How do we retain passion while accepting all of life equally?

by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Enlightenment is not a state of passivity or indifference. Equanimity involves seeing through your wisdom eye and not through your negative emotions, such as anger or attachment. It is important to understand that it’s possible to live life with equanimity as well as with enthusiasm, inspiration, and a loving heart.

It seems in the West we associate passion with uncontrolled emotion. Emotion drives us toward what seems shiny and promising. But it is possible to experience strong emotion, or strong enthusiasm, or inspiration, without being driven by emotion. You must guide emotion — You are the source of that emotion, and also the driver. You guide that emotion and live and act with it, but you are in control. Equanimity means total control of our emotions.

While we usually equate control with tension and effort, that’s not the case here. A good athlete will perform with grace and strength, with no extra tension. A confident and skilled driver will drive a car with good control, but not tension. If you drive too loosely, and without respect for the conditions of the road and the capacity of the vehicle, you will lose control of the car. But if you are a good driver, you are in relation to all conditions present and are not tense. The fundamental requirement for control is that you are open. You are open and you are aware in that openness.

In Tibetan Buddhism there is a saying that samsaric beings are controlled by their karma and their emotions, while enlightened beings are not. If we are honest, we cannot say we are not controlled by our emotions, but how much we suffer is a question of how much we are controlled by our emotions. Are you guiding your emotions, or are your emotions propelling you in certain directions? With open awareness, you are not the victim of conditions; rather, you are able to guide your emotional energies, and are therefore free to experience curiosity, enthusiasm, and joy in living.

You can be open and love someone and not be attached. You can be excited about something without being bound by the expectation of a specific outcome. Unfortunately, people often become excited about an imagined outcome rather than experience joy in the moment for its own sake. You can just be excited. Open excitement! Open joy! This very openness is what makes the experience of love strong. One might call it passionate, but it is open — and that is what makes the difference between love that benefits and love that causes us to suffer. When you are open, you have more ability to guide your love, and you are less a victim of the pain of love, because if something goes wrong, you easily let it go. Openness has a lot to do with letting go. When you let go, you reconnect with unconditional openness and discover love, joy, and compassion, which arise naturally.

Our equanimity comes from open awareness itself, and when we connect with that source again and again, our life is dynamic and alive — not passive, dull, or disconnected. Each time you let go of your attachment, you reconnect with open awareness. This is what is known as the path. We continuously recognise that the source of our love is not in the other person, and that the source of our enthusiasm is not in this job or that project. This frees us to engage fully in life and to allow our life to become our path.