finding balance in a broken world and staying steady through the stress
(Raising Equanimity—Upekkha)
Early on in his teaching, the Buddha described life as 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As parents, each new day seems to bring at least another 10,000 home. The Buddha also mentioned something else most of us know to be true: life is stressful. Change and uncertainty are about the only constants we can depend on, and these can contribute to our suffering or our growth. Everything changes when we start a family, even down to our brain and hormones—in both women and men.1 There is little more stressful, uncertain, and full of change than the ongoing process of parenting. And while change is hard for us parents to accept, growing up is not all fun and excitement for kids, either. Family legend has it that when I was two, I wailed inconsolably as deliverymen carried out our old refrigerator to deliver a brand new one. I’m still not so great with change and loss—the other day, I found myself holding back tears alongside my son when he lost his stuffed monkey.
So how do we deal with all this change? How do we abide the pains and joys of life—neither getting swept up in them nor turning our backs and ignoring them—and help our children learn to do the same? Traditionally, this quality of abiding is called equanimity, an attitude that is not to be mistaken for passivity or indifference, which are sometimes described as the “near enemies” of equanimity. When it comes to our family, equanimity is inextricably linked with compassion. We can have equanimity without compassion, like when we feel burned out and cynically dismiss our kids’ concerns as mere manipulation. We can also have compassion without equanimity, responding to their immediate wants over their long-term needs because of our own intolerance of their discomfort. As I heard someone recently put it, compassion with equanimity means, “I want you to be happy, but I don’t need you to be happy in order to be okay.” Rather, equanimity is a radical acceptance of not-knowing and a means of not taking everything so personally. In meditation, we are often taught to recognize strong and difficult emotions as they arise without acting upon them, just like noticing the weather. We can do this with our loved ones as well, noting in our children, “Ah, anger is here. Sadness is here”—though, depending on the mood, perhaps not noting these thoughts aloud. In this way, we open ourselves to a deeper engagement with all of life, embodying balance and stability in the face of uncertainty and change. Most important, equanimity better enables us to develop a stable, secure base for attachment with our children, ensuring their optimal physical, psychological, and spiritual development.
The Eight Worldly Winds
Equanimity is said to keep us on the right track in the face of eight worldly winds—fame and disrepute (or praise and blame), gain and loss, success and failure, and joy and sorrow. We could all probably add a few more “winds” that we’ve experienced, but this list covers a great deal of what we face in life.
Buddhism teaches that the nature of suffering is dual and permeable, which is to say that we experience suffering together, and it’s contagious. We are only as happy as our unhappiest child, as parents are fond of saying. And often, the stronger our bonds with our children, the more vividly we are blown about by their eight winds, experiencing their joys and sorrows in the complex dance of interpersonal neurobiology. One week our kids are invited to the “cool” party; the next, they are back with the “nerd herd.” They win praise for their role in the winter musical but then are blamed for losing the playoff game by missing the fly ball. One spring they celebrate the success of acceptance to the college of their dreams, and the next fall they lose their scholarship when their grades slip. One bright summer day brings unbelievable joy at the beach but then inconsolable sorrow when their ice cream cone crashes onto the hot pavement. These delights, slings, and arrows come and go throughout their lives and our own. They also mirror each other. When our child is the difficult one at the playground, we watch as the other parents shrink away from us and playdate invitations fade. When our teen gets into trouble, we face the judgment of other parents who don’t want their kids hanging out with our bad influence.
We too are certain to face these winds in the parenthood journey, if we haven’t already. The day my son was due, my sister called to tell me she had been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. One day our family has it all; the next day we lose a job, a house, or even a family member. One year we are the cool parent in our child’s group of friends; the next we are infamously uptight and old-fashioned. Our own therapist praises our parenting, but our child’s therapist gives us a long list of “suggestions.” One year we celebrate our child’s coming of age, the next we have to bury our own parents. The challenge in all of this is learning neither to overidentify with these changes nor to see them as permanent. The good news (and bad news) is that all the winds are temporary. Equanimity acts like the ballast of a ship. Although the ship is blown one way or the other by the winds of life, it neither sinks nor goes too far off-course.
reflection Of these eight worldly winds, which has challenged you and your family the most? Which has been prominent for you in the past year? Which do you fear the most?
These eight worldly winds are also interdependent. For example, blame leads to shame, which calls for more self-compassion and self-forgiveness. Praise can encourage arrogance, which can be balanced by gratitude and appreciation for others. We can savor joy and pleasure and tolerate sorrow and pain all the better if we employ the wisdom of impermanence. We can balance success and failure by taking more personal responsibility, yet not taking it all personally. Let’s look more closely at the eight winds and see how they play out in our lives.
Fame and Disrepute (Praise and Blame)
How well your family approaches and learns from these winds will determine your family’s resilience. One of the best ways to deal with praise and blame is to be well-rounded, which is not the same as being hyperscheduled. You’re more than a parent, just as your child is more than your son or daughter. Everyone in your family has multiple roles and activities that mean a lot to you—it’s important to recognize that and to hold your identities lightly and enjoy them. To balance a ship, ballast must be spread evenly and widely.
If your child is overattached to their identity as the smartest kid or the best soccer player, they will struggle when the world inevitably suggests otherwise. This is often when they’ll melt down, act out, or just give up on something that had been important to them. Even worse, they can become anxious and depressed, turn to drugs or cutting, or any number of other behaviors that land them in my office (or landed me in the offices of several therapists when I was a kid).
We can help them shift their identities in ways that will serve them in the long run. For example, we balance the identity of smart kid with the more sustainable identity of hard worker. Even better, we encourage kids in their various interests so they have a range of identities to fall back on. They might not get an A on the spelling test, but they’re still a beloved grandchild, helpful friend, and decent skateboarder. Likewise, if they ace the test, they can feel great at something without overinflating their ego, because they’re better able to put their successes in context with their more challenging endeavors like their one hard thing.
reflection Are your family members’ lives well-rounded enough to provide a cushion of confidence when things go wrong? In what ways are your lives dependent, independent, or interdependent on each other at this stage?
Gain and Loss
Just like praise and blame, gain and loss are inevitable parts of life from childhood onward. Although winning and losing streaks always end, we can accept the flow of victories and defeats. In addition—but admittedly trickier—we can learn to find silver linings when things don’t go our way. One of my favorite teaching stories, Sai and the Horse, demonstrates these principles:
Once, there was a farmer named Sai who lived with his family on their small farm. They were poor but had a horse to help with the labor in the fields, until one day in a storm, the horse ran away. The rest of the village came to console old Sai on his bad luck, but he merely replied, “Bad luck, good luck, who ever knows.”
The following week, the horse reappeared, this time with a mare in tow. The villagers shouted their congratulations. What great luck! In response, Sai merely smiled, “Good luck, bad luck, who ever knows.”
The next week, while training the new mare, Sai’s son was thrown from the horse, falling to the ground and shattering his leg. Once more the villagers came to visit and share their condolences, and once more Sai simply shrugged and said, “Bad luck, good luck, who ever knows.”
Soon, a war broke out in the kingdom, and the king sent out a call for all able-bodied young men to join the army. All the young men of the village were killed, save for Sai’s son, who had remained home with the broken leg. Once again, when congratulated on his good fortune, Sai simply said, “Good luck, bad luck, who ever knows.”
Try sharing this story with your family in challenging times and good ones. You can also create new chapters to Sai’s tale as you go, inviting your children to make up twists and turns of their own. Engaging the story on this level will highlight the value of acceptance; it also teaches us to look for the flower in the muck. Of course, broken legs and lost horses are one thing; it’s much more difficult to remain calm and equanimous when we hear that 20 percent of our daughters are sexually assaulted by the time they finish college, and half of our sons will be in car accidents by the same age. But we can prepare ourselves and our children for the more difficult times to come by first working through the smaller challenges of skinned knees and broken hearts that will inevitably occur along the way.
We can practice equanimity much better when we understand how events are interdependent. We also develop equanimity when we look into the future with the same acceptance we have at examining the winding path that got us to where we are today. Equanimity arises when we renounce control—or, more accurately, when we renounce the illusion of control. Ideally, we learn along the way to strike a workable balance between letting our children live their own lives and make their own mistakes and keeping them happy and safe. Being a parent requires doing both.
reflection Think of a time in your life when a success turned out to be more complicated or a loss turned out to be a surprise gain.
Success and Failure
It’s natural to seek success in life and to want the same for our children. However, the dangers of success are arrogance and pride, which are often deficiencies in gratitude and the wisdom of interdependence. Fortunately, we can accompany any success we meet with mindful gratitude for others. A wise mentor once advised me, “Remember when you feel proud of an accomplishment to also feel grateful to those who helped you.” That’s why those Hollywood awards shows include “thank you” speeches and books include acknowledgments. We can model gratitude in the face of success with our children and point it out when we see the same happening in the world, helping them understand how their successes are built upon their relationships with others. By encountering success in this manner, we foster equanimity in all of us.
Setbacks are painful, but they too hold powerful lessons in equanimity. It’s far too easy to become fixated on what failures seem to represent in the moment—not meeting an explicit goal or desire. It’s much harder to see the bigger picture and take the long view. The truth is, the path to success is often circuitous, with plenty of failures along the way. Reflect on how this is true for you and share your journey with your children, or tell your kids stories about well-known people who had unexpected paths to success. People are often surprised to hear the route I took to get to where I am. I was an English major who took six years to finish my bachelors degree, after which I worked as a waiter, as an artist’s assistant, at an Internet startup, and then as a special education teacher. I had absolutely no plans to become a child therapist; instead, I kind of fell into it after a series of what felt like major setbacks. I’d been rejected from graduate school at Harvard years ago, but I recently joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School. I could write an entire book on all the twists and turns in my life—as could you. Discuss your own setbacks, career changes, and odd meanderings with your kids—within reason, of course. Most important, reframe your so-called failures as opportunities. Doing so will help your children connect the dots between overcoming setbacks, staying true to one’s values, hard work, and inevitable rewards.
None of us is immune to success and failure, even on a daily basis. Make it safe for your children to make mistakes. At around age five, kids begin to notice that adults have a negative emotional reaction to their mistakes, which unconsciously implies that they should be ashamed.2 What we communicate to our children in the face of their blunders makes all the difference, just as how we model dealing with our own mistakes is important. Do we react to our defeats with shame and self-deprecation, or do we acknowledge them and get back to work? Some experts even recommend adults deliberately make mistakes and forgive themselves to model positive self-correction.
reflection What setbacks, disappointments, or unconventional aspects of your life path can you share with your children when they feel like giving up? How do you model mistakes to your family?
We all need to fail from time to time. Learning, adaptation, and resilience require some degree of defeat. It’s not only okay to let your children fail; it’s also wise to do so. Learning to bounce back from “failure” is one of the most useful gifts you can offer the adults they will eventually become. Only by making their way through smaller setbacks do our children learn how to deal with bigger setbacks.
When children do inevitably fail, it’s critical that we don’t place the blame on other people or circumstances out of their control—the muddy field, the biased referee, or the unfair teacher who has it in for them. Our kids will have to deal with these challenges in life, of course, but more important than recognizing these situations will be their sense of agency, autonomy, and responsibility. You can help them by compassionately talking through what they could do when such situations arise—practice in the mud, for example, or stay after class to ask the teacher for help. Even asking what they could have done to improve their experience of the past week will help them build a sense of autonomy to empower them to handle their next challenges with greater equanimity.
Joy and Sorrow, Pleasure and Pain
Humans are resilient. Consider the fact that our species has survived millennia of violence, disease, starvation, and emotional pain of all types. Even today, when something like 70 percent of people have experienced a traumatic event, only 20 percent of these survivors go on to develop PTSD.3 And here’s even more promising news: up to 90 percent of trauma survivors experience post-traumatic growth, which means they make meaning of the experience and transform themselves and others. Social psychologist James Pennebaker has shown that writing, visual arts, and other avenues of creative expression can help positively convert trauma, even boosting the psychological and physical immune systems.4 He suggests using prompts like “I became stronger when I overcame __________,” “I am the person I am because of __________,” and “I am wiser now after __________” to help us transform the sorrows, traumas, and pains of life. We increase the benefit of doing so, of course, when we model this type of wise speech for our children.
As the Buddha famously pointed out, suffering is inevitable. None of us will escape sorrow and pain, not even people who devote their lives to the spiritual path. An interviewer once asked the Dalai Lama about his regrets in life. The holy man replied that after a student of his had once committed suicide, he had felt regret and responsibility for the man’s death. When asked by the interviewer how to get rid of such a feeling, the Dalai Lama paused and then said, “I didn’t. It’s still there. I just don’t allow it to drag me down and pull me back. I realized that being dragged down or held back by it would be to no one’s benefit . . . not mine or anybody else’s. So I go forward and do the best I can.”5 We’re not trying to get rid of pain—ours or our children’s. We can be saddened by pain, by our regrets and mistakes, and yet keep moving forward. This, too, is the wisdom of equanimity.
Comfort with Change and the Unknown
Equanimity is about appreciating the inevitability of change. It’s about learning from everything we meet in life and growing through it all, which is pretty similar to the definition of resilience. Consider the number of changes you’ve had to make to become the parent you are today. What would your life be like if you refused to adapt to the rollercoaster of parenthood? When Leo was a few months old, he slept through the night, and my wife and I smugly assumed we had the best baby in the world. Well, that certainly changed. He went through a stretch of waking up every hour on the hour, but then that changed. And I’m just talking about his sleeping! The sleep thing was like a cosmic hazing ritual to prepare us for the ups and downs of the rest of parenthood—just when it becomes predictable, something changes and we have to adapt. Once Leo was sleeping, he was suddenly crawling everywhere and the house needed baby-proofing. Once the house was secured and he was no longer a danger, it was on to potty training, and on and on. It all reminds me of Sai’s story.
The suffering emerges when we start assuming that how it is now is how it will be forever. When the baby is crying, we can get some relief from remembering that it will stop, eventually. Equanimity means letting go of our attachment to whatever arises, good or bad. Or as the saying goes, “Let go or be dragged.” If we’re too caught up in our dreams of our child going to Oxford someday, we’ll suffer all the more (as will they) when they get their first B. It’s not that we pour cold water on every exciting or good thing that comes along—I’m just suggesting that we all learn to take life’s ups and downs in stride.
And what better practice for equanimity than parenthood? We’re experts in dealing with change! Consider all the things that will change, from their sleep schedule, to their eating preferences, to their size and shape, their health, their mood. It will all change. So too will your relationship with your children and your partner. And guess what? The bad news is that the first year as parents is statistically likely to be our unhappiest, and becoming parents doesn’t necessarily make us any happier.6 But a year only lasts twelve months, and then things change again. Life doesn’t always get better, but we can always get better at living it.