The scientists came on retreat recently. I get to work with this brilliant cohort of researchers, educators, and physicians from all over the country, helping them with mindset and leadership. They arrived in Salt Lake City feeling anxious, even “terrified” about the abrupt pauses in their NIH communication, study sections, and funding. It’s hard enough to feel secure when your livelihood is at stake. An even deeper cut is when you feel hostility toward your work—which you define by a deep commitment to making an impact and years of hard-earned knowledge and training.
For many of us, our equanimity, a sense of composure and balance, has been thrown off lately with current events that seem baffling and frightening. We might go into a stress mode of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—that one’s new to me. I’ve been freezing lately, unsure of what to do. I understand fawn—I can be overly nice, trying to please people.
At the retreat we divided the scientists into two groups and gave them a stash of random art supplies and ridiculous metrics to build a sculpture in 45 minutes. Then at irregular intervals we sounded an alarm and disrupted their process—stealing supplies, knocking over what they built, giving and requiring new supplies (balloons), and throwing balls at them.
How do you think they responded? Did they get mad and fight? Did they give up—flight or freeze? Or fawn—try to appease us?
Buddhism teaches that two things affect our equanimity—aversion and attachment. We tend to avert discomfort and stress. We are attached to stability, familiar routines, and people we love–we protect these things.
Think about how you want to feel every day—maybe productive or harmonious. You might have aversion to a gazillion emails and someone difficult you dread seeing. You might be attached to knocking out a To-Do list, dinner on time, helping someone who makes your heart sing. Then the unexpected or unwanted happens. Your inbox goes nuts. You get a rejection. Someone you love is hurt. Someone is really late. You’re really late. Your equanimity is thrown off by the arrival of an aversion or a disrupted attachment.
Attachments hold our deepest commitments and challenges. We can hold on for a long time protecting something, mourning a loss, regretting something past. They can hijack your peace and sense of presence in life right now. Someone once asked the Dalai Lama how to handle the death of a beloved child. He responded that children are our strongest attachments, and losing one the hardest of all.
When we disrupted their equanimity at the retreat, they didn’t have any of the expected responses. Instead they got more focused, anticipated and strategized the disruptions, discussed and leveraged their individual strengths, and made the sculptures stronger. They were definitely attached to their team and work; however the stakes were low. They adapted, got resilient, and gained some empowerment. Not control, there’s a difference—you can’t control balls being thrown at you. But you can build shields, get better at deflecting, and even learn to laugh. You again? Bring it.
I don’t want to diminish the imbalance and disruption in the world now, even close to home where people have lost their jobs. I could lose mine since I’m paid by the scientists. I’m trying to get over my freeze, which is why you’re reading this. I have to adapt, which means do a better job contributing where I can, and be resilient, which means don’t despair…and keep moving along every day.
