Eight Worldly Winds I

In the Lokavipatti Sutta of the Buddhist Scriptures, the Buddha taught that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute (sometimes called the “eight worldly winds”) are constantly arising and passing away, beyond our control. We suffer when we cling to pleasure, gain, praise, and fame and wish them to be always present. When instead we get pain, loss, blame, and disrepute, we feel that something is terribly wrong, or that we’ve done something wrong, and we resist what is happening in the present moment, bringing ourselves more suffering.

The nature of our human existence is that we continually experience both pleasure and pain. If you think back to some difficult relationship or experience you have had, or your successes and failures in life, you may be able to recognize, from your own experience, when your desire to hold on to the pleasure and reject the pain contributed to your suffering.

So, how are we to work with the tendency to cling to or push away our experiences so that we can avoid further suffering?

We can help ourselves gain stability in life by cultivating the quality of equanimity or balance. Equanimity is the ability to be fully present to all of our changing experience with impartiality and acceptance. Equanimity does not equate to indifference, rather it involves developing our capacity to love and accept whatever arises, rather than trying to control what can never be controlled.

Working with our Compassionate Presence to Feelings practice, we learn to be intimate with all that arises from within the safety and protection of our field of care. We find we can be supported by our innate sense of spacious awareness and compassion as we approach what we habitually want to avoid.