5. The Role of Hope and Fear, Equanimity and Reactivity

The role of hope and fear, equanimity and reactivity: 

We may have noticed from our responses to pleasant and unpleasant events that there is a human tendency for us to be tossed about in our search for pleasure and in our avoidance of painful experiences. We habitually desire experiences which are pleasurable rather than unpleasant, rather than failure, gain rather than loss, praise rather than blame, being recognized rather than obscurity. 
 
We can tend to become strongly attached to the positive aspects of these: pleasure, gain, success, praise and recognition, and want to cling to these experiences. However, things do not last, and in becoming attached to these experiences, we can set ourselves up for suffering, when the winds of opportunity change direction. The experiences of pain can feel all the worse when we have a sense of what we have lost. To fall from success, or praise or recognition into failure, blame or obscurity is all the greater if we have a sense that our well-being and happiness was dependent upon them. 
 

We can sum up these reactive tendencies into two prime forces, those of hope and fear. Caught up in this is our sense of anticipation, expectation, wishing for things to be a certain way, expecting things to be a certain way, fearing things not turning out the way we want, disappointment when they don’t, and so on. We can recognize how often our thinking is dominated by our hopes and fears and how far this can take us from mindfulness of what is actually here and an open acceptance of life as it is. We can see how much these reactive forces can contribute to our day to day suffering. 
 

Mindfulness and acceptance can help to anchor us when life tosses us about in this way. Eventually, through our practice, we can start to develop a stance of equanimity, which can offer us real freedom through the abandonment of hope and fear in our lives. This is described by Tara Bennett-Goleman as follows: 
 
Equanimity is a profound quality of mindfulness that cultivates the ability to let go. With equanimity, we can acknowledge that things are as they are, even though we may wish otherwise. It allows us to accept things that we have no control over, and it allows us to have the courageousness of heart to stay open in the face of adversity. Equanimity can be used as a practice, to help bring a mental ease to turbulent emotions, like anxiety, worry and fear, frustration and anger. 
 
Of course, equanimity does not imply indifference of that we should simply accept everything as it is – injustice, unfairness, and suffering all call for action to make what changes we can. But even as we do so, an inner state of equanimity will make us more effective. And when it comes to those problems in life over which we have no control – and to our emotional reactions – equanimity offers a great inner resource: a sense of non-reactivity, of patience and acceptance. 
 
 
From "Emotional Alchemy: How your mind can heal your heart", Rider Books, 2001