The Pull of Preference and the Steadiness of Equanimity
El tirón de la preferencia y la firmeza de la ecuanimidad
A reflection on how the mind's habitual preferences shape experience, and how equanimity allows awareness to remain steady amid pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tones.
The Pull of Preference and the Steadiness of Equanimity
A reflection on how the mind's habitual preferences shape experience, and how equanimity allows awareness to remain steady amid pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tones.
I'd like to explore something that sits at the very heart of our practice: the way preference operates in the mind, and what it means to meet experience without being pulled by it.
How feeling tone drives reaction
Every moment of contact, every moment something arises in awareness, there is a feeling tone. Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is not something we choose. It simply appears. But what happens next is where the whole machinery of suffering gets set into motion. When something pleasant arises, the mind leans toward it, wants more of it, tries to hold on. When something unpleasant arises, the mind pushes it away, contracts, resists. And when something neutral arises, the mind tends to glaze over, to not even notice it, to fall into a kind of dullness or boredom.
This is the pattern. It runs constantly, and most of the time we don't see it happening. We just find ourselves caught: chasing after one thing, running from another, sleepwalking through everything else.
Equanimity as a different relationship to experience
Equanimity is not indifference. This is an important distinction. Indifference is a kind of checked-out, flat state where we simply don't care. Equanimity is the opposite of that. It is a deeply alert, present quality of mind that can be with whatever is arising, pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, without needing it to be different. The awareness stays steady. The heart stays open. But the reactivity, the compulsive grabbing and pushing, that softens.
When equanimity is present, you can feel something pleasant and simply know it as pleasant. You don't have to chase it. You can feel something unpleasant and simply know it as unpleasant. You don't have to fight it. This sounds simple, but it is a radical shift in how the mind relates to experience.
Preference as identity
One of the deeper layers here is that our preferences are closely tied to our sense of who we are. "I am the kind of person who likes this, who dislikes that." The whole structure of identity is built on preference. So when we start to let go of the automatic reactivity around preference, it can feel disorienting. It can feel like we're losing something. But what we're actually losing is a contraction, a narrowing. What opens up in its place is something much wider and much more free.