Developing Equanimity for Challenging Times
“Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in that space is our power and our freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
I started meditating around 10 years ago. I was desperate. I had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and I made the decision to forego conventional treatment and attempt to manage my disease using natural lifestyle interventions (you can read my full story here). I needed some way to calm my mind while knowing that I had cancer growing inside my body.
Someone very dear to me gave me a copy of Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn shortly after my diagnosis. Prior to opening that book I had never heard of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program that he pioneered at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s. I didn't have much experience - or use for - meditation either.
JKZ's science-backed, secular approach to mindfulness resonated with me in a way that the quasi-religious Buddhist traditions never did.
I was blown away by the evidence Kabat-Zinn presented demonstrating the beneficial impacts mindfulness can have on health and well-being. Amongst other findings he found that mindfulness training can:
improve outcomes in people experiencing chronic pain, depression symptoms, anxiety and drug addiction
bring about positive psychological outcomes in cancer patients, including decreases in biomarkers
have a positive affect on the post-inflammatory stress response
provide symptom relief in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
possibly prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease
With nothing to lose I started sitting to JKZ's guided meditations. I started with 10 minutes and gradually worked my way up to 30 minute meditation sessions.
It was humbling. I felt like I was failing at meditating. My mind was constantly wandering, always jumping around, obsessing about things that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about during meditation. As instructed, I would constantly bring my attention back to my breath (when I remembered) and I tried not to judge myself too harshly but I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere. In my mind, which was still biased toward achievement, I didn’t feel like I was getting the meditation equivalent of stronger, or faster, or smarter.
I worried that I was wasting my time. But I kept showing up for my daily meditation practice. I was committed to doing whatever I could within my control to manage the progress of my prostate cancer to avoid treatment, or at least delay it until there were less invasive treatment options available.
If I had the discipline to eat healthier and exercise more then I could muster the discipline to sit quietly for 20 minutes a day and focus on my breath.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
“I define mindfulness as the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally”
The longer I meditated the more I began to recognize patterns in my thoughts and behaviors that, upon closer inspection, seemed more like habits than hard-wiring. Mindfulness enabled me to start experimenting with delaying my reactions to certain situations; this thrilled me since it showed me that what I had assumed to be automatic responses -- that I was just wired this way, that reactivity was my nature -- were actually choices that I could make, in the moment.
I began to view this space between the stimulus and the response like the sliver of light in a doorway that I never knew existed. But now I could see the door. My foot was wedged in the doorway and I knew that I could pry the door open further and further until it was wide open. The promise of being able to choose how to respond in any given situation -- what Frankl called the ultimate freedom -- kept me coming back to the meditation cushion.
I became so convinced of the value of mindfulness meditation that in 2022 I decided to begin training as a meditation teacher so that I could help others hack their reactivity and achieve some measure of equanimity.