I'm attached to this planet. I want it to survive. I'm attached to democracy. I want it to flourish. What can I do? I want peace in the world. I don't want war. I don't want cruelty. What can I actually do? Those are questions a lot of us are asking right now. And in today's interview with our guest, Margaret Cullen, she offers an answer that may surprise you as much as it surprised me. Margaret is one of the early teachers in the mindfulness movement who has written a book that's out just this week called quiet strength, find peace, feel alive, and love boundlessly through the power of equanimity. I know equanimity from my practices in Tibetan Buddhism as a practice in which we try to equalize our feelings toward friend, enemy, and strangers. It's a way of kind of clearing the pallet before you can genuinely cultivate love and compassion beyond your immediate friends and family. But Margaret talks about equanimity in a different context, as a way of maintaining mental balance without pushing away any of life's complexity and turmoil. She put it powerfully in our interview as feel more, react less. Listen to the interview now if you'd like to know how. I'm Scott Snibbe, and this is How to Train a Happy Mind. Margaret, it's a pleasure to have you on how to train a happy mind. You and I know each other from the Bay Area community of meditation and mindfulness, and it's nice to have you formally here to talk about your new book. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation, Scott. So your book is about equanimity, and I wanna just start out by asking you what that means to you. Both from your book's perspective and your own perspective. So I'll start with my personal perspective. It's something I seek, is why I wrote about it. I wrote about it because work on it. I look for it, I aim for it, and I don't come by it naturally or easily. And I have to confess, I've yet to find the right elevator pitch for equanimity because it's quite subtle and quite profound. And the more I explored it, the bigger it got, which is part of what I love about it. So of course I need to reduce it to something digestible for these kinds of conversations. And I think the first pass at that is the ability to feel fully, the range of human experience, everything that's possible for us to feel as human beings without getting caught in either, any kind of stickiness, rejection, attraction, spacing out, which of course we know from Buddhist philosophy. I would extend for our contemporary world the definition of equanimity. And this is where it gets subtle subtler to include the ability to recover more quickly. So the reality is that we all get hijacked here and there. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't. So equanimity allows us to recover as quickly as possible from being hijacked. Is a good way to put it. I, you know, I was surprised reading your book because, you know, I've come from more the Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and we use that word a lot equanimity, but we learn it as eliminating our bias, you know, equalizing our feeling towards others. And in particular through this meditation on a friend enemy stranger, which you include in the book. But you emphasize this definition I think comes more from Theravada tradition of non-reactivity, impartiality, inner balance. That's how I was trying to kind of figure out how to think about these two definitions. There's like inner balance and outer balance, you know, and obviously inner balance needs to come, come first. So I'm not sure there's necessarily an order. It feels like a cycle we can intervene on anywhere and it will be meaningful, so we can be hijacked and practice impartiality towards all beings and become more equanimous. We can be hijacked and turn inward and allow the emotion to arise and pass away and become more equanimous. You talk about this in your first chapter. You know, you write about how equanimity helped you overcome some pretty difficult issues with your mother. A lot of us have challenges with our mother, , in a retreat that happened with Sharon Salzburg. I wonder if you could tell that story. Yes, of course. That was the first time that I practiced equanimity as a formal practice, and we did it for about a week. I think we had done maybe a week of each of the Brahmaviharas on that particular retreat a long time ago in the desert. And the phrases that we were given to practice equanimity were something like, uh, "Your happiness and unhappiness are the products, your thoughts, actions, deeds and circumstances, and not my wishes for you. Knowing this, I will continue to wish for your happiness." And in, in many ways it was like the heart of the 12 step prayer really and I'd been working with the phrases and all the silent practices, uh, sitting practice, bringing my mother to mind, bringing different people to mind. And then I was walking out in the desert the phrases start getting a life of their own when you sit with them, several tens of thousand times on retreat. And I was walking the desert and I had a picture of my mother. And the thought, the phrases came to mind, "your happiness is the product. It is not my responsibility." And it seems so obvious to say it. I think most of us would shake our heads and say, of course. But emotionally, many of us have a different formula, a different calculation around that. We can have the intellectual understanding. But in my case, um, mother had had a lot of mental illness throughout my life, depression. Suicidality, personality disorder, lot of things. And was her lifeline. I was her ray of sunshine. I understood in my child mind that that was really my job in life was to keep her from the brink, from falling into the abyss, whatever that was. I wouldn't let her go there. And that became quite burdensome you can imagine. And in my mind, to let go of that job of trying to make her happy to not love her and to not be a good daughter. So the genius of these simple phrases was, it doesn't mean I don't love you to understand that I can't make you happy. And I got it in that moment, and it was I mean, even saying it now, this was at least 40 years ago, I kind of have chills because of how much suffering, and delusion and confusion was created by that for me over many years and how liberating that moment was. It's asking too much of a child to be responsible for their parents' happiness, to say the least. Um, but, um, you know, you say the word love and I think, um, it's hard for a lot of us to define that word. Like, what, what do you mean by love? When you, you love your mother, but you're not responsible for her happiness. t Well, loving kindness, the first of the Brahmaviharas taught me so much about what love is and what it isn't. And, you know, loving without attachment is very different from the kind of love that most of us are taught in our families of origin. And in a romantic context. And I've really taken that to heart. I've explored that, especially with people who are closest to me, where I'm the most attached to really begin to tease apart what is love, which I think of as unconditional goodwill and unconditional friendliness. From attachment, which is kind of pointing more towards me. I need you to be fill in the blank. Happy. You know, that's a big one. You and I both have daughters and it's really hard when they're suffering and, uh, it's very hard to not feel attached to their happiness and to let go and to trust and to, I, I'm not good at that. It's so hard as a parent. Right. And then also to realize that they do need to go through their own problems in order to grow. You know, they actually need difficulties to be a, a whole human being. You mentioned the Serenity Prayer you know, this is a wonderful bridge, I think between Christianity and Buddhism, right? Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, which is recent you know, it's like a hundred year old prayer that got popularized in the AA and other recovery movements. Um, we, you probably know we have a version of this in Mahayana Buddhism from Shantideva, you know, this great, probably my favorite book in the world is a book he wrote called A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. And he says even more simply, he says, if you can do something about a problem, why worry if you can't do something about a problem, why worry? Sounds straightforward, but um tell me more about that. You know, your experience with the, the Serenity Prayer and this sentiment. Yes. Well, I joined a 12 step program in my twenties because I was a compulsive eater, and this was before I got involved in Buddhism. I wasn't willing to believe in God, and that has never really worked for me. But I learned something about surrender and the power of that. And of course in the context of the 12 steps, it tends to be God. And you know, it's based on a Christian model. But of course a lot of people do the 12 step program and don't believe in God. I think that taking refuge in something greater than myself brings equanimity. It brings trust. It allows us to surrender. taking refuge is a way to relax the ego really. And that contraction of the ego is in some ways what is between us and equanimity. I like how you put this. I think your approach to refuge is really quite original in this book. Of course if you believe in God, you can take refuge in God. If you're a Buddhist, you can take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, sangha. Also, the notion of karma, And you talk about taking refuge in the truth, which is very nice. You know, that's actually really what dharma means, isn't it? It just means the truth. It doesn't mean Buddhism, it's just things that are actually true. You know, in our, in Mahayana Buddhism um, people's fundamental goodness. It's not universally accepted in all forms of Buddhism, but in Mahayana Buddhism, that's actually, it's a refuge. You don't have to be Buddhist to take refuge. Is that beneath it all maybe very far beneath um, there is a kind of fundamental goodness, fundamentally like healthy, universal needs that we all share. Unpack that a little more. What is the truth for people who aren't Buddhist or Christian? You know, what is the truth they can take refuge in. Well first I wanna respond to taking refuge in basic goodness. Just hearing you say it again. It's like, honey on my heart, there's something so sweet about that refuge. I can feel myself relax into it. When I hear it I the relaxation. It is the opposite of mistrust. So what is the truth? One way of thinking about the truth from the Buddhist perspective, this parsing that has been incredibly helpful to me is that things change. That means things are pleasant sometimes, unpleasant sometimes, and neutral sometimes, and it's hard to argue with that. They're never always good, they're never always bad. It means that, um, there is a dimension to life that is impersonal. It isn't all completely about me. There are other dimensions. And actually, you know, the more we look, the bigger the impersonal grows in our awareness and the personal shrinks. So that again, is kind of reducing the ego reactivity that gets in the way of equanimity. So these are truths from the Buddhist perspective that I think, you know, having taught in mainstream settings, mindfulness based interventions, these are very universal, and again, they're not particularly Buddhist. They're, I think of them as universal truths. And of course, they're related to impermanence as a fundamental truth. But I would go on to say that if we really live as though these are true. And not just nodding our head intellectually. Yeah, yeah. I know things change. Then we have to confront uncertainty as a truth, and that's an uncomfortable truth. That is inextricably bound to impermanence that things are constantly changing. We can take refuge in certain ideas that support us in the reality of uncertainty, but we can't erase uncertainty altogether. I mean, there's, um, it's one thing to say things change, but to actually feel it, that's what we call a realization in Buddhism. Right? It's feeling something. It's not just, um, saying it or knowing it. You unpack some of the misconceptions about mindfulness, I think, 'cause I think a lot of people think of becoming non-reactive or less reactive with mindfulness that it's synonymous with less feeling, but you contradict that quite strongly in your book. And you, you cite a study, uh, Antoine Lutz, like a study at, at University of Wisconsin where he said that advanced meditators actually feel a pain more, at least when you look at their brains, but they also recover quicker and they don't have that anticipatory anxiety. So talk about that. How does that have to do with equanimity? 'Cause you're, are we actually feeling more if we are, uh, experiencing equanimity? Yes, we actually are feeling more, I have a quote in the beginning of the book from Matthew Brensilver, a mindfulness teacher who's I, I love this quote. He says that equanimity deepens the poignancy of our lives while draining it of melodrama. And this is such a beautiful distinction. Melodrama is not the same as poignancy. Melodrama is the additional kind of reactivity, but poignancy is feeling deeply. And it turns out that indifference, apathy, detachment -as opposed to non-attachment- detachment are all near enemies of equanimity. We kind of think, okay, I'll just withdraw and I'll be equanimous. No, equanimity is an expression of love. All the are expressions of love, right? And the first three are love in different contexts and. The fourth equanimity is love without attachment, love with impartiality. Without Love, it's not equanimity. So that's the first thing. And because we're talking about a way of being in the world in which our usual ego defenses are broken down, equanimity is a state of deep vulnerability where we feel more. We feel more. But it's supported by the wisdom that allows us to react less. Be a good slogan. Feel more, react less. It's not, I've not heard it that way before. Um, let's get real here. Like, there's a lot of things that people are feeling a lot and reacting a lot right now, um, with the world. What about all the, the protests, the conflicts happening around the world, the things that people are pulling out their hair on all sides of the political spectrum. , How does equanimity help with that? Like, for someone listening who's really frustrated about situation in the world on any side of the spectrum, how would they use these tools? I think equanimity couldn't be more important than now in this particular moment where we kind of have a perfect storm causes for outrage that are spewing out daily from the highest levels of government in the United States and around the world. you know, it isn't exclusively us, but for those of us who live here, it's an onslaught that for many of us feels unprecedented. And this is exaggerated exponentially by social media, by algorithms that are designed actually to activate our nervous systems and to make us more outraged. So where does equanimity fit in terms of actually taking action in the world? It's critical because the problems are so big know, what we would call the poly crises of climate change and democracy, two really huge issues. It's very easy to get overwhelmed. It's very easy to feel despair. And what we're aiming for here is just what we described, just exactly what we were talking about. How can I open my window of tolerance so that I can feel this, feel it deeply, let it matter to me, and not be overwhelmed by it, which of course is one of the near enemies of compassion. And the way I can do that is equanimity. I can feel this. I can let it arise and pass. I can take refuge, I can put space around it. And that brings the wisdom to act in the most beneficial way, knowing, for example, what I can do and can't do. The Shantideva 12 step prayer and applying it to our very troubled world. Okay, I'm attached to this planet. I want it to survive. I'm attached to democracy. I want it to flourish. What can I do? I want peace in the world. I don't want war. I don't want cruelty. What can I actually do? My outrage often if, if I can't draw the wisdom from the feeling of being deeply moved by injustice, then I can't respond effectively in the world. I'm just flapping my wings. And also if I'm bringing this, the sense of outrage to my community raising this level of activation, I'm not contributing to others responding well. They'll respond by feeling more outraged or perhaps even more guilt that they can't fix more, and then they get shut down For whatever reason, they can't walk out in the streets and protest. They shut down in guilt. I'm not doing enough. I can't fix the problem. So we all need equanimity to figure out what each of us can do. And there's no amount that's too small to help the problems that we face. There's a phrase you and your husband have that at first might seem at odds with this, where you, you have this catchphrase, it's not my emergency. So could, could you explain the story behind that and how it relates to, you know, towing that line of doing all we can, but, not getting hijacked and, overwhelmed. Yeah, it has to do with, a comment that a physician made at a party. She had been an ER physician for decades and she was quite equanimous. My husband asked her how she managed with all of that intensity, and she said, well, I just remember that it's not my emergency and it's beautiful example because. If each case that came in were her emergency, she couldn't do her job. Imagine, how you feel when it's an emergency, how your mind, your cognition gets focused, narrow. Your body is tense, you're not relaxed. Um, your jaw gets tight. You kind of affirm in your mind how bad things are. You're worried all these things that don't allow you to kind of do surgery or intervene. You don't even have access to the whole data bank that you need to practice medicine. If it's all an emergency. You've gotta figure out how to be equanimous. And you know, I in general, I very much agree with you, but I can imagine someone listening, , saying the opposite. Like, a lot of activists want us to feel like it is our emergency, right? Like, that's their feeling is people , aren't taking the situation seriously enough. Role playing, imagine me as that activist saying it is our emergency, we do need to panic. What do you say back to that? Well, I would say, how does panic help? It brings to mind a story I was told recently by a rabbi who went to Minnesota with the Multifaith group. You know, there was a huge group of multifaith, leaders who went to Minnesota to be part of the protest. She said, there were people in the audience, even among the multi-faith leaders were really upset, they were angry. And the organizers were so skillful because they brought equanimity and they brought the temperature down so that we could go out in the streets and be effective because if we went out with our anger, the danger of escalation into something that, would create more backlash was very strong. And it was key that the organizers in very subtle ways could bring the heat of the down enough so that we could engage more with our love of justice than of our hatred of injustice. That puts another spin on it too, 'cause this feeling without reacting, but also trying to bend your feelings toward the constructive ones as an antidote too. You know, in the, in the book you're, you're quite brave in sharing a lot of your own challenges, um, with mental health and eating disorders, um, shoplifting. You also talk about, can you share how equanimity helped you overcome some of these? Well, I talked earlier about the 12 step program, um, which was my first exposure to equanimity, and it was very powerful There's so much wisdom in the 12 step program, which I think kind of the truth of the pudding is in the tasting. So part of it is the surrender and a lot of wisdom about learning how to kind of step out of the contraction of the ego to let go, to trust, a lot of addiction is in my case, and I think for a lot of people is really born out of and fueled by mistrust, by fear, by just fear that you're not gonna be okay. Fear of your own feelings, fear of suffering, and it drives us to consume and behave in ways to not feel, to try to find safety through whatever it is we're addicted to. So through the 12 step program, um, there's the surrender and then there's also doing a moral inventory, which is very hard to do, because addiction is often accompanied by a lot of immoral behavior. And in my case it was shoplifting and yeah, it was very embarrassing to write about. And poignant, I have to say, it was very poignant for me to revisit that, young woman years ago who was in so much pain. So the moral inventory is really acknowledging that and making amends, in my case, seeing connection between the addictive pattern and the shoplifting. Then putting it together the book and long before the book, to see that behaving according to your values, whatever they are, is the ground for equanimity. And of course, you can see that as soon as you start meditating for real, once you start doing any kind of serious meditation practice, you can see that all the behavior that you've done in your entire life that isn't aligned with your values, eventually will bubble up to the surface and ask to be seen. You know, this is one of the critiques of mindfulness that it, in some of the ways that it's taught, it's detached from ethics or morality, you know, um, clearly it's not for you and how you're explaining this, but can you explain like, where does that, where does that come in? You know, 'cause the way a lot of people learn mindfulness, it's just sort of, okay, let things pass by. But you're saying, you know, no, this is, you need to have personal integrity where does that fit in, in the Buddhist path or in secular Buddhist path and mindfulness. Yes. I'm so glad you asked that. it's not a practice about just pay attention. It's a practice that's designed to give us insight. Insight meditation connects the dots. Oh, my behavior is linked to my wellbeing. When I do this, I feel this way. And I wrote about in the book, you know, I launched the first MBSR course for physicians, for example, at Kaiser, the very first one that happened. And it was funny to me when I read the backlash against MBSR, about how corporations are using it to make their employees just go along with everything, you know, Kaiser, at the time, there were a lot of problems with the medical staff and how medicine was being delivered, how the medical staff was treated. And rather than go along with this, a lot of the doctors said, I'm not gonna do this. Some of them actually quit, I was just the teacher, I was just the messenger. But it certainly didn't make them more compliant. Definitely. It was really just the opposite. You were talking earlier about, um, suffering like the tightness, you know, that so many of our problems come from, um, just collapsing into ourself, our ego. You write about this in the book when you were in your twenties, I guess you encountered Buddhism and, how you had thought suffering was a personal defect until you heard the first noble truth that, uh, suffering's universal. Talk a little bit about how that opened you up. Um, most people kind of are annoyed by that first teaching of Buddhism that life is suffering. It's, I'm glad it landed with you. It landed so powerfully that that was the moment I got on the path and never left you know, I went on a 10 day silent retreat. I'd never meditated for a minute. Before I went on that retreat, I had no idea what I was doing. My boyfriend at the time was a Moroccan Jew who was a musician and a real estate broker. And he went on a 10 day retreat and he came back a different man, and I thought, what an unlikely person to go meditate. And he was talking to me and I thought, wow, this is really interesting. I'm going. So I signed up and one of the first things that I heard was the three Noble truths. And when I heard the truth of suffering something inside of me completely relaxed because this is the same. Young woman who had been trying to hold up the sky for my mother my whole life and who really felt, there was a lot wrong with me and I was given an opportunity to take it less personally and it was so much more helpful than the therapeutic approach, which I did it, I still do and believe in, but that was making me take it more personally, And in practice it was like, oh, suffering is universal. I don't have to make mine a special case. and there's a way out of it You wrote how you honestly thought everyone else was happy except me. Right. I'm sure other people can relate to hearing that. What are ways that people can practice this in everyday life? Um, you know, in a lot of ways you've described like the outcome or the inner experience of feeling equanimity, but how do we develop that muscle? So meditation is one of many ways. It's a wonderful way to access equanimity, and there are lots of other ways, I've talked quite a bit about getting out of the small self what happens when we're hijacked or in reactivity we kind of we're in a trance of whatever that narrative is, and we wanna break the trance, the spell of outrage or fear or, , being inadequate or being, , the only one who's suffering, whatever that spell is. If we can break the spell, have access to wisdom again and equanimity. And in some ways, equanimity and wisdom are, are pretty synonymous, in fact. how do we break the spell? we take refuge, taking refuge is a kind of surrender that breaks the spell, humor. Breaks the spell. Getting out of ourselves into nature. Breaks the spell. You know, asking yourself questions about impermanence and impersonal is this personal will this change? How will this look in 10 years? All of these things can be doorways into equanimity. And can you talk a little bit about the meditation you're gonna lead? We'll play that in the episode following this one. So I wanted to lead this practice. It's the practice that I described that I did on retreat that led me to the insight about my mother because it's not taught that often and it's not taught that often outside of the context of, of a Vipassana practice. So I thought it might be helpful, for your listeners. So it's basically a guided equanimity practice, and we'll be using the phrases that I talked about earlier in the podcast. Great. Well thank you Margaret for joining me, to talk about your book Quiet Strength, which is a very creative mixture of, um, Buddhist wisdom with the personal experience that I think people are really going to benefit a lot from. Um, appreciate you sharing it with us. Thank you Scott. very much. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Thanks for joining me for this conversation with Margaret Cullen. You can find links to buy her new book, Quiet Strength, find peace, feel alive, and love boundlessly through the power of equanimity at howtotrainahappymind. org. You can also discover guided analytical meditations there, hundreds of past episodes of the podcast, and information about the Train a Happy Mind community that meets every Sunday morning to talk and meditate together. How to Train a Happy Mind is a non profit project of A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment. The podcast is offered freely and without ads, thanks to the support of listeners. Thanks to Isabela Acebal for marketing and production on this episode. We wish you a wonderful day.