Ways to Cultivate Equanimity Through Mindful Meditation

Sometimes, we as humans are bombarded by tense and aggravated situations and it is important to stay calm, composed and really have the presence of mind to think yourself through. That’s exactly what equanimity teaches and in this guide, we will walk you through ways to cultivate equanimity through mindful mediation. Let’s learn mental stimulus exercises to achieve a calmer more composed state of mind.

Common practices to cultivate equanimity 

We have developed our own plan of action as humans to deal with pressure filled outcomes and challenging scenarios and our reluctance on emotions and certain habits, although come to serve us with real purpose and help us strategize, our dependency on these forefronts is too much and we need to rethink our strategy. The main flaws of emotions and habits are that they interfere with your conscious thinking which makes your thought process a lot more complicated. That’s where mindful meditation is so different, as it helps us to develop a streamlined approach.

Mindful meditation basically has four important stages. The first helps you get control over your breath and the second step is your distraction or the main event of stimulation taking place, the third step in this cycle is the realization that you have been distracted and finally the last step allows you to contemplate on the thought or feedback and just letting it pass by. This four-step cycle is repeated numerous amounts of times to reach the effective equanimity, kind of think of this like a routine or doing reps at the gym.

Eating habits

Believe it or not your eating habits play a vital role in controlling your emotions, especially if you eat something that can wildly stimulate your responses. Eating sugar for one, gives you an instant adrenaline rush but all that energy quickly dissipates and you crave for more. Do yourself a favour and avoid eating such foods with extremely high sugar and processed foods that will interfere with your efforts to reach equanimity.

Give in to your feelings 

We briefly talked about this before, but the Buddhist approach of this ideology is far more comprehensive. A direct focus needs to be placed to what is happening inside your body and your mind can allow you to forget certain stuff and so the most balanced approach is to surrender to the incoming feelings as an observer. You don’t need to grieve over a stimulus or overthink it, just let it pass by. This is extremely helpful as it allows us to better control ourselves for future setbacks or outcomes that may potentially haunt us. Your life’s outcomes are beyond your control and life in general can be very unpredictable, but what you can do is to form your own natural mechanism to deal with it more effectively.

Creativity and mindfulness

We can’t really change what has happened to us in the past but we can look forward to the present and how we can take actions to deal with our current scenario. There are a couple of ways you can achieve great level of creativity. Think about doing something you are incredibly passionate about and don’t think about the outcome because that will ultimately demotivate and detract you from achieving your absolute best.

Playing sports 

Engaging in outdoor physical activity can be a great stress reliever, imagine yourself at the park playing your favorite sports, you are disconnected from all of your worries and all you care about is having fun in playing that sport.  This is yet another way to effectively reach equanimity and a state of mindfulness.

Additional ways to reach equanimity  

• Make yourself at peace by finding a position where you can take relaxing deep breaths and can allow you to connect to your inner body.

• Closely examine what is happening inside you and try to understand yourself.

• Reassuring yourself is key and try to comfort yourself all the time, “Everything will be okay”, “I can do this”, help yourself when you are faced with challenging situations.

• Don’t be that person that does a lot of multitasking instead try to focus on one thing at a time as one task will get your full attention and you will be able to perform a lot better.

• Learn to accept your current situation and don’t overthink about it as this can negatively affect your mindset and way of thinking.

Final thought

We have finally reached the decisive end of this guide, remember life is a constant barrage of challenges and unpredictability, you can’t possibly control every aspect of your life but what you can control is your emotions, the way your mind reacts and how to let go of emotional trauma and how to effectively relieve stress. All of these practices will allow you to reach equanimity. In a deep dark ocean of hopelessness, it is integral to stay calm and be true to yourself and that is the only way you are going to live a much fruitful life.