Hello and welcome back to the show.
I'm Patrick.
Thank you for joining us this week.
I'm really excited for this conversation.
I'm excited to bring you this conversation I have here with me on the line, Margaret Cullen.
How are you doing?
Excellent.
Thank you.
I'm so excited to have a conversation with you.
You're the author of a new book.
It's called Quiet Strength, Find Peace, Feel Alive and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity.
I loved this book and I thank you for it.
It was really, really fun to read and I was really excited when we got to, when we scheduled this, and I knew I got to talk to you about it.
So thank you for coming here.
Thank you for inviting me and for actually reading the book.
Oh my gosh.
The show is called Chasing Excellence.
And when we started it almost 10 years ago, it meant one thing.
And as we've developed the show, as we've had these conversations, it really like.
The thing I kept thinking about is we should call our show Chasing Equanimity, because it's so much in line with what you're talking about in this book.
I'm not going to change the name of the podcast, but like if we did, it wouldn't be inappropriate.
So just to give folks a sense of it like this is so in line with what we talk about here on the show all the time.
I would love to start with just table stakes, just setting the table for us with what equanimity is and what equanimity is not.
And you write this, and I'll just give this quote just to start us off.
You write.
I've come to understand equanimity as the ability to fully feel the entire range of human experiences, but feeling without reacting.
Reactivity clouds our ability to clearly apprehend what is happening or to discern the most skillful response.
And so can you just talk to us about equanimity a little bit?
What is it?
And what is it perhaps often thought of that it is not?
Yes.
Thank you.
And thanks for reminding me of how I defined it in the book.
I'm often asked to quote it from memory.
And I think, what did I say?
What did I write?
Yes.
So the biggest misunderstanding that I've encountered about equanimity is that in some way we are dulling limiting, suppressing our feelings.
And what I've come to discover is that actually We feel more deeply with equanimity, but we're less hijacked by it, by our feelings.
And that's really what equanimity is aiming for.
And it does so in two different ways.
So in one way it's creating space around our experience so we can tolerate it better without being hijacked into kind of this fight or flight that we all know about.
That gates cognition and you know, releases cortisol and when it's prolonged, has all sorts of bad downward effects mind and body.
But it's also understood in terms of recovery time.
So the reality is we all get hijacked at times.
None of us are going to live in a state of, I don't know, I would call it enlightenment.
Not that I really understand what that is, but none of us are going to live in a state where we don't can open to all of life as it is and be completely balanced all the time.
So another way to think about equanimity and one of the first really important papers from Harvard discussed this is what is our recovery time.
How long do we stay hijacked?
Do we fuel that reaction with rumination and ways that we keep that arousal going?
And I think that's a beautiful way to think about equanimity.
And one term for that from psychology is effective chronometry.
How long do you stay hijacked?
How quickly?
How kind of live and flexible is your system so you can recover from these moments of being hijacked?
Mm-hmm.
I remember years ago we had the writer Ryan Holiday on the show.
He popularized a lot of Stoic philosophy and you write about Stoicism a little bit, but one of the things we talked to him about was the misperceptions of Stoicism as being having no feeling.
And one of his big points is that's not it at all.
And I think it's similar to one of the points that you make in the book, which is and you actually write this a huge misconception, is that equanimity suggests a state of passivity and inaction.
So can you talk a little bit about, I think what you call near enemies of equanimity in the book?
Yes, this is a beautiful concept from Buddhist philosophy.
I love it a lot.
I haven't encountered it anywhere else.
In Buddhist philosophy, there are four divine abodes or measurables, and equanimity is the fourth.
They are loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
And each of them have a far enemy, which is the opposite of it.
And that's kind of obvious.
But each of them also have a near enemy, which is something that kind of walks like, talks like acts, like masquerades as the thing, but isn't the thing.
And it's a really helpful concept in terms of teasing out especially the the more subtle ways we get pulled into a lookalike for equanimity.
So we think of balance and we think somebody's really chill and they basically don't care.
So one way to stay balanced is to withdraw into apathy, indifference, passivity.
It looks like equanimity.
People might call it that.
In my book, I talk about kind of a stoner, like, yeah, whatever, man, you know, it's all good.
It's all good.
Like a 13 year old boy of your whole life.
And there's definitely a detachment there.
And if there's detachment, we know we're in near enemy territory, indifference, passivity.
Another interesting thing about the four measurables and My tradition.
I've been practicing Buddhist meditation and teaching for, oh God, a long time, maybe 45 years long time.
In Buddhism, I would say equanimity is the most highly articulated described, defined practices, et cetera.
And these four immeasurables where we find equanimity are all expressions of love.
So equanimity is actually an expression of love, of care.
And without the hijacking interestingly, without the melodrama that happens around hijacking we're more effective.
We're actually more loving, not less loving.
And that's another place we get really confused.
So, for example, Matthew Brensilvor, I have a quote in the beginning of my book from a Buddhist teacher.
I love this quote so much for equanimity.
Equanimity drains our lives of melodrama, but deepens the poignancy.
So we're actually more moved with less drama.
Why is it easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we're better off feeling nothing than if we were to feel it, but then be able to modulate our own reaction or reactivity to it?
Well, it's a very understandable temptation because there's a lot of suffering in the world.
And to feel everything really, even the beauty.
I'm sure you're well aware of that.
There's a poignancy in beauty, in being moved by beauty as much as suffering.
We're vulnerable.
Equanimity is a state of vulnerability.
We're allowing ourselves to be moved by the world.
It's vulnerable.
So naturally, we avoid it.
We avoid feeling vulnerable.
And in many ways, we don't want to be touched by the world.
We want to feel, quote unquote, safe.
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One of the things that I kept thinking about as I was reading the book.
This is a strange thing to have thought about, but hopefully I'll be able to explain it in such a way that it makes sense, which is I kept thinking about.
About 20 years ago, I went to my first endurance seminar.
And much of that endurance seminar was spent on...
The practical nature of running.
In other words, the right way to run versus the wrong way to run.
This was the first time I remember thinking, oh, that thing that I thought was just a natural thing.
You just move your feet faster and you're all of a sudden running.
And yes, some people are better at it and some people aren't as good at it.
And some people look better doing it and some people look slightly silly when they're doing it.
That was the first time I realized, oh, that's actually a skill that I wasn't labeling as a skill.
And as I was reading the book, I started thinking about, oh, equanimity is a skill.
There are practices that you can do daily weekly monthly, that you can improve the skill of equanimity.
And maybe there are folks who are slightly more naturally equanimous, gifted with equanimity, and there are some folks who aren't so much, but to the degree that each of us can move closer to it, to more equanimity, like there are ways to do it.
And one of the first places I started thinking about this in the book is where you start talking about the three doors that we have access to.
And you're right, Des.
Most of us were raised with a false emotional dichotomy.
Either act them out or suppress them.
Those are the emotions.
To make matters worse, emotion suppression was glorified as something dignified heroic mature, strong and desirable.
And then you say in addition to door number one, act out or ruminate, and door number two suppress repress, avoid or deny, there is door number three, which is equanimity.
Feel it, but don't feed it.
And so again I started thinking about okay well, that's the beginning of looking at equanimity as a skill.
And part of that practice is to, as best we can, choose door number three.
So can you just talk a little bit more about door number three and how in all the work you've done and the workshops you've run, you get people to start even just recognizing, oh, there's a third door that I can choose if I can see it.
Sure.
I'd be happy to.
Let's operationalize equanimity, Patrick.
Exactly.
So the good news is it's readily available online. whether or not we have equanimous temperaments.
And as you said, some of us tend to be more equanimous than others.
I actually do not.
I am not kind of.
I don't have an equanimity as a temperamental quality but, like the other immeasurables like compassion and loving kindness, we all have it naturally.
These are inborn qualities that we all have.
So we don't have to go anywhere to get it.
And, unlike some more esoteric things that we might cultivate in through long meditation equanimity, we can access it just like that.
Just like that.
With what one of my mentors, John Kabat-Zinn, used to always call an orthogonal rotation of consciousness.
This just tiny turning of understanding can shift everything in a moment and we can discover the equanimity that is actually there.
So I'm excited about it because there are so many ways that we can do that.
We can kind of short circuit the hijacking loop, the narrative, the story, whatever has us caught in a cloud of drama unawareness, outrage or withdrawal.
There are a myriad of ways to do that.
So I imagine a lot of your listeners have meditated, have done some kinds of meditation.
I'm sure you've talked about it on this show.
And when you practice mindfulness meditation, you're cultivating equanimity.
So there's one thing.
For anybody who's doing mindfulness meditation, you're cultivating equanimity.
All those moments where you sit, with experience, with nonjudgmental awareness, you are widening the window of tolerance.
You're choosing door number three.
You're saying.
Rather than go off on this train of thought and worry, rather than deny through fantasy or whatever, or just getting up and having an ice cream cone, I'm going to sit here and be with this experience as kindly and non-judgmentally as I can.
That's equanimity.
So every moment that you've done that in your meditation, you're strengthening equanimity.
But you can also do it without meditation.
And you and I talked before we started recording about I call them cognitive hacks, just to, to be whatever, to give a little kind of hook with a hack.
They're cognitive hacks.
They're very simple ways of kind of interrogating what's going on in the moment to see if there might be a more spacious response that allows us to turn towards it, feel it, allow it to arise and pass away, to get kind of awakened from that trance of reactivity.
These questions that I suggest in the book are not questions you can inflict on yourself or anybody else.
So the timing has to be right, and you'll know in the moment.
So if it's not right, don't worry about it.
Experiment with them.
Do you want me to mention them now?
Sure.
Be specific?
Okay.
Yeah, also really relate to what are called in Buddhism the three characteristics, and the Buddhist path is one very much like Stoicism.
I think what Buddhism and Stoicism share at their very essence is the power and the freedom of being aligned with reality, that the truth will set you free.
And Circling back to the beginning of our conversation, there is a certain amount of vulnerability when we open to the truth.
And a lot of ways that we're misaligned from the truth have to do with defending ourselves from reality or burnishing our self-image in some way.
Curating our experience so we'll feel safer.
Burnishing our image so we will feel loved all the ways.
The paradox is that they actually make us more vulnerable because they misalign us with reality.
And what Stoicism and Buddhism share is the central conviction that if more you connect with reality as it is, the happier you'll be, the more freedom you will feel.
So one reality from the Buddhist perspective is that most things aren't as personal as we take them.
Buddhism takes it a step further.
We don't have to go there because it's a challenging question.
But let's just say most things are not as personal as we might think.
And a lot of the ways we get caught in reactivity has to do with taking things personally.
So a simple question can simply be, are there impersonal elements here that I'm not recognizing?
Is it possible that this isn't mainly about me and whatever the story is?
They don't like me.
They're rejecting me.
They don't respect me. they betrayed me, et cetera, et cetera.
That's a lot of suffering.
That's a lot of moments of being misaligned with reality, of being off balance.
Just asking yourself gently, is it possible to interpret this?
And In truth, most of the time, we're making up the answer, right?
I mean, we're making it up.
So if you're making up a story about why somebody did something someone reminded me on another podcast interview well, just ask them.
Well, of course, you can just ask.
But if you don't have that opportunity and you're making up a story, make up a better story that is more aligned with reality.
And reality is there are huge, complex causes and conditions that influence every moment.
And we tend to think we see ourselves as so central to the world and why everything is happening.
And we're actually not.
We're not quite as important as we think in any given moment.
So that's one.
Another one is... remembering what our mothers or grandmothers always said.
It's such a platitude.
This too shall pass.
The truth is things change.
Impermanence is a fundamental truth.
When we get caught in a story, we tend to forget that this too shall pass.
And if your mother tells you that and you're really upset, you could get very pissed off because it feels like discounting or minimization.
Or what do you know about my drama of the moment?
So we have to be careful not to do that as a kind of mother telling you to get over yourself, because that's never going to work.
My mother has tried to do that to me a few times, and you're right, it never works.
Absolutely.
It makes things worse, actually.
It just compounds the frustration.
So we've got to be skillful with the question of if I remind myself in this moment that, for example emotions, we know that the nature of emotion is to be fleeting.
When we're not fueling them, when we're not suppressing them, they come and go really quickly.
Jill Bolte-Taylor talks about the 92nd rule.
Yes.
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about this.
Yes.
Can we remind ourselves that the reality is emotions move quickly, and much of our suffering is around emotions, fear, anger, outrage, worry, that kind of thing, anger. all the flavors of those different feelings, sadness.
So remembering impermanence is remembering reality, that things change and emotions pass quickly.
And if I remember that, maybe I can turn towards it.
Maybe I have more courage to sit with things as they are, to not immediately go into door number one or door number two and stay with door number three.
Yeah.
So those are two of them.
I can give you the third one or not now.
Let's do the third one.
But I want to sit on the 90 second rule just for a minute because I think it's so useful as a reminder to ourselves.
And actually just yesterday I was having a conversation with my wife and we had a moment and I was like this is the moment that I usually react.
But I was just like, no, 90 seconds.
Let's see if I can wait 90 seconds.
And...
Not responding is not totally new for me in a moment like that.
But a lot of times I'll just sit quietly.
But in my head, I'm doing all the reactions.
I just try.
I don't know if I made it 90 seconds, but I was just like, no, just sit here.
Just like sit here and don't have an argument in your head.
Don't try to change the subject.
All right.
And it worked wonderfully.
And it's not that hard to just sit with it for 90 seconds.
And then, once that 90 seconds begins to close to your point, the intensity of the moment starts to go down, and you can then sort of choose which way to go.
And you actually write this about the 90 second rule.
Beyond this timeframe, the perpetuation of the emotional state is driven by our thoughts and interpretations which, in turn, elicit more emotions, and even more emotions about our emotions, right.
So if you can stay off of that train track for a minute or 90 seconds, then you don't have to go down the line.
That feels very easy to go down once you get into the habit of it.
So true.
And it is deeply conditioned.
And that's the challenge.
It's so deeply conditioned.
That's the hardest part.
It's actually harder than staying with the feelings.
We kind of tell ourselves, oh, this feeling, it's like, I got to get out of this.
This feels so threatening or icky or whatever.
But really what's hard is deconditioning the habit.
Yeah.
And I want to talk about that a little bit more.
But let's just because we've got it.
We've talked about two of the three thought experiences.
We talked about don't take it personally.
And actually, before we move on from that, it reminded me can you tell the quick parable of the man on the boat in the fog?
Because to me, I just love the visual.
And I think folks will be able to kind of carry that with them from this and from the conversation sure.
This is a favorite story of mine.
It has served me over decades, this story, really decades.
I love this story.
I think it's Chinese.
I can't remember where it comes from.
I think it's a Chinese parable, but there's a man in a boat and yes, it's foggy.
And another boat appears and The man has the right of way and this other boat is bearing down on him and he's getting angrier and angrier.
It's very clear what the right of way is.
He starts yelling, get out of my way.
The boat keeps bearing down, bearing down, bearing down.
Finally, he sees the boat is nearly on top of him and he sees that there's no one in the boat.
And of course, you can imagine the anger just completely disappears in that moment.
It's all about the story of someone being in the boat.
And that's the power of recognizing how impersonal so many situations are.
There are a lot of different versions of that story.
Yeah, it reminds me of the saying, which I may butcher, but don't take for malice what is often attributed to indifference.
So you can't be mad at the boat.
The boat's not doing it on purpose.
It's just a boat.
But until you know that nobody is on the boat, that nobody is steering that boat, we're mad at the boat.
And then to your point.
Once you realize there's nobody piloting it, you realize oh, it was indifferent.
The universe pushing that boat towards me was indifferent, didn't care that I was there, didn't care if I wasn't.
Exactly.
And there's another take on that from Marshall Rosenberg, who was one of my teachers and developed nonviolent communication, NBC.
Really interesting system.
And he used to say all unskillful behavior can be interpreted as a tragic expression of unmet needs.
Tragic insofar as we're doing exactly the wrong thing to get our needs met.
So there are a lot of ways we can understand situations that break through the spell of outrage anger, reactivity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's talk about that third thought experiment before we move on.
It's the big picture.
It's the overview effect.
Yes.
The overview effect.
Yes.
So the thought experiment is basically to imagine this situation with perspective, and the perspective can be one of space or it can be one of time.
And I heard this first from my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, and he's a funny guy and a wonderful meditation teacher.
And I remember him saying, from the perspective of history, how important will this be?
And just reflect for a What do you feel when you think of Genghis Khan?
Nothing.
Well, Genghis Khan wrought havoc and hell across thousands and thousands of square miles and killed incredible people, but he's in the dustbin of history.
So, from the perspective of history, and we can even go like a week out, a month out, a month from now hmm, how will this feel?
Can you remember a month ago? what you were ruminating about.
Can you remember a week ago what hijacked you?
And of course, right now, so many things hijack us, you know, just get on social media.
Can you remember what it was that hijacked you last night?
So the perspective of time, again, you can't inflict it on yourself.
You can invite it and see if it's helpful.
You can't inflict it.
And I think just to go back to that concept a little bit more, we can use these perspectives as kind of like a spiritual bypass, and that doesn't work.
As a way to avoid the feeling, do a back and run around it, that doesn't work, right?
So invite perspective taking, not as a way to deny the feeling, but as a way to put more space around it and see what happens, to allow it to arise and pass and kind of do its thing as part of nature.
We are part of nature.
Feelings come and go as part of nature.
And part two of this third reflection is space.
And I think we all know that every astronaut who goes out in spacecraft and sees the earth, they have a spiritual awakening.
They learn perspective in this profound, visceral way.
And priorities change because of this awakening. about what's really important.
They see the earth in this context that is really profound.
And again, we tend to collapse around ourselves, our tiny, tiny, tiny worlds.
And things get very important.
And there's a metaphor I like for this.
I use sometimes in my classes.
I didn't put in the book.
But let's say you have a small bottle of water.
You shake it up.
It creates a lot of disturbance.
The bigger the container, the same wave creates less and less disturbance.
So we use this metaphor. perspective taking of space and time.
So this same wave creates much less disturbance in the bigger container of awareness.
It reminds me of an exercise that I've done before, and I think I got it from the author Arthur Brooks.
I forget what he calls it, but the basics are, let's just say something bad happened.
You got fired from a job.
Your girlfriend broke up with you.
Something happened.
Spend some time journaling on the emotions of that relatively close to the moment when it happened, and then put it away.
And in six months, bring it back up and reflect on the emotions of the exact same, the exact same moment, the same stimulus, but six months later, and you'll and reflect and look back on.
Well, that's how I felt six months ago.
But today when things are calm and the water isn't so choppy, oh, I don't feel nearly as fearful.
I don't feel nearly as angry.
I don't feel nearly as anxious because it's not happening right now.
And I think that's such a useful exercise.
And it was what I was thinking about when you were talking and when I was reading about the thought experiment of the big picture.
It's like, yeah, zoom out a little bit.
Recognize that how you feel right now will change in a week and change in a month and change in a year.
And bring some of the calmness that we know is coming.
We know you're going to be calmer in a year than you are right now in the moment.
So just try to steal some of that calmness from the future and recognize that you can.
Actually we can grasp it now if we just do a little bit of work.
Yes, I agree completely.
I might argue a tiny bit with the verbs.
Yeah.
And this, I think, comes more from my meditation training.
And rather than kind of... I don't think we actually need to import or grab or take the calmness.
I think it comes...
I think that's the beauty of it, is that, in a sense, we create the conditions, we get perspective and then it happens, and we don't have to make it happen.
It just happens.
And there's a kind of relaxation there, no striving, a letting go, because the striving, the kind of trying to reach or gain equanimity, in some sense backfires.
So we create the conditions by perspective taking, and then there's equanimity there.
Thank you for correcting that, because that actually brings up one of the things I want to talk about, which is about this creating the conditions.
And you write that equanimity behaves like a shy animal, only appearing when the conditions are right.
Our job is to create the conditions for equanimity to arise.
So could we talk about a little bit more about how do we create those conditions?
Again, maybe thinking about this idea of like, OK, equanimity as a skill to the degree that it is.
What do we need to do in our environment, in our internal environment or external environment, so that we can create the conditions whereby, to your point, we are inviting it in and we are not grasping at it?
Yes, I think there are so many ways to do that.
And these ways are shared by everyone from Oprah to Arthur Brooks and everyone in between.
And I'm sure many of the guests on your podcast step out in nature, have an experience of something that's bigger than self experience, as Dr Keltner talks about all the everyday versions of awe where the sense of self shrinks.
He's done great research on, he's had research even in his lab.
I don't know if you've had him on the show or you know who he is.
Dr Keltner is at Berkeley, wonderful psychologist who has written a great book on awe.
That I think-.
Yeah, I remember you mentioned the book and I highlighted the title when I was reading it.
Yeah,
Yeah, I think it fits for what you explore here.
So he's done some great research on awe and we can have huge moments of awe where, like watching the Olympics that were on recently, you look at some of those athletes and it's awesome to see what they're able to do listening to music or going to the great pyramids in Giza or seeing the Angkor Wat in Cambodia we can feel awe.
But we can feel awe watching a butterfly on a tree and watching the way it moves, and like the incredible beauty and natural design of this fragile creature that It sounds like a platitude, but it can be a moment of awe.
And we see it with kids who stop and look and they're awestruck by ordinary things.
And we can reclaim that awe.
And what Docker showed is whether people kind of seek out a big experience of awe or he just shows them a big picture of Yosemite.
So they just look at a picture of Yosemite.
So awesome.
They draw a picture of themselves before and they draw a picture of themselves after.
And guess what?
The picture of themselves after this self is much smaller.
It shrinks.
So anything that we can do to realign ourselves proportionally with life is going to help us regain equanimity.
So in relation to others, in relation to nature, humor, I love humor.
Humor just collapses these big stories we have about how dare he, you know, a lot of those.
Can you, especially politically, so much outrage.
Humor is a way, Of course.
Meditation practice is definitely a way to really, like I said earlier, cultivate that capacity to sit with things as they are.
So of course, hygiene with social media.
I mean, that, okay, everybody says it, but yeah.
I mean you want to keep the habit of arousal going.
Just spend a good portion of your day on social media and You're guaranteed to do that.
And again the problem in some ways is more about the habit you're creating.
Even secondary to that are all the negative consequences of that arousal.
But it's the habit that gets reinforced that's really pernicious and hard to change.
Yeah, you're right.
Increasingly.
Nowadays, we are actually training our minds to be distracted and constantly seek new and better forms of stimulation.
And then you go on to something that I'd love to spend a little bit of time on, which is in Buddhist teachings.
There are four places where we are instructed to direct mindful attention.
These are usually taught in a particular order, beginning with awareness of the body, proceeding to awareness of feeling tones, then awareness of states of mind, and on to awareness of dharmas, mental phenomena that underlie and order our relationship with reality.
They are called the four foundations of mindfulness.
Could you walk us through those four phases a little bit, just so that we get a sense of what they are and maybe why they are sequenced in the way that they are?
Sure.
Yes.
Great.
I haven't been asked that.
I love talking about the four foundations of mindfulness.
So most meditation practice begins with awareness of the breath.
And that's very logical because we feel the breath in the body.
The breath happens without effort.
It's pretty neutral as far as sensations go for most of us.
So it tends not to trigger a lot of reactivity.
So we're able to stay with it more readily.
Mindfulness of the body is incredibly liberating and incredibly important.
When we're focusing on the body, we're not lost in thought.
That's really different from how we are most of the time.
And we may only kind of flittingly land there feeling half of an in-breath or feeling a second of pressure with your hands or your feet.
But each of those moments, we are not in rumination.
And the body is not only in the present tense, but it is a doorway to connect us with reality.
The mind because it's in the future and the past and it distorts in all sorts of ways.
Is not reality actually the kind of reality that we want to connect with?
The body is here, present tense reality.
And the body is a way for us to begin to distinguish between the stories we tell about sensations and the sensations themselves.
And this can be extremely liberating.
So John Kabat-Zinn, who developed mindfulness-based stress reduction almost 50 years ago, started in a hospital.
And a lot of the people who came and were learning mindfulness outside of Buddhism were in pain.
And they were applying mindfulness to physical pain.
And they got help.
And how did they get help?
They got help by seeing pain as sensation, like pressure heat tingling, and beginning to separate their thoughts about the pain from the pain itself and not even calling it pain, seeing it in this very basic way, as sensation.
And that becomes extremely liberating.
That's what's possible in the first foundation of mindfulness.
Now, I'm saying this because these parcels of experience were specifically chosen because of their capacity to liberate the mind.
That's what they're about.
You get the most bang for your buck if you apply your mindfulness to these four areas.
That's where freedom happens.
And again we're talking.
Freedom in terms of being fully aligned with reality, without resistance, without denial, without attachment.
The second one is really interesting.
And actually I talked on a podcast yesterday with a Buddhist teacher in some ways most aligned with equanimity.
So the second foundation is called Vedana.
And it's in Pali, it's feeling tones.
This is so interesting because Feeling tones occur.
They arise with every moment of experience, but they're usually happening below the threshold of awareness.
So, every time an experience meets a sense door, and this includes thinking, which is considered a sense in Buddhist philosophy, but touch, sight sound.
Every experience that we have has a feeling tone.
The feeling tones are very simple.
Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.
That's it.
Those are the only choices.
So every experience we have registers on some level as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Or we might say neutral as neither pleasant or unpleasant.
It's defined differently.
What's really important here is that that unconscious, typically unconscious reaction conditions, reactivity.
I don't like it.
Yuck.
Aversion.
And aversion starts that whole, whatever that story is of aversion.
Ooh, I love this attachment, stickiness.
When we're sticky, we're not equanimous, because we're holding onto things rather than letting them come and go.
It's a form of reactivity.
Oh, neutral, boring, chill out.
Now we're the teenage boy, like, what's going on here?
I'm checking out.
Then I'm not here.
I'm not present.
So you can think of each of these almost like the physics of martial art.
We're leaning in.
We're off balance.
I want more of that.
We're leaning out.
This is boring.
I'm just withdrawing.
Or we're fighting, you know, we're fighting with experience and none of the, we're not balanced.
So that's number two, that's mindfulness of feelings.
And it's so important to pay attention to like, is this pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?
You can kind of break the whole cycle right there.
Very powerful.
Number three, it's the third foundation of mindfulness.
That's kind of everything that's going on in our heads.
And the one-to-one explanation in English and through the lens of Western psychology gets a little tricky with the third and fourth.
Fourth foundation, because sometimes we put emotion here.
But in Buddhist philosophy mind and body are one.
And really a lot of emotion is, can be known in the body in the first foundation.
So things can get a little wonky in the translation, but I think it's easiest to think about the third foundation as awareness of thinking and and awareness of what goes on in the mind.
That's not strictly what it is in Buddhist philosophy, but practically speaking that's the most helpful thing.
And then in the fourth foundation is It becomes more esoteric and more Buddhist, because it has to do with the nature of reality and kind of turning your attention towards these different lists that they have in reality about the nature of experience.
And I'm not sure it's worth getting.
I didn't get into it in the book and I'm not sure it's worth getting into the weeds with your listeners here for the Fourth Foundation.
It's not even... typically taught that much.
So in mindfulness practice it's embedded in kind of talks that you get, but it isn't specifically taught in mindfulness meditation.
Okay.
You have a line and I think it's in this section of the book that I just love which is the best way to tame the mind is to give it freedom.
Can you talk about what that means, especially as it relates to at least those first three stages of mindfulness?
Sure.
And the foundations, by the way, are not necessarily in order.
You can move between focusing on this and focusing on that.
We just usually start with the body because it's easiest.
I think this comes from something Suzuki Roshi said about taming the mind.
I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure it did.
And again, it's something that I've used in my own practice and in my teaching all the time.
It relates to the analogy of the container of water also.
So we're talking about space, right?
We're talking about creating space in the mind so that things can arise more readily.
But the particular angle of this story I think is really helpful for my personal psychology and a lot of the way we're wired in the West, which is if you make too many rules and you tell me too much what to do, I'm going to rebel.
And the way I'm wired psychologically, I need more room.
I need a bigger pasture.
I don't want to be restricted. you have to do this and you have to stay with the breath.
It's very fundamental to most meditation practice.
You are taught that it is okay to think.
Thinking is not the enemy.
If you make thinking the enemy, guess what?
You're going to think more and more and more and more.
You want to give the mind a really big posture.
You want to allow it to do what it does. and say, oh, there's the mind thinking.
And the more we allow it, the more spacious we become, the less reactive we are and the less we actually fuel reactivity.
It's a bit paradoxical.
We all want to get rid of thoughts when we're meditating and it's nice to drop into a space where we're not ruminating.
But we don't get there by making thoughts the enemy.
That's the pasture idea.
Kind of like, okay, this is the nature of mind.
The mind does this.
It's not a problem.
It's not a mistake.
And it's not personal.
It's not just my mind that does this.
Every mind does this.
Yes.
All right, starting to wrap up so we can be respectful of your time here.
One more thing.
You write this although equanimity is a vital skill, it is not the only thing the world needs.
The world needs our love compassion generosity wisdom energy intelligence, creativity and vitality, to name just a few.
Nonetheless, the more I learn about equanimity and reflect on the current state of the world, the more convinced I am that, of all these beautiful qualities, this may be the medicine we need the most in this moment.
And so, thinking back a little bit to what I brought up earlier about the skill of equanimity and looking at it as a skill, whether that's a perfect metaphor or not, what is your kind of closing case for why it is worth doing the work to develop the skill of equanimity today, if not always, but why perhaps today, as you say, it is the most important?
I'm so glad you asked that.
And it's a beautiful way to close our conversation.
Thank you.
I wrote a piece recently on equanimity as a form of resistance.
Many of us are angry at the political state situation.
In the world, and particularly in the United States right now, wherever you are on the political spectrum, there's a lot of anger.
There's a lot of polarization, divisiveness.
I don't think anybody wants it.
I think we're angry that our attention, our emotions, our hearts, our values are being hijacked by social media and the ways that politics has co-opted the genius of algorithms to colonize our psyches, our hearts and our minds.
I don't think we want that.
I don't think anyone wants that.
I think a lot of us are afraid that equanimity is too soft, that it doesn't have the strength to meet the outrage of the moment.
And what the moment is called for.
There's a lot of fear.
And that fear goes back to the near enemy, actually.
And we slip into this near enemy.
Oh, yeah, I understand.
It's not indifference, but it's not strong enough.
So let's look in closing at the monks who walked from Texas to Washington.
Yes, perfect.
19 brown skinned men with their pariah dog they adopted in India, walked in their robes, paragons of virtue who had taken eight precepts don't handle money, only eat what's given to them.
Their only message was peace in the world starts with peace in your heart.
They catalyzed, their dog has millions of followers on Facebook.
Their dog Aloka, let alone these 19 monks, who were greeted by governors spontaneously making peace days and evangelical Christians called the messengers of Jesus in the Deep South.
These Buddhists from Southeast Asia in a monastery in Texas, there's power here.
Mm-hmm.
There's tremendous power.
You can reclaim your equanimity, your peace of mind.
You can resist the outrage machine.
And there's power in it.
We saw it in Rosa Parks sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
That was equanimity.
That changed federal legislation.
So Please, folks, don't feel that you are copping out with equanimity.
You're standing up for what you believe in and against what you don't value.
Thank you so much, Margaret.
The book is called Quiet Strength, Find Peace, Feel Alive and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity.
The book is out now.
I loved it.
And I know folks who are listening, who have listened to Chasing Excellence for a while, will also love it.
So definitely go out and get it.
Margaret, thank you so very much for the work and for your time today.
Thank you for a wonderful conversation, Patrick.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before you go.
First, if you want even more from this episode, go check out the full five three, one breakdown.
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