In This Episode…

In a world where uncertainty, conflict, and emotional triggers seem to be everywhere, staying rooted in stillness can often seem out of reach.

In Unlocking the Power of Stillness: Equanimity Meditation, Craig explores how meditation can become a powerful ally in helping us stay centered and grounded, even in the midst of life’s most difficult challenges.

This quality of inner balance is often called equanimity. And it doesn’t mean staying calm all the time, or acting like we’re unaffected by life’s ups and downs.

True equanimity empowers us to stay grounded in the unshakable depths of our own being, allowing us to engage fully with whatever life brings, without losing our center.

If you’ve ever wondered how to hold steady when life is swirling around you, this episode offers both insight and practical guidance for unlocking the transformative power of equanimity through meditation.

For a deeper experience of Craig’s approach to meditation, consider joining our Awakened Life membership program which offers in-depth guidance, a meditation workshop, and a live online retreat with Craig. Register today to receive your first month for 50% off at AwakenedLifeMembership.com.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s meditation experiments, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at FreeMeditationWorkshop.com.

If you would like to share your experience of the podcast or have questions about Craig’s teachings, please feel free to email us at support@craighamiltonglobal.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

The capacity I’m speaking about today is what we could call equanimity — the ability to remain centered and steady no matter what’s going on around us, and no matter what’s happening inside us. Life circumstances often knock us off center and disrupt our equanimity, our sense of centeredness and steadiness. What’s also true is that it’s often our own emotional reactions that throw us off balance.

Many of us get thrown off by strong emotional responses to things happening around us — but sometimes, it’s not even that. Sometimes it’s just a thought passing through our mind that catches us in reaction. Other times, it’s a trigger — an emotional response that doesn’t have much to do with what’s actually happening. It’s simply a built-up, cumulative response that suddenly explodes within us.

And certainly, at a time like this, when so many upsetting and disruptive things are happening, how do we find the ability to hold steady? How do we cultivate equanimity, remain centered, and not get swept up in reaction?

It doesn’t mean we don’t respond, but we want to respond from a place of clarity, perspective, and wisdom—not from being triggered. So how do we cultivate that?
We start in meditation, by sitting still and not reacting to anything that arises. And from there, we bring that practice into our daily lives, learning to stay rooted in steadiness and centeredness, no matter what happens.

The Outward and Inward Faces of Equanimity

This is something that probably all of us on a spiritual path have to grapple with at times. If we’re on a spiritual path in one form or another, we’re probably trying to live our life with equanimity. We’re probably trying to be a person who is centered, steady, present, and not inconsistent. We’re striving to be consistent. That’s another way to talk about the outward face of equanimity.

The inward face of equanimity is that, inwardly, we’re steady. We’re like a boulder in a stream bed — and even if violent floodwaters come down, ravaging everything and reshaping the stream bottom, this big boulder doesn’t budge. It doesn’t move. It’s not affected because it’s got so much mass and weight. A spiritually awakened person has a similar kind of weight, mass, and depth.

There’s a way that we are profoundly anchored in something deeper than all the ups and downs happening on the surface. It’s heavier than everything swirling around it. And no matter what happens, we don’t move. We don’t budge.

Equanimity in the Face of Aggression

This is the potential of spiritual awakening, and all of us, to some degree, are probably trying to find our way there. But what happens when people are being aggressive and threatening toward us? That’s one of the times that can most disturb our equanimity — when we feel our safety is at risk.

I’m going to share a couple of perspectives on equanimity that you can try to work with because, again, this equanimity that we see as a spiritual quality is often imagined as being removed from life.

It’s a bit of being detached, and we think of the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree while the demon Mara tempts him with all manner of worldly things — trying to scare him, trying to appeal to his lust, his greed, and the Buddha just sits there, unmoving. We look at that myth, that image, that archetype, and we think, Oh, he must be so distant from the things of the world that nothing touches him. He’s so detached from all worldly things.

But the kind of equanimity I’m pointing to and inviting us to consider isn’t one where we’re distant and detached. I gave one example of being like a boulder — where we’ve discovered something so solid and weighty in ourselves that it doesn’t get blown off course by powerful winds and storms.

Another metaphor is the ocean, where the surface is often very stormy and whipped up, swirling seas with waves that are choppy. But down in the depths of the ocean, there’s just profound stillness — a calm that is unperturbed by what’s happening on the surface.

An Equanimity Meditation

There are two things I want to invite you to do. I want to invite you to try a meditation practice — and you can do this on your own. I’ll just give you a brief taste of it here. The practice is to sit still, and physically you don’t move. Your body is still, but inwardly, you are also still. Inwardly, you don’t move, no matter what happens.

1. The Power of Stillness

Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t thoughts. It doesn’t mean there aren’t feelings. There might even be intense feelings, chaotic thoughts — monkey mind, as they say in some traditions. But can you sit still and not react to the ups and downs of your own emotional life? Can you sit still and not react to the chaos of your monkey mind?

Can you just sit there — not moving outwardly, not moving inwardly, not getting involved with the content of the mind, not being in reaction to the content of your emotions, not trying to change anything at all? Just deeply still, letting everything be.

That brief practice is something you can do for 20 or 30 minutes a day. Just do that practice and experience the power of stillness. I always teach that it begins with the meditation practice because meditation is a very controlled environment — in a positive sense. Meaning, it’s a very contained environment. You can sit still in meditation, do nothing, and react to nothing. And there’s no problem with that. There’s no demand for you to do anything when you’re meditating. So you can just be like that.

So, we begin with the meditation, and if we do this consistently, we start to discover: there’s a part of me that never moves. There’s a dimension of my own consciousness and being that has never moved — that was never thrown around by the chaos of life. It’s always been still. It’s always been deep, like the ocean.

2. Experiments in Stillness & Awakened Living

Then the experiments in awakened living can begin. In relation to this quality, the experiment in awakening and awakened living looks like this — How can I live my life fully engaged, active, interacting with others, problem-solving, doing creative work, whatever I do?

How can I fully engage without losing touch with this deep, still center that never moves? What does life look like when it’s flowing out of that depth? What’s the experience of life when I’m living from that depth?

So we begin experimenting with it — and for each of us, it’s our own unique experiment. In my programs, I offer practice guides and detailed experiments that go beyond what I can share here. But what I want to inspire in you is a spirit of adventure, exploration, and discovery.

Because ultimately, it’s that spirit of experimentation, the willingness to try, to engage, to learn directly from your own experience, that makes all the difference.

Not Holding on to Our Meditative States

So we’re practicing meditation — and here’s the important thing to remember: we’re not trying to hold on to a meditative state of consciousness in our daily life. We’re not trying to stay in that deep, still, unmoving, unreactive, equanimous calm as we engage with the world. Why?

You’ve probably heard spiritual teachers say that’s the goal — that you’re supposed to keep meditation going throughout the day. But we’re not. Because daily, engaged life demands something completely different from meditation. It demands engaged action.

So we’re not trying to hold on to meditative awareness, but we are experimenting with how to stay rooted in this depth even as we engage with the world. We can observe ourselves — and when we see that we’ve reacted, gotten lost, or lost our equanimity, we can pause and look back at what happened.

The other part of practice is to inquire. We can say, Oh, clearly I lost my equanimity when that person threatened me or challenged me. Why? Nothing really changed. My center, my essence, is still infinitely deep. It’s still untouched. So why am I losing touch with that? Then we explore. And that deepens our inquiry and our practice.

Being Calm vs Being Rooted in Deep Stillness

I just want to clarify that when I’m talking about living from a place that’s anchored in this deep, deep stillness, I’m not necessarily talking about responding in a calm way. This is really important.

You might remember I mentioned earlier that the goal isn’t to try to bring the kind of peace and calm we experience in meditation into every moment of life. And this is interesting because many of us carry a spiritual idea or archetype in our minds — imagining that we’re supposed to walk around being calm, peaceful, smiling, and untouched by what’s going on around us.

Sometimes it might look like that, but it might also be that living your life anchored in this depth expresses itself as ferocity, fierceness, or intensity. Because what really happens, when we get our ego structure out of the way — when we get the false self story out of the way and all our habitual, conditioned reactivity out of the way — is that this profound depth we truly are begins to live our life. That’s the power of stillness.

The Universe, Surging through You, Isn’t Always Calm

That’s one way to think about it: all of us are universal consciousness, this profound, sublime, sacred event — this supreme consciousness, the very creative principle of the cosmos, the impulse of evolution surging through everything. We are that supreme depth and source. We are that cosmic energy, intelligence, and love.

What I’m saying is that when the depth of who we are starts to be freed up to live our life — because we’re no longer constraining it through all of our limited habits of unconsciousness and narrow attention on the false self — everything changes. When that gets out of the way and this dynamic super-consciousness begins to live our life, that depth starts to move through us. It flows out in every possible way.

Fierce Love, Angry Wisdom, Righteous Anger

If someone is being rude and disrespectful to you or someone else, they might be met with a force of intensity and anger they’ve never encountered before — a consciousness that’s unwilling to accept the disrespect, the narrowness, and the pettiness coming out of another.

They might be met by what I believe Ken Wilber calls angry wisdom. Angry wisdom, as opposed to what he also called idiot compassion. It’s not a term I tend to use, but you get the idea. It’s not just one kind of expression — all gentle, sweet, and meek. Sometimes it might be that, but other times, it might be the opposite.

Sometimes there might be a lot of force to it. Other times, it might be filled with humor. It might turn things on their head. So look at it that way.

A good way to think about spiritual awakening is to strip away the layers. For those of us who might not resonate with words like sacred, sublime, or divine — and I do use those words — you might feel, Oh, that’s all religious language.

So we can take all of that off the table. Instead, we could say we’re talking about a human being who is optimized, a human being whose higher functioning has been activated, liberated, or unleashed into the world. And that’s really what we’re pointing to. That’s what we’re talking about.

What Does Optimal Human Functioning Look Like?

I think most of us could probably do a decent job of imagining what that would be like, even if we haven’t tasted it directly. What’s my vision of optimal human functioning? And then, bring it closer. What would my optimal human functioning look like? How would I be different if I were fully optimized?

Meaning, if all of my unconscious limiting beliefs were removed from the equation — if all of my destructive habits were taken out — and all that was left was my highest, best, most profound self. What does superconsciousness look like in the form of me, living my life?

And once you’ve got that picture, do you know what’s a powerful practice of direct awakening? Be that person. Just start being that person. Start doing your best to embody that version of yourself, instead of waiting for some lightning bolt of enlightenment to come down and turn you into that person.

Because if you can already see it, that means you have access to it. You can already begin to practice those qualities, here and now.

I’m not saying that’s the whole path — not at all. I think you’re getting the picture. I teach a very deep, nuanced path, and I think it’s worth mentioning briefly how I approach that.

The Practice of Direct Awakening

I have two main online courses that I teach. One is a 12-week course, mostly focused on meditation, called The Practice of Direct Awakening. In that course, we go through a series of modules where we explore and put into practice many of these spiritual survival skills.

I’m talking about these higher ways of being, and we practice them directly in meditation. We also have practices we bring into daily life, exploring these and many other aspects of awakening. If you’d like to read more about that course, you can visit: directawakening.com to learn more.

Awakening to an Evolutionary Relationship to Life

I also have a nine-week course called Integral Enlightenment: Awakening to an Evolutionary Relationship to Life. That’s the course where I teach more about what spiritual awakening and conscious evolution look like outside of meditation. I do teach some meditation in that course, but the focus is much more on how to step into this evolutionary relationship with life and how to meet all the different aspects of life from that place. You can learn more about that course at: integralenlightenmentcourse.com.

It’s in these contexts that I teach a holistic spiritual path — one that includes both specific meditation practices and very specific life practices, all designed to remove every obstacle to the free, natural, uninhibited expression of our spiritual nature, our true nature. These courses offer a much deeper journey into all of this.
I hope you’re able to weather the storms, and that your spiritual practice gives you stability, strength, courage, and love in the midst of it all.