This week we’re hanging with Michael Uebel, psychotherapist, researcher, longtime mindfulness teacher for military veterans, and author of Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being.
How did we all meet? Michael sent Jeff an email that said something like, “I hear you’re obsessed with equanimity… so am I!” Jeff read the new book and could not put it down. So here we are, nerding out about equanimity :)
Michael’s whole project pushes back on the idea of equanimity as some kind of unshakable stillness, a “sitting like a mountain” you achieve and then hold onto. Instead, drawing on Taoism, Zen, and a long line of Western thinkers from Thoreau to Heidegger, he reframes it as something much more alive: a continual rebalancing, an “essential mobility,” a relationship to the world rather than a fortress against it.
We talk about:
Why equanimity is not stillness so much as a continuous process of rebalancing
Uncoupling equanimity from acceptance and non-judgment
How working with military veterans and PTSD shaped Michael’s whole approach to the practice
The difference between “space around” an experience and “space inside” a sensation
Letting your focal point and focal periphery trade places, and how the oscillation between the two can help keep us loose.
The Adventure:
Michael leads us through a space practice: settle into your seat, let the breath be natural, and start by noticing sensation. Pressure, tingling, the air on your skin.
Then the shift: let go of the idea of arms, legs, a body at all, and turn attention instead to the space around you. Above your head. To your left and right. Below you, behind you, and finally stretching out in front as far as it can go, until there’s a sense of boundless openness with everything, thoughts, feelings, sensations, simply arising and dissolving inside it.
The throughline for the whole practice is that whatever we can give space to, can move.
Let us know in the comments: What shifted, lifted, or got more spacious for you in this practice?
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for tuning in!
Michael’s Links:
Michael’s research on Academia.edu
YouTube: @MichaelUebelPhD
