Mindfulness and equanimity are often treated as synonyms. Margaret Cullen believes that mistake has consequences.
In Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, Love Boundlessly, the culmination of five years of research and conversations with more than thirty teachers, scholars, neuroscientists, and practitioners, Cullen argues that equanimity is the attitudinal core of mindfulness and the key to understanding how we love without attachment.
In this conversation, she unpacks the doctrinal debate, the lived experience that shaped her view, and why equanimity deserves renewed attention now.
Angela Stubbs: Quiet Strength has been in the works for how many years?
Margaret Cullen: I guess it’s five now. Five years.
Angela Stubbs: Take us back five years. Set the stage. What was going on in your life when the idea for this book began to settle in?
Margaret Cullen: Oh, thank you for asking. I haven’t been asked that before. I did talk about it a little in the book’s prologue. I had begun teaching workshops on equanimity close to 10 years before I started writing the book, and about five years ago an editor at New Harbinger reached out to me to write a second book. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that.
But then the idea came to me: a book about equanimity could be really interesting and useful. There were already so many books on mindfulness and quite a number on compassion. Although I had been teaching and writing about both for years, I wasn’t sure I had anything to add to that literature. Very little had been shared on equanimity. That was part of why I got interested in teaching it in the first place. It wasn’t addressed much in either the Buddhist circles I’d been practicing in for decades or in the mainstream mindfulness world.
It was time for a deep dive into this quiet virtue that’s been hiding in plain sight for 2,600 years.
I got excited and went back to New Harbinger, and they said no. They wanted a workbook. I didn’t want to write a workbook. It wasn’t time for a workbook. It was time for a deep dive into this quiet virtue that’s been hiding in plain sight for 2,600 years.
Angela Stubbs: I really love this sense of inner knowing you had, declining the workbook and following something deeper. It feels like an intuitive process. Can you talk about that, what that felt like?
Margaret Cullen: I found myself led by the book, which was a fascinating and surprising process. Very early on, the book had its own ideas. I discovered that I was following the book’s lead. The book said “no, not a workbook”, “no, not New Harbinger”, “No, this is what I want to be.” By following the book’s lead, it became something much bigger, deeper, and richer than I could have imagined on my own.
That was quite remarkable. It led me to an agent, a big publishing house, and an editor who had a beautiful vision for the book. I felt like the book led, and I was always half a beat behind it.
Angela Stubbs: As the book began to take shape, you were also wrestling with the lineage and doctrinal differences around equanimity and mindfulness. How did those conversations, including your exchange with Sharon Salzberg, influence the direction the book ultimately took?
Margaret Cullen: Originally, I planned to write a chapter exploring the doctrinal relationship between mindfulness and equanimity. I’ve been tracking that debate for more than twenty years, beginning when I was co-teaching with Alan Wallace, who defined mindfulness quite narrowly as sati, simply as remembering to return to the present moment.
But at a certain point, I realized the scholarship wasn’t helping illuminate lived experience. So I tried to simplify the question.
In the insight tradition, mindfulness includes an attitudinal quality. It isn’t just returning to the present moment. It’s returning in a particular way, with non-judgment, spaciousness, allowing, and non-reactivity. That quality is what we call equanimity.
In one conversation, I asked Sharon Salzberg to imagine a Venn diagram: one circle mindfulness, one circle equanimity. How much do they overlap? Her answer was immediate. Completely.
I remember thinking, Really? Completely? We don’t tend to use the terms interchangeably. Yet many Western Vipassana teachers would say that without equanimity, it isn’t truly mindfulness.
In the insight tradition, mindfulness includes an attitudinal quality. It isn’t just returning to the present moment. It’s returning in a particular way, with non-judgment, spaciousness, allowing, and non-reactivity. That quality is what we call equanimity.
Angela Stubbs: Is equanimity used in traditions apart from Buddhism and mindfulness? You spoke with Tom Block about Judaism and Sufism. Are those traditions using equanimity in the same way?
Margaret Cullen: There are differences, of course, but there are also striking similarities. Equanimity appears in many traditions beyond Buddhism. We find it in Judaism, in Sufism, and in Stoicism, often expressed through a similar concern: how we relate to life’s changing conditions.
In Buddhism, this has the poetic name of the “worldly winds”: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disrepute. Other traditions articulate the same insight in their own language, but the essential question is the same: How do we meet the constantly shifting winds of fortune?
What surprised me was how consistently this thread runs through different traditions. If you’re coming to this with fresh eyes and know nothing about equanimity, you might be surprised to discover that it’s almost everywhere, even in some of the least expected places.
Angela Stubbs: You’ve said equanimity found you when you really needed it. Can you share what was unfolding then, and how equanimity began to function as a teacher for you?
Margaret Cullen: There have been several times when equanimity has appeared as a teacher for me, but the first was on a retreat with Sharon Salzberg. We had done basic mindfulness and lovingkindness practice, and then spent a week on equanimity.
In the Vipassana tradition, equanimity is often cultivated through reflecting on certain phrases. One of them invites you to imagine someone you love who is suffering and reflect: their happiness and unhappiness are the result of their thoughts, actions, and circumstances, not your wishes for them. And even so, you continue to wish them well.
That was a complete revelation to me.
I worked with those phrases in both sitting and walking practice. One morning after breakfast, I was walking in the desert in Southern California, during that exquisite, fleeting springtime in Joshua Tree. I wasn’t formally meditating, but the phrases had taken on a life of their own.
I thought of my mother, and the phrase arose: I am not responsible for her happiness. And not only that, I could still love her and wish her well. It wasn’t a binary choice between taking responsibility for her happiness and being a bad daughter.
My mother struggled with depression and other mental health issues. As long as I could remember, it had felt like my job to make her happy. It was an impossible task, and by my twenties, I had become more and more depressed myself because I was failing at it.
In that moment, seeing clearly that, oh my goodness, I can’t control her happiness, was incredibly liberating. It sounds obvious now. But at the time, it was a revelation. And, beyond that, it is neither disloyal nor unloving to let go of this futile effort.
We come to believe that loving someone means managing their emotional state…Equanimity is love without attachment: to outcomes, to roles, to what I need from you, to how I need you to be, even to needing you to be happy.
Angela Stubbs: Many of us feel responsible for the happiness of people we love, especially within family. How does equanimity shift that dynamic?
Margaret Cullen: Women, of course, have been inculcated to be caregivers in roles as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. Those stereotypical roles, which hopefully my daughter’s generation, maybe your generation, Angela, is breaking out of, have given us distorted pictures of what it means to love.
In my mother’s case, and often with our children, we take on responsibility for their happiness. We come to believe that loving someone means managing their emotional state.
But Buddhism is fundamentally a path of connecting with reality. There’s no safer ground to stand on than reality. And the reality is that I am not responsible for your happiness.
These equanimity phrases expose how easily attachment masquerades as love. In Buddhism, attachment is considered the near enemy of lovingkindness. Without careful attention, we conflate the two. We accuse others of not being loving when they’re not expressing attachment, and we feel guilty ourselves when what we’re feeling is attachment, not love.
Angela Stubbs: Can you unpack that a bit more?
Margaret Cullen: Equanimity is one of the Four Immeasurables in Buddhism, along with lovingkindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. They’re all aspects of love. So equanimity is love without attachment: to outcomes, to roles, to what I need from you, to how I need you to be, even to needing you to be happy.
It acknowledges your complete sovereignty over your own life. Even that language can be misleading, because I don’t grant or withhold your freedom. I never had that control in the first place. The belief that I do isn’t aligned with reality.
That’s where our ideas about love get tangled. We confuse attachment with care.
Angela Stubbs: In the world we’re living in now, where there’s always something to care about, how do you work with equanimity as a tool in difficult times?
Margaret Cullen: Having just written a book about it and being interviewed about it, I have unique pressures on myself, and from my friends and family, to be equanimous. The good news is we can turn that into a joke. Humor is actually a great doorway into equanimity.
I’m reaching for it a lot these days. There are also a few cognitive hacks that I use very frequently. They’re related to the three characteristics in Buddhism that are very close to my heart and central to my practice.
Angela Stubbs: Tell us about the hacks.
Margaret Cullen: First, I ask: Is this situation as personal as I’m making it? As meditators, we taste non-self, the experience of being connected to all things. And yet we walk around in our separate, contracted egos. It’s a reminder that there’s another way of relating to experience.
Second, impermanence. If I’m caught in reactivity, in a moment of suffering or even joy, I remind myself that things change. I loosen my grip on attachment or aversion. That’s reality. That’s the reality I want to align myself with. Things are usually less personal and less permanent than they seem.
And third, I like this question from Byron Katie: Is it really true?
Given the current political situation, it can feel like the end of the world. We say the world is on fire. It can feel literally true. But if I step back and ask, is it actually on fire, the answer is no. That’s an expression. And that expression amplifies fear, outrage, and anxiety, and pulls us out of equanimity.
Angela Stubbs: People often misunderstand equanimity. How do you describe what equanimity is not?
Margaret Cullen: Equanimity is definitely not indifference. It’s not apathy. It’s not passivity. Those are the near enemies of equanimity.
Equanimity is not withdrawal.
I think for a lot of people who care deeply about the world, even if they understand this intellectually, emotionally, it still feels like a withdrawal. I have friends who are longtime practitioners who are afraid of equanimity. They think the world is in so much trouble that equanimity somehow forecloses their opportunity to be activists and engage with the world’s problems. That’s a very important misunderstanding. It’s deep and pernicious. Equanimity is not withdrawal.
This is part of the beauty and paradox at the heart of equanimity. It’s caring perhaps even more deeply, not less, but draining that love of melodrama.
This is part of the beauty and paradox at the heart of equanimity. It’s caring perhaps even more deeply, not less, but draining that love of melodrama. It’s loving without attachment. We care just as much, perhaps even more, about this beautiful planet and all the people and species who are thriving and suffering upon it, but without the melodrama and the outrage. That frees up our energy to be as effective as possible in whatever way we engage.
Angela Stubbs: Earlier, we talked about the overlap between mindfulness and equanimity. If mindfulness is awareness, where does equanimity fit? You’ve described it as a kind of balance. What does that mean?
Margaret Cullen: The balance we’re talking about is dynamic. It’s not static. We’re not aiming for some frozen state. It’s more like walking. With every step we lose our balance and regain it.
Equanimity is the capacity to recover more quickly, to create space around our experience when we’re knocked off center. It’s not about being chill or detached. That becomes a near enemy. It’s about flexibility. It’s about resilience.
Angela Stubbs: The book is titled Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, Love Boundlessly. It wasn’t always called that. How did the title and subtitle evolve?
Margaret Cullen: I originally wanted to call the book Equanimity: The Quiet Virtue. If it had stayed small and focused only on Buddhism, that might have worked. But once the vision grew, that title no longer worked for my agent or publisher.
They first suggested Quiet Power, which I liked. Equanimity is quiet but incredibly powerful. In martial arts, power comes from fluidity and balance, not brute strength. But politically, “power” felt like a tainted word. So we landed on Strength.
The subtitle, Find Peace, Feel Alive, Love Boundlessly, is not language I would normally use. I have an aversion to telling people what to do. My language as a teacher is more invitational and provisional. This is declarative. I joked that I felt like a circus barker for equanimity.
But the book has a wider vision than my own. I’m one voice among many contributing to what it’s meant to do in the world.
Angela Stubbs: Is there anything in the book that people haven’t asked you about yet?
Margaret Cullen: Surprisingly, I’ve been asked very little about the neuroscience. No one has asked about the time I went to a lab in Arizona and had transcranial stimulation applied to my brain to supposedly engender equanimity.
Neuroscience labs that have studied mindfulness are now adding tools like transcranial stimulation and sophisticated fMRI mapping to reverse-engineer advanced states of meditation.
Angela Stubbs: That feels like a very different angle on equanimity. What happened when you went into the lab?
Margaret Cullen: They stimulated my brain and asked what I was experiencing. I didn’t feel anything. I was disappointed because Shinzen Young was there, along with Jay Sanguinetti, who runs the lab at the University of Arizona. Over lunch, they described extraordinary experiences they’d had using the technology.
I wanted to feel that. I even considered changing my flight home to try again. I believe them. But I didn’t have that experience.
From my perspective, equanimity is part of some of the most cutting-edge research just beginning to unfold. It’s early. Where it ends up, nobody knows.
