Tara Brach

I'll see if I can find her.

So a few days later, the girl returns and Kafka's there and he says, he didn't have a doll, but he said, I have a note and it reads this from your doll.

I've gone off to travel some around the world.

Please don't worry about me.

I'm fine.

So the girl is a little relieved and she returns to the park every week or so and each time she returns Kafka has another note for the girl describing the doll's wonderful journeys around the earth and all the adventures and so on.

Well, Kafka got much sicker and he went to the park one last time and this time he'd brought a doll and he handed it to the girl and he said, well, travels really changed her.

And some years later when the girl was a young woman she found and read a note that had been rolled up and placed in the doll's hand.

And this is what it said.

You will lose everyone you love but the love will always return in new forms.

So this is what I think of when I say the wisdom of equanimity, that there is this spaciousness that sees life coming and going, but in that openness is available to what's timeless, available to the love that just keeps emerging through different forms and really is available in any moment that we're really present.

So one of the phrases that I have been really drawn to in my own reflections on equanimity is a heart that is ready for anything.

It's that kind of spaciousness that whatever comes our way there is not a sense of, oh, this is terrible, I have to defend.

There is this availability to life, this openness.

And when our heart is ready for anything we are not preoccupied with worrying about the next moment being too much.

because I think a lot of the time we go through the day tensing against what's around the corner.

So we're going to explore this and we'll begin with what I think of as the shadow of equanimity, the near enemy of equanimity, and that's indifference.

It happens often that

people will get into a state where they'll say, well, I'm just being a quantumist, but what they're really doing is not willing to open to their feelings.

In other words, it masquerades as equanimity, this indifference.