutral observations.

Skill 2: Meet both positive and negative events with equanimity

Equanimity is the 9th Foundation in Mindful Compassionate Dialogue

Equanimity is a primary feature of an expansive perspective.

Equanimity is access to a stillpoint inside that enables you to meet experience with a profound allowing, non-bias and non-judgment. It’s an experience of remaining stable and open in an expansive perspective. With equanimity, you can observe experiences such as craving, aversion, impulses, or intense feelings without attempting to push them away or hold on to them.  

Equanimity is characterized by moments of freedom from habits and preferences and the ability to notice experience with curiosity and lightness. This spacious attention offers access to creativity and spontaneous responsiveness.

Practice

Choose one of the following practices to engage with in the coming week:

1. Set your intention to notice moments of craving and aversion, pull toward or away from something with tension, and relax and return to center each time you do.

2. For one day set your intention to notice the impulse to give an opinion and let it arise and fade away without expression.

3. Take time to reflect with compassion on the cost of behaving and making decisions from a place of a feeling of craving/aversion. Identify the needs you were trying to meet at the time.

4. For a week, use each meditation period as an opportunity to study craving and aversion. Intentionally allow feelings of craving or aversion and study the experience. Notice the experience relative to each category of experience: body, thoughts, impulses, images, memories, energy, feelings, and needs.

5. For a week, Take 20 minutes to journal at the end of each day. Write down five judgments you had that day and translate them  into feelings and needs.

6. Identify the most common form of craving you experience. Identify a feeling and need present when that form of craving arises. Identify a specific and doable action you will take to meet that need in a healthy way.

7. Make a list of what you are habitually averse to and set your intention to relax the next time you encounter that trigger.

8. When you feel aversion to yourself (shame, self-criticism, self-judgment), identify that which you are thinking that you don’t like and say, “I am not this. This is not myself. This is not me.”

9. Set your intention to use moments of tension as your cue to repeat a specific mantra like, “I can accept this moment just as it is,” or, “I am big enough to stay present for this.”