The Equanimity Game: How to Quickly Get Back to Baseline

Yesterday I spoke about a fun little tool for improving your physical and emotional awareness.

In case you missed it, the tool is called HALT, and it involves checking in with yourself and identifying if you’re not just hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

Then addressing the real cause of your funkiness and getting back to rocking it.

The best part is, the more you do this, the faster you are able to get back to baseline.

That last part is really important.

In fact, it’s so important that there’s even a sexy word for it:

Equanimity.

Equanimity is basically the state in which you are able to simply observe what’s going on around you, completely unattached from anything that happens.

Note: It’s important to point out that I don’t mean passive or apathetic, but rather refraining from attaching any meaning, significance or story to your experiences. 

And by being unattached, you are able to choose a powerful response, rather than reacting emotionally.

So yeah, equanimity. 🙂

It’s a pretty cool word in general, but it holds particular fondness for me.

During my two 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreats (which should really be called bootcamps), our teacher SN Goenka kept coming back to two themes:

Awareness and equanimity.

Having the awareness to notice what’s going on, and the equanimity not to react to it. Or when we do, coming back to equanimity as fast as possible, without judgment.

What’s even more awesome is the fact that one of my other virtual mentors, Marcus Aurelius, one of the founding fathers of Stoicism (look it up and thank me later) ALSO recognized the importance of this thousands of years ago, which he captured in his brilliant Meditations:

“When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.”

Brian Johnson calls this The Equanimity Game.

Here’s the moral of the story…

We can’t deny the fact that sometimes, we’re going to miss the mark (me writing this at the end of my day, for example).

But, we have the power to turn it into a game by whipping out some HALT goodness and seeing how fast we can get back on track.

Have fun with that the next time you notice yourself slipping up.