September 04, 2026

Equal in Victory and Defeat

Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called yoga.

These words come from Krishna's counsel to the warrior Arjuna, who has dropped his bow on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, paralyzed by grief and doubt before a war against his own kin. Krishna does not tell him to feel nothing, but to act fully while releasing his grip on how the results will turn out. The passage names this steadiness itself as yoga, a union with something larger than the mind's constant grasping for good outcomes and fear of bad ones. In the Eastern traditions, equanimity is not detachment from life but full engagement with it, done without the mind's compulsive need to control what comes next. Like a mountain unmoved by weather, the practitioner learns to do the work well and let the results arrive as they will.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Equanimity →