Equanimity is Not Stillness

As a non-English native speaker, big words are not my favorite. I choose simple words in my teaching as well.

Equanimity is not the word I used often, until the word stillness started to not sit well with me. In my Vinyasa/Power class, I ask for stillness, but I am not asking for the type of stillness where your body is simply unmoving; absence of movement. You still your physical body, so you can listen and experience your energetic body moving.

The buildings and dead body are example of stillness, inert energy and absent of motion. In nature and any living systems, stillness is rarely truly static. A tree appears still, yet water is moving through xylem, sugars are being transported, cells are respiring, stomata are opening and closing, fungi are exchanging nutrients belowground, and tissues are responding to light, temperature, gravity, and stress. The organism is composed while remaining intensely active.

Stillness is static. Equanimity is alive. Stillness is a pause in movement. Equanimity is the pause within movement. …So when do you practice stillness?

Savasana.

During savasana, which literally means corpse pose, you are practicing physical stillness first. Ideally, that creates the conditions for a deeper settling: breath softens, muscular effort drops, attention stops chasing the movement, and you observe what remains.

Stillness is useful. We need places where effort can stop and the body can settle. Savasana gives us that space. But outside of Savasana, life keeps moving. Breath changes. Thoughts change. Bodies change. Circumstances change.

The practice, then, may be less about finding stillness and more about finding steadiness inside all that movement. Because that’s neture of life itself.

That is the kind of equanimity I hope we practice together.

Love and gratitude,

Kanade