Below, Margaret Cullen shares five key insights from her new book, Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity.
Margaret is a psychotherapist and pioneer in bringing contemplative practices into mainstream settings. She co-developed the Compassion Cultivation Training with Thupten Jinpa at Stanford University School of Medicine, the Mindfulness and Compassion Training for Military Spouses with Amishi Jha at University of Miami, and Compassion Corps, a program which brings compassion programs to underserved populations.
What’s the big idea?
Equanimity isn’t very sexy. It doesn’t generate memes, tweets, likes, or viral posts. It’s a quiet virtue that expands tolerance, widens perspectives, levels the playing field, and strengthens love and effective engagement. If you long for a world that is more peaceful, sane, and just, equanimity is a great place to start.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Margaret herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Equanimity has been hiding in plain sight.
Equanimity shows up across traditions: Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, and secular ethics. Different languages and different frameworks point to the same human capacity. Equanimity isn’t exotic. It’s not something you have to import into your life. It’s already here.
Equanimity is basic to our nature. We share it with the natural world—it’s part of the same intelligence that regulates your body, keeps systems in balance, and moves every living organism toward homeostasis. It’s the ground we stand on, even when we don’t realize it.
What varies is not whether we have it, but whether we can access and cultivate it. And there are many ways in, including through:
- Faith traditions.
- Practices.
- Small cognitive reframes.
- Humor.
- Moments of awe.
- Communities that support and reinforce it.
You don’t have to get it perfect. It’s not a fixed state. It’s both a trait and a capacity that grows over time. Just by reading this Book Bite, your salience network has been primed toward equanimity, and it might just appear in that single moment when you need it most.
2. Equanimity is not indifference, passivity, apathy, or being calm.
This idea is one of the biggest misunderstandings. In truth:
- You can be excited and equanimous.
- You can be broken-hearted and equanimous.
- You can be fully engaged in the world, even fighting for change, and be equanimous. You can be calm, too. It’s just that equanimity isn’t only about being calm.
Think of Rosa Parks, sitting on that bus in Montgomery. Or the nineteen monks who walked for peace from Texas to Washington, D.C., in February of 2026—quiet, steady, and completely committed. Even their dog, Aloka, had over one million followers on social media. This is not disengagement. It’s the ability to stay present without collapsing or overreacting.
And this is where science is catching up. Psychologist Iris Mauss and her colleagues have found that people who try eliminating negative emotions—or relentlessly chase positive ones—are not healthier. They tend to have higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower well-being. Forcing ourselves to feel good doesn’t work.
Equanimity offers something different. It allows us to feel the full range of experience without dampening our zest for life. Because equanimity doesn’t come from feeling less. It comes from being able to feel more without getting lost in it.
3. Equanimity is about recovering more quickly from emotional reactions.
This is something scientists call affective chronometry—basically, how long does it take to return to baseline after you’ve been triggered. When I first encountered this in the research of Antoine Lutz and Richie Davidson, it surprised me. Highly experienced meditators (over 10,000 hours) weren’t numb emotionally. In many cases, they actually showed stronger initial reactions to provocative emotional stimuli than the rest of us.
But the difference is that they recovered faster. They didn’t stay stuck in the feeling. They didn’t ruminate. They didn’t spiral. And this idea has begun to appear in academic literature on equanimity. One early paper out of Harvard suggested that this capacity—how quickly we recover our balance—may be central to what defines equanimity.
“You still feel everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—but you move through those states more fluidly.”
So, equanimity isn’t about becoming unshakeable. It’s about becoming less sticky. You still feel everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—but you move through those states more fluidly. You come back more quickly and that changes everything because now the question isn’t, “Did I react?” It’s, “How long did I stay there?”
4. Mindfulness and equanimity are both the same and different.
I began teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1996, so I’ve been engaged with how mindfulness unfolded in the West for three decades. And having worked closely with Jon Kabat-Zinn, I can tell you that mindfulness was never just about paying attention. It was about how we pay attention, and that “how” is equanimity. Or, as Jon would say, paying attention non-judgmentally.
When I interviewed meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, I asked her to imagine a Venn diagram with one circle for mindfulness and another for equanimity. How much do they overlap? She said, “Completely.” In that sense, they’re the same. And at the same time, they’re different.
When you step outside the modern mindfulness movement and look across religious and philosophical traditions, you find equanimity everywhere—but not necessarily mindfulness as we define it today. In many religions, equanimity shows up as a kind of inner balance in the face of life’s ups and downs—the “worldly winds” of praise and blame, gain and loss.
When Moses Maimonides brought this idea into Jewish philosophy in the 12th century, he did it through a Sufi teaching, borrowing a story from a Sufi master. So, yes, equanimity is deeply embedded in mindfulness. It is also something that appears across many traditions, in different forms and languages.
5. Is the world on fire?
It can feel that way. With the overlapping crises we’re living through, it’s hard not to reach for extreme language. Sometimes it feels like no amount of hyperbole quite captures the mess we’re in. And yet, the constant language of outrage and alarm doesn’t help. In fact, it knocks us off balance, narrows our perception, and gates our cognition.
“Equanimity doesn’t deny reality. It helps us see it more clearly.”
This is reinforced by the algorithms that shape what we see. Anger and outrage generate more engagement, so those are what get amplified and travel faster. But when we’re caught in that loop, we lose access to the capacities we need most: clarity, discernment, and effective action.
I saw this up close in California in 2020. My part of the state was on fire. We had so many evacuation notices that our bags remained packed by the front door for weeks. But the entire world was not on fire, and that distinction matters. Equanimity doesn’t deny reality. It helps us see it more clearly.
I had a conversation with former Congressman Tim Ryan about this—someone who has been in the middle of more than a few political firestorms—and what we kept coming back to was that if we lose our balance, we lose our effectiveness. Equanimity is not a retreat from engagement. It allows us to meet a difficult world without becoming distorted by it.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
