🌀 Equanimity: The Mind’s Parkour Move in a World of Anxiety Trampolines...

Why Stillness is a Lie, and Mental Fluidity is the Real Zen-Flex of the 21st Century

By Dr. Pradeep JNA  “Deals-on-Deals” Datta | April 2025 | Cognitive Circus Weekly

Forget Stoic Stone Statues — Equanimity Is a Gymnast in the Brain Wearing Tap Shoes

Equanimity, that oft-abused buzzword of yoga retreats, Instagram therapists, and overpriced incense labels, is not what you think. It’s not about becoming a placid cow in a field of sunflowers while breathing through your third eye and pretending traffic doesn’t exist.

No, true equanimity is more like mental parkour across an ever-shifting psychological urban jungle. It’s not a mountain — it’s a surfer. Not silence — but symphonic attunement. Not a still pond — but a jazz solo of consciousness, improvising, adjusting, flowing.

And if you think this sounds like Eastern mysticism married Western psychotherapy in a Vegas chapel — you're right. But beneath the incense and ivory towers lies a cognitive revolution. So buckle up, pour yourself a paradox smoothie, and let's dissect this misunderstood marvel.

The Myth of Inner Stillness: Why Calm is Overrated and Probably a Marketing Scam

Let’s begin with the delusion we've all been sold: equanimity as stillness.
You’ve seen the image. Cross-legged monk. Zero movement. The world could explode and he’d still be blinking in slow motion.

Cute. But wrong.

Real equanimity isn’t the suppression of reaction. It’s the freedom to choose how to respond while staying mentally mobile. Think of it less like Buddha on a rock and more like Spider-Man swinging between emotional skyscrapers while whistling.

Stillness is a state.
Equanimity is a process.

Meet Your Mind’s Ninja: Equanimity as Mental Motion

Equanimity isn’t about ignoring the chaos — it’s about dancing with it without spilling your coffee.
It’s the ability to hold your awareness wide enough to include sorrow and gratitude, anger and insight, loss and laughter — without needing one to cancel the other.

It’s not about “letting go” of judgment. It’s about multiplying perspectives so no one judgment can colonize your awareness.

In short:

  • Meditation says “focus on the breath.”

  • Mindfulness says “be here now.”

  • Equanimity says “sure, but also be everywhere else — just don’t freak out about it.”

The Baby Who Became the Buddha

One of the oldest metaphors for equanimity comes from Daoism — a baby, wide-eyed, blinking at nothing in particular, free from opinions, just vibing with existence.

Zhuangzi put it best:

“The baby stares all day without blinking... it has no preferences.”

That’s not because babies are enlightened. It’s because they haven’t yet learned how to hate broccoli or people who use the wrong fork.

True equanimity isn’t apathy. It’s the opposite of detachment. It’s the art of intimate, non-possessive engagement with reality. Like a poet who touches everything with words but grabs nothing.

Ram Dass, Perspective, and the Guru Who Played Mirror Games

When Ram Dass told his guru, “I’m too flawed to teach,” Neem Karoli Baba did what all good spiritual pranksters do — he walked around him like an art critic examining a sculpture, then said:
“I see no imperfections.”

It wasn’t a mystical spell. It was a shift in angle. What looked like flaw from one view became divinity from another.

Equanimity is that:
The freedom to swivel perspectives like a philosophical drone camera, without getting stuck in the angle of your inner critic.

Astronauts, PTSD, and the Great Overview Zoom-Out

Astronauts report the "Overview Effect" — that cosmic psychological facelift you get when looking at Earth from space.

From up there, nations vanish. Wars look petty. Your ego? That thing yelling about your inbox? Irrelevant.

That’s equanimity.
Not because you stopped caring, but because you saw more.

In PTSD, attention becomes a spotlight — locked on danger, hypervigilant, trapped. Equanimity suggests turning on the floodlights: yes, threat exists… but so do trees, birds, breeze, and the kindness of strangers.

Mobility, Not Morality: Equanimity Is Not the Ethical Police

Most spiritual discourses sell equanimity as a moral achievement — compassion, kindness, forgiveness, or Oprah. But that’s not its essence.

Equanimity isn’t nice.
It’s neutral.
Not neutral as in indifferent, but neutral as in free from bias, free from gravitational pull, free to move.

It doesn’t “disarm” judgment. It zooms out until judgment becomes one of many characters in the story — not the narrator.

Playfulness is the Point — Not Enlightenment™

To be equanimous is to play.
Not in the childish sense, but in the cosmic sense — like jazz improvisation, surfing, or flirting with the Divine while riding the subway.

Why are surfers more equanimous than monks?
Because they ride uncertainty. They don’t fight the wave. They become part of it. That’s equanimity — not resisting reality, but learning to ride it. With grace, grit, and the occasional faceplant.

Disequanimity Hurts — Ask a Combat Veteran

When you’re hyper-focused on threats, as in PTSD, your awareness becomes a prison of pattern recognition. You scan for exits, suspect everyone, and read smiles like they’re booby-trapped.

Equanimity here isn’t stillness. It’s expansion.

Not erasing fear. Not denying danger.
But folding those reactions into a wider awareness — the sound of a bird, the warmth of the sun, the laughter next door.

Not survival mode. Life mode.

The “Big Blooming Buzzing Confusion” We Call Reality

William James said it best: reality is a big blooming buzzing confusion. Equanimity doesn’t reduce that complexity — it learns to dance in it.

That means:

  • Accepting contradictions.

  • Feeling deeply, without needing resolution.

  • Holding paradox without imploding.

  • Laughing while crying.

  • Loving while letting go.

Equanimity is the freedom to feel everything without becoming any one thing.

It’s the philosopher’s glide, the poet’s wink, the monk’s belly-laugh.

TL;DR: Stillness is Dead. Long Live Movement.

If you want peace, stop looking for stillness.
Look instead for mobility.
Mental agility.
Perspective surfing.
Cognitive cartwheels.
A way of seeing that keeps changing shape — without losing center.

Equanimity isn’t the rock unmoved by waves.
It’s the dolphin riding them.

So next time someone tells you to be “calm,” don’t settle.
Be playful. Be wide. Be spacious. Be weird.

Because the real secret to equanimity?
It’s not sitting still.
It’s being in the world without being owned by it.

And if that’s not a superpower, I don’t know what is.

Coming up next week in Cognitive Circus Weekly™:

“Inner Peace or Inner Police? When Mindfulness Becomes a Control Freak”
“The Art of Letting Go While Screaming Internally”
“Why Your Anxiety Might Just Be a Failed Stand-Up Comedian in Your Brain”

Stay equanimous. Or don’t.
It’s all part of the dance.

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