Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Teacher Valham guides a meditation on equanimity, the foundational mental quality for developing genuine bodhicitta and universal compassion. He begins by grounding the practice in breath and loving-kindness, then explores how self-attachment and possessiveness fragment our perception into friends, enemies, and strangers—categories that are actually fluid and temporary. Through careful analysis, practitioners examine how people shift between these roles over time and across circumstances, discovering that such divisions rest on superficial, changeable impressions rather than truth. Valham teaches a systematic technique: visualizing known people in each category, recognizing the kindness all have shown at various times, then gradually expanding this equanimous perspective to include all beings. He emphasizes that even a single moment of genuine equanimity can transform daily life and reduce conflict; the meditation concludes with a dedication that this equanimity serve as a stable foundation for compassionate intent toward all living beings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 Equanimity.mp3
UUID: 4909c640-3284-484e-a5cd-842df9bfec9b
Teacher: Valham
Collection: Guided LR Meditation (Valham)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,325
So let’s just take a couple of deep breaths and relax your body and mind before we start. Follow your breath for a couple of minutes. And now let’s think of the loving compassionate thought of bodhicitta. This one awakens the wish, actually from the sense of responsibility.
Sense of responsibility for the happiness of others, or a sense of responsibility for others as much as we can. A sense of oneself having the responsibility for others as much as one can. That feeling of responsibility, that arises out of compassion, wishing to relieve others from suffering. Compassion in turn, you know, depends on feeling love, having a loving feeling towards others. Or in other words, you know, wishing others to experience happiness.
Love, that comes out of recognizing the kindness of others, and then wishing to repay it. And so we can only feel the kindness of all others. You know, we can only feel others regard others as our benefactors. If we are free from partiality, not partially feeling close to some, and distant from others with aversion. So in this way, you see equanimity is the very foundation for the whole for developing for the whole progress to develop bodhicitta.
Without equanimity, our bodhicitta won’t have a firm basis. Actually, probably the basis of bodhicitta is compassion for oneself or renunciation. Then also after, you see, that compassion is developed, then the equanimity becomes the foundation for the compassion. Universal kindness, bodhicitta towards others. bodhicitta, feeling the responsibility happiness of others.
So then if we investigate, you know, why do we feel unequal with others? Why we divide up the world into friends, enemy, and strangers? And that’s because of the sense of I and the self attachment it arises, and the possessiveness towards, you see, my body, my friends, my possessions. So that whoever interferes with these, I come to be regarded as an enemy, dislikable person. And then whoever harms and increases our sense of well-being in our possessions, that becomes the friend, the likable person.
And somebody that does neither, neither help nor harm, remains as an estranged person. And we feel more or less indifferent. So you can see with this type of attitude towards others, it’s not possible to generate genuine love and compassion. We will always be biased. And actually, when we investigate, you see, we can see that this way of thinking is actually very superficial.
It’s not true. If we investigate why we feel close, if if we would visualize, you know, just remember your friends, like a group of friends, some people you dislike, and the third category of strangers. When you remember these beings in your own life, and you ask yourself, why do I feel close only to one group of people? Usually, you find it’s because you remember something pleasant they did. When you think of them, you remember something something nice they did.
When you think of the enemy, why we feel distant from these people? It’s because when we think of them, we remember something nasty. It’s not that they always have been, you know, nice or nasty. It’s just that that’s what comes to our mind when we think of them. Yes.
Let’s try to seriously investigate and try to find out and see if these are really true, or isn’t it that they actually change place. Stranger become friend, friend becomes stranger, enemy become friend, friend becomes enemy. We can ask ourselves, where are our childhood friends? And the person we dislike so much, surely when we look in, you know, to our connection with this person, we find they also sometimes benefited us. These discriminations are not so true.
They’re just temporary, just dependent on our state of mind. So now try to analyze yourself, and don’t think that we are trying to make everybody into strangers, or into somebody we can feel indifferent about, that we don’t have to engage with. What we try is to go completely beyond these discriminations and see that ourselves and others, we are exactly equal in being each other’s friend enemy and stranger, just at different times. So, you know, thoughts like these on equanimity will completely transform and make our mind very healthy, make us able to open our heart for every living being. Not close our heart, you know, and only keep it open for some.
And that is the main purpose of equanimity. To enable us to open our heart for every living being, no matter how they temporarily appear to us, this way or that way. So think in a gentle way, not too hard, not too pushy. Just go into the memory. You see, you feel you visualize first.
You remember your friends, and then check how they actually changed. The same, then then you go to the enemies, people you dislike, and recognize also their kindness. Then you check the group or the strangers. First, let’s do that. So you see, when you research among the people you know, you probably cannot find a single friend that is a concrete friend, has always been friend, and will always be friend.
The same, it doesn’t feel always comfortable to put that enemy in the category of real enemies. They also helped sometime in the past. And also in the future, I can completely change. And then the stranger can turn into a friend or an enemy any moment, just by one word sometime. Just even by a smile sometime.
And also consider yourself. Maybe we ourselves are some people’s friend, some people’s other’s enemy, and yet again, other people’s stranger. So what does that make ourselves? Are we a real friend, a real stranger, or a real enemy? Probably, we are sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, sometimes stranger, just depending on conditions.
So think that is true also for these categories of people that I discriminate against, that I fix in my mind. So now first, you try to equalize people you thought about. Try to see how we change. Even sometime in one day we change. And throughout life, for sure, we change.
It’s not fixed the way it appears today. So you try to determine the equality there within the groups. They are changing group all the time. So all these beings, in fact, are equal in being each other’s friend, enemy, and stranger. You try to generate this feeling.
If you manage to generate it a little bit towards your own acquaintances, then you try to expand it to look at beings outside your immediate circle. I think they too are equal in being my friend, enemy, and stranger. They’ve been that countless times. Try to generate that kind of smooth and even feeling that is able to embrace all living beings in a sense of one unity, in a feeling of one universal feeling of equanimity. If you reach that feeling, and then you put single pointed concentration onto it, and just merge your mind with a thought of equanimity, opening your heart equally in all the ten directions.
As a conclusion, we can think that in our ordinary daily life, you see conquering our enemies, destroying our enemies, and protecting our friends is the source of all conflicts, all quarrels, all hatred between people and between countries, distrust, ending in war, conflicts. If everyone could experience just even one moment, the taste of equanimity, problems like those will start to fade away. After even just one session, you know, practicing equanimity, reaching a state of equanimity. When you go outside, you enter a completely different world. So let’s dedicate the merits, the benefits of the meditation, and think, may we be able to lay the foundation with equanimity in order to build the palace of bodhicitta in our mind and become protectors of universal living beings and may people everywhere, due to these merits, think of benefiting one another.