Feel and Hear Everything
Pay attention to body sensations while listening to the sounds around you.
Equanimity is an attention skill that allows us to relate to sensations with less internal interference—less resisting of discomfort, less clinging to pleasure.
Maverick meditation teacher Shinzen Young developed four equations to differentiate equanimity at the sensory level from acceptance at the situational level.1
I’ve rearranged them slightly for clarity and to highlight their potential significance.
PAIN x RESISTANCE = SUFFERING
PAIN x EQUANIMITY = EMPOWERMENT
PLEASURE x GRASPING = FRUSTRATION + ADDICTION
PLEASURE x EQUANIMITY = SATISFACTION
These formulations are surprisingly useful because they distinguish between pain and the misery we experience, and between pleasure and the satisfaction we derive, revealing that our response shapes both. They reveal an underlying dynamic at work in every situation, using raw sensory phenomena and our ability to relate to them as observable, elemental factors.
This theoretical overview shows why working on our attentional skills can be transformative, but the real power becomes clear through application. Here’s a personal experience from the dental chair that illustrates equanimity in action.
When I anticipate pain that ultimately benefits me, I try to remind myself in advance to resist it less when the time comes. This is more easily said than done, of course. I’ve explored this extensively in the gym and training for marathons, but the dentist’s office also makes a great lab for such experiments, particularly when receiving novocaine injections before procedures that would be unbearable without them. How hard could it be to allow a needle into your gums for a moment, knowing it will soon be followed by the relief of numbness? Very hard, as it turns out.
I’ve observed two things about this challenge over the years. It’s nearly impossible to drop my resistance to the shot, and my body responds to waiting for the numbness with anxiety. My adrenaline shoots up, and I find myself lost in worrying about whether the drug will effectively block the pain. Trying to relate to brief, localized pain tends to be fraught.
One time, I decided to approach the challenge from a different angle. What if I could give the pain more room and treat the anxiety as an emotionally flavored body sensation to fold into a bigger canvas of acceptance? While I waited in the chair for the dentist to administer the shot, I started paying closer attention to everything I could feel and hear. Instead of focusing on my mouth, I felt my entire body. I also noticed a variety of sounds buzzing around me—the murmur of staff conversations, the treacle of light jazz piped throughout the office. I tried to take in as many sounds and sensations as possible so that the pain of the injection would have a much roomier stage for its brief appearance.
Not only was this approach effective, but it also came with a surprising realization. The pain seemed to want and need more space to expand, and my ability to provide it grew in relation to the level of discomfort itself. While feeling and hearing everything during my warm-up had been comforting, my spatial capacity to hold it increased significantly to accommodate the pain. This taught me a valuable lesson about proportion: while the pain in my gums was still present, it occupied much less of my attention than when I tried to focus solely on the mouth discomfort.
The experiment wasn’t about logically accepting that dental work is uncomfortable. It wasn’t intellectual or abstract. It didn’t transform the pain into bliss. By working at the sensory level, I discovered something surprising: my ability to hold raw sensations has an elasticity that’s only revealed under pressure.
I attribute this insight to the consistency of my practice, and I stay on the lookout for other unavoidable discomforts that might reveal what I’m capable of enduring.
I like how Charlotte Joko Beck summarizes this quandary2:
“We’re always looking for something, waiting for something—for the time which will be perfect, peaceful, better, different, happy. But we’re not suddenly going to find some mysterious place where all our troubles disappear. Our great life truly is just what we are at this very second.”
All of this implies a core equation at the heart of cultivating phenomenal awareness:
SENSATIONS x EQUANIMITY x TIME = AT HOME IN MORE OF YOUR LIFE
When you habitually observe the sensations of pain and pleasure with less interference, you feel better equipped to stay with whatever happens rather than seeking ways to improve or escape the experience of being alive.
This doesn’t mean you can turn pain into pleasure, but you can get better at savoring what’s pleasant, wrestling less with inevitable discomfort, and growing your capacity to hold it all.
Exercise
This exercise strengthens equanimity by exploring a broader-than-usual perspective on physical sensations and sounds.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Walking through the snow
Waiting in line at the grocery store
Going to a concert
