Disengaged equanimity

During a recent dinner with a friend we were discussing how words come to have meaning. Because we attribute meaning to words based on our lived experience, words can change in meaning over time for you personally, or mean different things to different people. Like a color-seeing person and a colour-blind person both growing up calling the same thing “blue” but experiencing that in different ways. One such word we stumbled upon was equanimity. A word meaning peaceful, or mentally calm especially under stress or in a tense situation, we talked about how once you’ve lived through a moment like that and tried to cultivate equanimity in the face of tension you know there is more than one flavour of equanimity. By the end of the conversation we decided that it would be more useful if we referred either to engaged equanimity, or disengaged equanimity. Engaged equanimity meaning mental calmness and even temperedness whilst fully engaging with your own and others’ experience of the tension. Disengaged equanimity to mean calmness reached through withdrawal from engagement either through choosing only to observe the moment or choosing to feel separate from the experience. Connected calm or disconnected calm.

Sometimes as a facilitator you need to step back and observe, or disconnect personally from the moment in order to direct the group productively, and so it becomes a practice to clear out our internal responses to the topics. I used to have a saying - "before we can do the work, we must get empty". If you master the practice of neutralising your perspective in order to help a group navigate a conflict or intense moment - then disengaged equanimity might end up part of your invisible toolkit. Sometimes it does save us, so we get really good at it. But recently I have been seeing it more connected to the Framework Fetish - both can become a form of laziness. It’s easy to show up to a company meeting thinking about how we’re thinking about the work, it’s easy because you’re not in the ring with the messiness of how it feels to do the work and try to talk about it. Another facilitator friend recently said to me "sometimes I just slip into being totally content agnostic and I don't always remember to care about the topic we're discussing". I think facilitation is normally higher quality when there's unique attention given to the nature of the topics and the struggles people have to talk about them. I'm sure most people would agree. How do we actually practice that in tricky moments?

It’s easy to ignore negative feedback about how the workshop failed to meet a participants expectations, it’s easy because inside yourself you have decided that they just didn’t understand why you did it the way you did it. You have written them off. But instead how can we show up for engaged equanimity? How can we wrestle with the real issues in the room with our hearts empathetically as well as intellectually wrestling with how to direct the flow of those emotions? I realised I could engage with an angry participant in the workshop in Canada and rather than disengaging, I asked the angry woman why she felt the way she felt during the break. As she told me about how she expected the workshop to be about an expert giving a presentation but instead she was just talking to people she didn't know in a variety of smaller and bigger discussions, and suddenly I empathised with her response, we talked it through. There was no practical resolution, but we understood each other. And after walking in and out all day, speaking over other people and complaining loudly to other participants within my earshot, she sat down and silently listened to the long closing circle. And we both won.