Lexicon
Equanimity
Steadiness that does not depend on things going well.
- Published
- 2 Sep 2026
Equanimity is not indifference. Indifference is a failure to care; equanimity is caring without requiring a particular outcome. In practice it shows up as a shorter gap between something going wrong and your ability to respond to it.
It is worth noting that equanimity is the slowest of the qualities to develop and the easiest to fake. A useful check: if you are calm about someone else's difficulty but not your own, that is suppression, not equanimity.
→Practices that use this term
- Practice in a queue 5 minutes
- Resonance at six breaths a minute 15 minutes
- Practice in a noisy room 15 minutes
- Metta for someone difficult 20 minutes
- Metta for a neutral person 15 minutes
- Thirty-minute full body scan 30 minutes
- Ambient sound as anchor 10 minutes
- Four phrases for yourself 12 minutes
↔See also
- Metta — The practice of wishing well, offered deliberately and without conditions.
- Restlessness — The agitated quality that makes sitting still feel unacceptable.
- Open awareness — Attention without a chosen object, resting on whatever arrives.