Written by Rebecca D'Onofrio

“Thoughts are like passing clouds and emotions are like the weather. Some days we may experience dark skies with rainfall, other days we may experience heavy clouds that keep rolling in, and, still, on other days we may experience a perfect sunny day. None of it is particularly problematic from the point of view of the sky.”

Many meditation traditions often claim peace and equanimity as a benefit of the practice but these are often misunderstood. It isn’t the conventional superficial kind of peace that depends on having an easy, comfortable time — it’s much more expansive and dynamic than that.

During meditation practice, and mindfulness in particular, we are cultivating the ability to not get so carried away by the speed, activity, and content of our mind and when that happens, our mind begins to settle into a natural state of ease and relaxation regardless of what’s occurring.

As the fog of discursiveness begins to lift in the light of mindfulness, our mind starts to become naturally clear, lucid, and open. We are able to experience our body and sense perceptions more fully. There is a sense of embodying ourselves in the present moment and a sense of complete accommodation of our mind.

At first, we may only experience brief glimpses of this more expansive state of being, but as we continue to practice mindfulness, our ability to maintain this state of mind will strengthen. But it cannot be done by force; it happens as a natural byproduct of releasing our discursive impulses, attachments, and aversions.

As we let go of all that turbulence, we discover that our mind is naturally clear, vast, and brilliant. It can be likened to the bright blue sky. Thoughts are like passing clouds and emotions are like the weather. Some days we may experience dark skies with rainfall, other days we may experience heavy clouds that keep rolling in, and, still, on other days we may experience a perfect sunny day.

None of it is particularly problematic from the point of view of the sky — it doesn’t chase after sunny days or run away from stormy ones. The sky is always present and its nature never changes regardless of the weather. Our mind is the same way.

Rather than wrestling with our thoughts and emotions, hoping to pin them down into submission, we can welcome equanimity as a dynamic process of accommodation that allows us to embrace our experience exactly as it is without the need to push some experiences away and pull others in.

The absence of this push-pull struggle is what leads to true genuine peace and the dawn of meditative equanimity.