Chris Levine: Equanimity | 2003, Lightness of being | 2008

Mindfulness, 2021

A recent surge of interest in equanimity as an important and transformative dimension of the cultivation of mindfulness can benefit from discerning different types of equanimity recognized in the Buddhist traditions, such as between equanimity as a divine abode or immeasurable and equanimity as the absence of compulsive reactivity by way of likes and dislikes. In order to provide an early Buddhist background to a more fine-grained understanding of the construct of equanimity, the present article surveys key passages on equanimity in their relationship to mindfulness.

Mindfulness, 2014

This essay is based on the chance observation of the use of exaggerated asymmetry by Lucian Freud in his controversial portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Through Formal, Stylistic, Contextual , Historical , Scientific ,Philosophical and Aesthetic Analyses of the work it is intended to argue that this painting is in many ways atypical of Freud’s work. It is proposed that while the painting is stylistically very similar to his previous work, the nature of the sitter and the artists shared commonalities and growing introspection have produced a remarkably revealing work, largely unappreciated by the audience.

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, the so-called 'Ditchley Portrait' (National Portrait Gallery, London) is among the most well-known and iconic images of the queen, yet its precise meaning remains uncertain. While historians and art historians agree that it was commissioned by the courtier Sir Henry Lee as an appeal for Elizabeth’s forgiveness, no analysis has convincingly explained how the allegorical tempest, which is unique among images of Elizabeth, conveys her pardon. This essay demonstrates how the Ditchley Portrait represents Elizabeth in the guise of the goddess Fortune, an identity central to the visual culture of Elizabeth's court--yet unmentioned to date. Her position balancing atop a globe in a landscape divided into stormy and sunny zones explicitly invokes iconographic traditions of Fortune. With its conjunction of Latin mottoes, vernacular sonnet, and icon of the queen, the Ditchley Portrait comprises a grandiose emblem ratifying the queen as Eliza Fortuna, arbiter of her nation’s destiny and Lee’s fate. Ultimately, the portrait renegotiates the contentious nature of female authority while also providing its patron with a powerful talisman against misfortune.

The Unveiled Queen: When Beauty Holds the Eye, 2025

This paper presents a resonance-based reinterpretation of the Burney Relief, a high-relief terracotta plaque from the Old Babylonian period, long mischaracterized through fragmented mythology and institutional taxonomy. We propose that the central figure, often labeled a goddess or demon, is, in truth, a sovereign resonance seal: a cosmological interface encoding the physics of memory, symbolic asymmetry, and the passage of soul between realms. Applying a Tier 0–5 symbolic resonance framework, we analyze her physical form not as iconography, but as infrastructure. Her dual-body posture, complete on one side, fractured on the other, mirrors the cosmic split between remembrance and forgetting. In her right hand, she holds a fully realized Axis-Eye: a resonance instrument predating the Ankh, Shen, and Was. In her left, its faded echo. Her navel, wings, talons, and gaze align not with divinity as ornament, but with function, as architectural calibration for cosmic return. This work reframes the Burney figure not as an object of worship, but as a map of alignment. Her beauty is not symbolic, it is structural. She does not wear the Eye. She enters it. She does not gesture. She holds. Through her form, the memory of coherence is not only preserved—it is reactivated.

Mindfulness, 2016

We integrate Buddhist thought and psychological science to propose a novel conceptual and operational definition of equanimity. First, we introduce the Decoupling Model of Equanimity-conceptualizing equanimity as the decoupling of desire (wanting and not wanting) from the hedonic tone of current or anticipated experience (pleasant and unpleasant). Second, we propose that equanimity is manifested by an intentional attitude of acceptance toward experience regardless of its hedonic tone, as well as by reduced automatic reactivity to the hedonic tone of experience. Third, we theorize that the practice of mindfulness leads to the cultivation of equanimity. We tested these ideas, focusing on the measurement of equanimity toward unpleasant hedonic tone using self-report scales. Meditation novices (M(SD) age = 31.4(10.9), 65.1 % women), from the general community in Israel, were randomized to a four-session mindfulness training condition (N = 138) or non-intervention control condition (N = 53). Confirmatory factor analyses yielded that, as theorized, equanimity entails one higher-order factor reflecting equanimity, and two lower-order factors-attitude of acceptance and reactivity to unpleasant hedonic tone. Moreover, partially consistent with predictions, we found that relative to the control condition, mindfulness training led to reductions in reactivity to unpleasant hedonic tone over time, as a function of responding to the training (i.e., elevation in state mindfulness). However, training did not lead to expected elevations in attitude of acceptance, regardless of degree of responding to the training. We discuss the implications of these findings for equanimity and mindfulness mechanisms research.

2020

The purpose of the current study was to explore the experience of equanimity expressed through art and its implications for the field of Expressive Therapies by examining the artmaking process of six participants (an illustrator, a visual artist, a musician, an art therapist, an expressive arts therapist, a clinical psychologist who is an art therapy practitioner). The participants were recruited based on their involvement in a contemplative practice that supported their practice of equanimity. The study utilized qualitative and arts-based research methods. Data were collected in the form of art (visual arts, poetry and music), interviews, journaling and artmaking by the researcher, and written feedback by the visitors at an exhibition held at the end of the interviews. The qualitative analysis yielded six themes: artmaking process as an experience of equanimity, openness to novelty, oluruna bırak – let it be, contemplating equanimity through artmaking tools that feel familiar and c...

2014

(British and Irish fiction, reception studies) Andrew C. Rouse (British history and culture) László Sári B. (literary theory, film studies) Gertrúd Szamosi (postcolonial literatures, Canadian studies) Gabriella Vöő (American studies, comparative studies