Seeds of equanimity. Knowing and being

“Seeds of Equanimity deftly provides the reader with a praxis for negotiating the human journey from a disequanimous to an equanimous mind. Uebel makes it possible to traverse these way stations with a quintessentially rich menu of scholarship from Western and Eastern philosophies, an interdisciplinary mix of philosophy, literary history, and folk tales, inter alia. This book is an invitation to consider abandoning binaries of thought that disturb an equanimous mind in favour of more fluid and fertile integrations that inform equanimity. I warmly recommend this book to clinicians and interdisciplinary scholars in the human sciences.” Maurice Apprey, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia School of Medicine This work is an innovative, daring introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity. Michael Uebel challenges the view that equanimity is the effect of a method aiming at states of impartial quiescence and solidity. Reanimating equanimity, Seeds allows new understandings of the concept to emerge through creative and rigorous attention to its genealogy as an idea centrally defined by flexibility, multiperspectivism, and non-teleological attitudes. Responding to the vertiginous increase in writings on mindful living, Uebel productively blends both Eastern and Western philosophies, generating a rich constellation of ideas framing equanimity as an epistemological mode and existential condition.