Equanimity, by and large, grows through reflecting on Dukkha, and reflecting on the 8 worldly conditions in particular. Praise and blame will come. Gain and loss will come. Fame and obscurity will come. Pleasure and pain will come. They will come. If we get high off getting the nice ones, we're going to drop down when we don't get the nice ones. To develop more Equanimity is to accept life as it is, so we have to reflect on life as it is. We have to reflect on the facts of life. We have to open up our awareness. We have to be able to see things more clearly. We have to be able to hear things clearly. We want to be able to know what we're doing. We want to be able to know what we're saying. We want to be able to know what we're thinking. We want to really be able to see life for what it actually is and then be able to accept it for what it is. So these are ways to develop more Equanimity.
Anytime that you see yourself getting sad, that's a sign your Equanimity isn't there. Anytime you see yourself getting too excited, the Equanimity is not there. You get off-balance in different ways. Often the Equanimity is missing. Whatever the off-balance is, you're often going to find the Equanimity's missing. So that's a sign to show you that you need more Equanimity, that you need to reflect more about life as it really is.
Somewhere in the scriptures or the commentaries, there is a description of the levels of happiness people experience. When an average person gets super happy, they bellow with laughter and they even roll over on the floor. A fairly wise person will laugh. A wiser person will smile a great deal. The Buddha curled his lips. Interesting. Now, this is not to say we're going to become an enlightened potato. It's only the Buddha who curled his lips. The Arahants and the other enlightened people, they smile. They feel that happiness, but it's not too high. They don't express it with a belly laugh and a roll on the floor.
Watch kids when they're excited. Stay around them if they're excited for 30 minutes straight. Then you'll see the kid collapse. This is especially true with the little ones, two-, three-, and four-year-olds. They get super excited for as much as 30 minutes straight, and then they are wiped out; they will scream, they will cry, they'll carry on. The up, the down, the up, the down - these things are basically Dukkha and this is what we want to avoid.
This is why Equanimity is so important. We're still going to appreciate life. We're going to find a happiness, but it won't be too high. And the gift of this practice is that sadness and the other "down" emotions can disappear. So when you think about it, for most people, you have the middle, you have the down, and you have the up. Some people think that in Buddhism, we're just going to end up in the middle. No, I don't believe that. What happens is that all of the "down" disappears. The middle becomes the lowest we go. The "up" shrinks but stays above the middle. So we still enjoy life and have a deep happiness, but it's just not too high. The Equanimity works to keep us from getting off-balance, but we don't become an enlightened potato.