Live Lightly

Why equanimity isn't what you think it is and how metabolizing your emotions is the key

My last post Sacred Secret struck a chord with several readers, with a few reaching out to me privately to express what a great sense of relief they felt after reading it.

There is a widespread misconception in society that those who display deep sensitivities and feel emotions with a great intensity are somehow handicapped compared to others. That they lack an ‘even temperament’, that they are irrational individuals who lack self-restraint and the ability to self-regulate. Within spiritual communities, it is often seen as a sign that a person ‘lacks awareness’ or is still ‘asleep’ in many ways, since the hallmark of an awakened person is widely believed to be one of emotional equanimity.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sensitivity to one’s environment can come in many forms - sensual, emotional, intellectual, intuitive - and often people who have these sensitivities will display them in all these forms. Such sensitivity is a double-edged sword because it can facilitate a more intimate relationship with life yet can also amplify suffering. That is the price one pays for the privilege of such intimacy.

People who are generally of a more sensitive orientation are also drawn to spirituality for two reasons. The first is that they seek a more intimate relationship with reality as they are fundamentally orientated towards craving greater intimacy. The second is that they seek relief from the onslaught of suffering to which they are particularly prone on account of their sensitivity. Unfortunately, there is a potential conflict of interest here. Because intimacy and suffering often go hand in hand.

You can think of it as walking on grass with bare feet instead of with shoes on. Your relationship to the grass is far more intimate - you can feel the texture of the grass, its coolness, its wetness, its freshness, its aliveness when your feet are bare. Yet, if you were to walk on a dirt path filled with sharp stones, those same bare feet would cause you a lot of pain compared to if you were wearing sturdy shoes.

Moving through life with a bare soul instead of one perpetually clothed in a sturdy and armored ego is a similar phenomenon - whereby we are able to see, feel and sense life in a profound and intimate way and yet when exposed to the inevitable harshness of life’s circumstances we feel their barbs and jagged edges ever more profoundly.

This then leads to the question - what is ‘equanimity’ then? Is it truly an unfeeling, unresponsive and unperturbed state? For that would be irreconcilable with the sensitivity required to be truly intimate with life.

This question is at the heart of what I see as a massive misunderstanding many spiritual seekers, and even many teachers, hold. And so, when they strive for equanimity through spiritual practice what they are really learning is to bypass their own sensitivity. In a bid to become unresponsive and unperturbed, they begin to actively deaden their senses, numb their emotions, curb their intuition and adopt a stance of intellectual apathy.

In other words, theirs is a process of desensitization to life which is completely antithetical to what spirituality is about.

My own approach is the opposite. If you are a sensitive person by nature you want to preserve that sensitivity because that is your portal to cultivating an intimate relationship with life. And if you are not sensitive by nature, then cultivating that sensitivity should become the focus.

This brings me to the feedback that some of my readers provided me after my last article, that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. While they felt exonerated in their own minds from the guilt of carrying these sensitive dispositions and felt grateful that they could now see their own sensitivity as an asset and not a liability - the question still remained: How does one deal with suffering if one has a high sensitivity?

This is a question that I also pondered on for many years. And it wasn’t until I had children that I began to understand.

I have always maintained that nature and children are some of the greatest spiritual teachers we have. When both my daughters were infants, I spent hours simply watching them interact with the world. I was fascinated by the curiosity, the rapt attention and the deep intimacy they were capable of. As parents we allowed them to take risks. We didn’t bubble wrap furniture or foam pad soft corners. We didn’t gate off sections of the house or block access to hot surfaces. We allowed them to figure it out.

What particularly fascinated me was how deeply emotional and expressive my children could be. How profoundly they could suffer and yet how quickly they could move on from it. If they bumped their heads or scraped a knee they would bawl at the top off their lungs as if the earth had collapsed and yet, only a minute later even as the tears were still freshly glistening on their cheeks, they’d be laughing hysterically at the cat attempting to play with a ball of yarn or some other such mundane phenomenon.

Deep misery to profound joy in 60 seconds flat.

I wanted to understand what mechanism allowed my children to retain their intimacy and sensitivity to life and yet move on from pain and suffering so easily. Because my own approach, of protecting myself by buffering against life with all kinds of ego-based mechanisms, might have taken the sting out of suffering but had also compromised my ability to be sensitive to life.

And then it slowly dawned on me. None of it was serious to them. Everything was play. Eating was play. Playing was play. Just lying on the ground and staring at the ceiling fan was play. Chewing on a toy was play. Taking a bath was play. Pooping in their diapers was play.

And because it was play, nothing was worth fixating on. If one form of play was causing pain or discomfort, they would have a good cry about it to release that emotion of intense unhappiness and then move on at the first opportunity to some other form of play.

I wondered: “Could it be that my sensitivity to life, the intensity with which I live, is not really the problem here? Perhaps, the real problem is that I take everything that happens to me too seriously?”

Coming back to the example of walking with bare feet. If you have ever walked on a rocky beach bare-footed, you know it’s not a comfortable experience. However, you also know that there is a way to walk on the rocky surface that minimizes the pain you feel. And that is by stepping lightly. You walk in a manner that looks more like tiptoeing than striding, selectively choosing the spots you step on, and you don’t put all your weight on any one foot. Most importantly, you keep moving, stepping lightly and with discernment.

That is also how I have learned to live my life while retaining my sensitivity to it.

I live lightly.

I try not to take anything that happens either too personally or too seriously. Shit happens to me as it does to everyone else. But I don’t claim any ownership over it. I simply deal with it the best way I know how. And if things improve, then great, and if they don’t, I don’t spend any energy beating myself up about how I could have done better. I simply accept that a portion of my life (and everyone else’s life) is going to be a shitty experience. I harbor no delusions about making it all rainbows and unicorns.

When the good times roll, I have a whale of a time laughing raucously and straight from my belly. When the sad times roll, I rant or sob it out as openly and gut-wrenchingly as it needs to happen. This approach is not only therapeutic but necessary.

I call it emotional metabolism.

Emotions, like food, are a form of energy. And just like food, they can either accumulate in the body or be metabolized by the body.

When emotions accumulate, they lead to buildup similar to how calories accumulated and not spent lead to buildup of fat deposits in the body. And that emotional buildup, over time, begins to compromise our psychological fitness, makes us lethargic, unhealthy, and in extreme cases causes physiological impacts.

Children have a high emotional metabolism, just as they do a high biological metabolism. They are able to feel emotions and process them immediately. However, over time as they learn that expressing emotions is not always socially acceptable, they begin to repress them and, in doing so, begin to accumulate buildup which then plagues them for the rest of their lives.

The vast majority of adults have no idea what healthy emotional expression looks like. Especially, when related to darker emotions such as anger, frustration, envy, anxiety, fear, guilt and shame. Which is why people seek therapists, life coaches and spiritual teachers to help them deal with these pent-up reservoirs of unreleased emotion they harbor within themselves that cause them to suffer and derail their lives. It’s the equivalent of an obese person using a personal trainer for help losing weight.

There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to a therapist or a coach or a teacher just as there is nothing wrong with reaching out to a personal trainer. But it isn’t necessary. And it especially isn’t required.

The human body is meant to be active through walking, bending, climbing, lifting, pushing, pulling etc. And as long as we are engaged in activities, whether natural or contrived, in which the body is being consistently used in that manner there is no need for external intervention or guidance. Coupled with a balanced diet - if one simply incorporated an active lifestyle, they would consistently shed any accumulated weight over time - barring any medical conditions that may have caused the weight gain.

The energetic body is similarly meant to express any accumulated energies using the outlet of emotion. Any emotion, when repressed, can turn toxic or psychologically detrimental over time. This includes even positive emotions like joy. There are cultures in which expressing joy or excitement is met with social disapproval. Appearing “too happy” is seen as childish or immature. In these cultures, people will often repress feelings of delight and as a result this repression of joy becomes a source for much suffering later.

Physical fitness and emotional fitness both depend on the same principle of metabolizing energy that has been absorbed from the environment and expressing it out of our systems. How one chooses to do that depends entirely on the person.

There are some people whose idea of exercise is running for hours a day. Others prefer gardening. I personally enjoy hiking with my dog and lifting weights. Manual labor is another popular option. Some activities are gentler, others are more explosive. Some happen over longer periods of time, others happen in short and intense bursts. But as long as that physical exertion occurs it really doesn’t matter how it occurs.

The same goes for our emotional expression. No one’s life is easy. We all have trials and tribulations. We all have challenges and hardships that cause us stress and anxiety. But do we allow ourselves to feel it? And in feeling it, do we allow ourselves to express it?

A question I often get asked is around how to express anger or sadness, which are typically frowned upon in society, in a way that doesn’t involve us yelling at people, getting violent or embarrassing ourselves. After all, unlike infants who can get away with throwing a tantrum in the middle of a store or bawling at the top of their lungs in public - adults have social repercussions to face.

Let me be clear that by suggesting that people be emotionally expressive I am not advocating that they become emotionally reactive. For example, a good friend of mine has a unique way of processing sorrow. Each night he sits by himself in his living room for an hour listening to classical music and during this time he allows his tears to flow freely allowing the sorrow to move through his system and using the music to facilitate the process. This inevitably leaves him feeling lighter and happier. Another friend of mine has always had a fiery temperament and he uses competitive sport as an outlet for any pent-up frustration or rage he carries.

These are examples rather than prescriptions. The point is that emotions must be metabolized otherwise they accumulate. And interestingly, sensitive people have high emotional metabolisms. They naturally feel things intensely and process them quickly. Which is why repression has particularly adverse effects on such individuals.

Therefore, the great tragedy that many spiritual seekers (especially those drawn to non-duality), who tend to be deeply sensitive by nature, begin adopting excessively repressive approaches to their own emotions believing that this makes them somehow more “equanimous”. In the long-term, this results in a deadening of their own personalities, a listless disposition, a lack of an edge or sense of humor and a generally apathetic demeanor when engaging with people or with life. This they sadly conflate with “contentment”. But all it really is, is an absence of aliveness. They have become numbed to life.

Instead, learn to live lightly.

For the sensitive soul, do not convince yourself that your sensitivity is a disadvantage. Do not seek to avoid, bolster or numb yourself to life. Do not seek to repress your deep feeling and emotion for fear that you will be judged harshly by others, or even worse, by yourself. Instead, see how this sensitivity is a portal towards cultivating an intimacy with life through which the imaginary borders between you and life gradually dissipate.

It is not through unfeeling that we become equanimous, it is not by being unresponsive that we grow contented, it is not by becoming unaffected that we become peaceful. Rather, it is by feeling even more profoundly, by responding even more intimately, by being affected even more deeply by even the most mundane of happenings that we discover the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Through living lightly, we find ourselves en-lightened.

I will leave you with this excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s book, Island, that recently appeared on my Substack, which makes the point beautifully:

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.

Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.

Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.

Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.

Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.

When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.

No rhetoric, no tremolos,

no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.

And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.

Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.

There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,

trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.

That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling,

on tiptoes and no luggage,

not even a sponge bag,

completely unencumbered.”