When Love Meets Vulnerability, It Becomes Steady

We explore equanimity as a heart practice that meets vulnerability without armor and shifts our relationship to identity, praise and blame, and social media reactivity. We offer practical steps to steady the nervous system and act with clarity in an age of fear.

• identity as a source of reactivity and friction
• the worldly winds of gain, loss, praise, blame
• equanimity as undefended openness across traditions
• the skydiving with no ground metaphor
• love transforming into compassion, joy, and equanimity
• caring without the fantasy of control
• small experiments to test catastrophic thoughts
• balancing activism with steadiness and clarity

We highly recommend the book Quiet Strength

Find “Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, And Love Boundlessly With The Power Of Equanimity” and more at Margaret’s website.

Margaret's New Book --> Quiet Strength: https://a.co/d/029xEshE

Margaret Cullen's website: https://margaretcullen.com

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Transcript

Identity And Beginner’s Mind

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If we don't say collapse into believing our story or fixating on some version of our identity that we cling to. If we're able to hold ourselves with spaciousness and say beginner's mind, then there's more freedom for possibility, freedom for noticing new things, freedom for just being, and there's kind of a lightness that happens where maybe we don't feel threatened by unpleasant stimuli, or we don't feel like we need something pleasant. How would you talk about equanimity in terms of how much identity is related to this?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

I think that's key. And not just in Buddhism, but certainly in Judaism and Sufism. And I'll explain that a little

Worldly Winds And Ego

SPEAKER_01 0:59

bit. One way that equanimity is described is really in how we relate to life events and the worldly wind in Buddhism, those pairs of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disrepute. Those worldly wins, gain and loss, fame and disrepute, those have a lot to do with identity. Increasingly in our modern lives today, a lot of our reactivity is bound up in identity. A lot of the suffering and a lot of the attachment that we feel going through social media and just all of our conscious lives, a lot of the bouncing around with our nervous systems is all based on pleasure, pain, fame, disrepute, likes and dislikes. Interestingly, Maimonides, who it seems was the person who introduced the concept of equanimity into Judaism in the 12th century, borrowed a Sufi story because the relationship between Sufis and Jews at the time was very, very rich and very bidirectional to talk about equanimity. And in both traditions, equanimity is described really in terms of ego. There are stories about a rabbi getting praise and blame, stories in the Sufi tradition about praise and blame. And how do you relate to praise and blame? And can you be balanced with both? And one of my favorite teachers, Matthew Brensilver, who you probably know.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Yeah, I love him. Yeah. I was just thinking about him an hour ago.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So Matthew talks a lot about all the strategies we have to defend our stories and to defend ourselves. And those are really what stand between us and equanimity often. Just one step further, I can't remember his name, but another Buddhist teacher who I don't know, but I quoted in the book through another

Praise, Blame, And Defenses

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Dharma friend, talks about the state of equanimity as one of vulnerability. It's really an undefended state. And I think this ties back into Shinzen's idea of not using energy to either maintain an identity, and Matthew talks about this a lot, to try to curate both our inner experience and our outer appearance to the world. All of those things create friction between us and reality. And that friction inhibits equanimity.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Thank you. It's so well said. Yeah, I like to dive into that vulnerability piece a little bit more because a lot of what we do with our identity is defend. And I believe I listened to Matthew Brent Silver once talk about this in terms of skydiving without a ground. Like, can we sense into our experience as if we're like skydiving, we're kind of falling, but remove the concept of a ground or sense that there's actually not a ground that we're actually gonna hit. There's this sort of free-falling openness that could feel very vulnerable if you believe there's a ground that you're going to die. I hope I'm getting his metaphor correct. But the sense of vulnerability in being and how many of us consciously or subconsciously create these identities as a way to defend ourselves, which inherently, as he says, causes a friction with life. Um can you talk about how we can meet that sense of vulnerability with equanimity?

Equanimity As Undefended Openness

SPEAKER_00 5:02

And forgive me, I'm not a very good interviewer, but this question kind of reminds me that equanimity is posited by the Buddha as a Brahmavihara, as a divine abode of the heart, that it's not this sort of head-based map of the world, but rather a form of caring. So just kind of asking in real time if you could talk a little bit about the vulnerability, the defending, and maybe equanimity as a heart-based practice to meet that vulnerability.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

No, I love that question. I think it's really an important area to address. I'll tell you briefly, I discovered writing the book. My wonderful editor, Barry Boyce, was one of the original students of Trumpa Rinpoche and a founder of Mindful Magazine. And he told me that quote is from Trumpa, that you jump out of an airplane, you discover you have no parachute, you're afraid, and then you discover there's actually no ground. I didn't know that either. Barry told me that. But it doesn't matter, really. It's wonderful metaphor. And in terms of vulnerability and love, and yes, equanimity is the fourth of the four immeasurables. And Frank Osteteski calls them the four flavors of love. Equanimity is a flavor of love, it's an expression of love. We know that loving-kindness is a kind of unconditional goodwill, and that when it meets suffering, it becomes compassion. But it's essentially the same quality of the heart, this unbounded, unconditional goodwill. Meeting suffering becomes compassion. And when it meets the

Skydiving With No Ground

SPEAKER_01 6:48

success of others, the well-being of others, it becomes mudita, the third of the four immeasurables. When it meets cause for celebration, which is maybe the flip side of suffering, we might say in that context, it becomes mudita. And we might say when love meets vulnerability, it becomes equanimity. What is this vulnerability? Well, in our vipassana practice, at least I was taught equanimity through the phrases uh your happiness or unhappiness is a function of your thoughts and deeds and actions and not my wishes for you. Recognizing this complete vulnerability, this complete inability to guarantee the happiness of people I love. In the face of this, I still love, I still care. And to me, that was a revelation when I first encountered that and really took it to heart that I had been living with this false binary of if I love, then I'm attached and I'm gonna fix and I'm gonna make better, and I'm gonna protect my heart and I'm gonna protect you. And if I can't do that, I'm gonna withdraw. But equanimity says no, you can't protect and you can't withdraw. So you stay with the reality that you cannot protect those you love from suffering, that you continue to wish and care deeply, understanding the complexity of causes and conditions that influence the outcome of every moment, well beyond your wishes, that your wishes have some small influence, but no ultimate influence.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but it feels like there's so much fear in this world. I was gonna call it like an age of fear, but so many people are feeling vulnerable right now. And I think anxiety is on the rise because we're afraid and because we're feeling vulnerable and we don't know how to meet that vulnerability. I'm so excited that you have this book out called Quiet Strength, which I highly recommend. I think it's gonna be so helpful for so many people who don't know how to meet their vulnerability. And I'm so glad that you wrote this because of your

Equanimity As Love’s Fourth Flavor

SPEAKER_00 9:22

depth of practice and your vast experience with all of these practices we've been mentioning. Because equanimity, it's not only not easy, but it's some misunderstood. And the Buddha talked about this as being the last thing that you can master right before enlightenment because it does tackle issues like identity, which is a slippery thing to sense into or to peel the layers of illusion. So I'm glad that you have this depth of background to be able to support people with this nuanced practice. So when so many people are feeling afraid right now and there's so much fear in the world, what practical steps would you recommend for people who don't know how to meet their vulnerability with this love? We're often trapped by our sympathetic nervous system where we're kind of caught in this loop of rumination or anxiety. How can people start to practice equanimity in this age of fear?

SPEAKER_01 10:34

As you asked that, something occurred to me that has kind of been in co-ed in the back of my mind. And let's see if I can find language for it. My sense is that in this particular time with the poly crisis, as many of us call it, and a lot of fundamental values and rights feeling under threat, and of course the planet, it can feel disloyal, it can feel like a cop-out, it can feel foolish. There are a lot of other adjectives I might be able to pull up for someone to approach equanimity. It can feel like you don't care, like all of these mere enemies that we understand intellectually, but then we pit them against the level of upset in the modern world, and all that intellectual understanding goes down the drain. And it feels like, well, any really serious person would be very upset right now, and equanimity cannot be the right response. So I want to challenge that. I really want to challenge that and say, suggest that people experiment in the laboratory of their own lives in a very safe way and just see, keep the bar low, don't overwhelm yourself. See if you challenge a hyperbolic statement like it's the

Loving Without Control

SPEAKER_01 12:05

end of the world or the world's on fire, if you ask yourself, is that really true right now, does that make you a worse citizen? Does it mean you're not gonna engage in your activism? How does that serve or not serve? And in a sense, our whole Buddhist path is one of connecting with reality. And in that reality, it's true that we don't have the solid ground of self. It's true that things change, and that is vulnerable for us because we can't really hold on to anything. So there's a reality of vulnerability that we get closer and closer to through this path that we've undertaken. And I think what we discover is that there's actually less fear and greater engagement and greater energy available for engagement when we're not trying to be at war with reality. So this is unpleasant, this is pleasant, this is neutral. Many situations that I'm in aren't personal. Yes, there are very serious problems in the world. And what is going to help me to be the most effective, given my frame of reference and my capacities, and generally the hyperbolic outrage that social media is genius about escalating, and we can feel that we are disloyal to our party or our position or politics to not get on the outrage machine. I really encourage people just to experiment and see what's really going to help you be the most effective

Book Shoutout And Closing Reflection

SPEAKER_01 13:54

citizen right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Beautiful. We need to be loyal to ourselves and to our well being and not get too attached to trying to control all these outcomes.