It can be hard to stay present during chaotic times. When we’re facing a brutal news cycle, rough personal circumstances, or another challenging situation, it can feel as though reacting in despair or shutting down our emotions are our only choices. But in her new book, Quiet Strength, psychotherapist Margaret Cullen suggests a third option: equanimity.
Equanimity is often understood as emotional stability in the face of challenging circumstances. While appealing, this frame can make it sound a little like a lack of feeling. Cullen defines it differently: the ability to fully feel our feelings — but without reacting to them.
She compares it to a surfer riding a giant swell. The surfer isn’t frozen with fear or fighting the wave. She’s fully present and adapting to each moment, with all her senses open to her environment. This is full aliveness, full presence.
We asked Cullen to explain how we can all cultivate more of that kind of presence. This is what she shared.
Experience Life: What is equanimity? How do you define it?
Margaret Cullen: Simply put, equanimity is a way of being with the full range of human experience without getting caught in any of it. A new definition has come to me since I wrote the book: “uncaughtness.” It’s a made-up word, but I think it fits.
Equanimity is about flowing with all experiences without getting caught by any of it.
With equanimity, rather than trying to regulate emotions or curate our experience so that it’s “all good and not at all bad,” we meet everything with an open heart, and we create more space around emotions. And if we do get hijacked [by our emotions or reactions], a hallmark of equanimity is an ability to recover quickly. That ability to bounce back and be pliable is what psychologist Susan David calls emotional agility.
EL: Where does the concept of equanimity come from?
MC: The word comes from the Latin roots Equus and animus. Equus meaning balance, and animus having several meanings, including spirit. I love that kind of dialectical tension around equanimity: There’s aliveness and spirit and also balance, which I think is very descriptive of the state.
We can find the concept in all the dharmic traditions. It’s highly articulated in Buddhism. But we also find it in Judaism and in Sufism. Certainly in Stoicism.
EL: In Quiet Strength, you write that equanimity is the opposite of suppression. How so?
MC: People often mistake equanimity for this idea of staying in the middle, of somehow controlling things so that we don’t feel any emotional extremes. But suppression of emotions involves a kind of interference with the flow of life and the flow of experience.
Equanimity is all about getting in that flow and finding a sense of connection with ourselves, with nature, with our inner and outer experiences.
EL: So it doesn’t mean tamping down your emotions if something bad happens?
MC: No. If something negative is happening, I’m not going to say, “I’m practicing equanimity, so whatever is happening is fine.” I’m letting myself feel as distraught as I am.
And in that way, equanimity actually deepens the poignancy of life. Whatever it is you might be experiencing, it’s important to be able to feel the poignancy. But without the melodrama that gets fueled by both resistance and rumination.
EL: You’ve written about the outrage–rumination spiral. How can equanimity help free us from that trap, especially with a 24-hour news cycle?
MC: When you’re hyperaroused and hyperactivated, your cognition is gated. You lose access to wisdom. Your perspective is narrow. And what’s being called for, at this moment in history, is seeing clearly, and learning to resist the tremendous urge to become outraged, which involves othering and divisiveness.
Equanimity is one way to resist the outrage that happens when algorithms pull us into these polarized positions. I don’t believe any of us want them — wherever we stand politically.
EL: What are some ways to develop more equanimity?
MC: The good news is that equanimity is already here. From the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, equanimity is fundamental to our nature, just as lovingkindness and compassion are. We don’t have to go out to find them. It’s more a question of accessing what’s already here.
Perspective-taking is a very powerful way to access equanimity. Ask yourself, How personal is this situation? How will it look in five years or 10 years?
Or try on the overview effect that astronauts all seem to bring back from their travels to space. From the widest perspective, How important is this?
We can also take refuge in something that’s bigger than ourselves. This brings equanimity because it opens up space. We might take refuge in God or Jesus or the Buddha. We might take refuge in community or art or beauty. We might take refuge in nature.
Another way is by growing what Dan Siegel, who wrote the foreword for my book, calls the “window of tolerance.” Growing our own window of tolerance helps us see directly into the laboratory of our hearts and minds, and discover that we can meet greater and greater levels of intensity in life without melodrama.
Start small and experiment. Be curious. What if I just open to this moment? What if I resist the impulse to tweet back in outrage? What if I don’t suppress the feeling and [instead] ride the wave and put more space around it. What happens? Just test it and see.
EL: How might our responses start to change when we start developing more equanimity?
MC: There are two main signals of equanimity. The first is that we’re able to hold a reaction with greater spaciousness.
Imagine that you have a container with water in it. You shake it up. If it’s a small container, that wave makes a big disturbance. The bigger the container, the less disturbance that same wave makes. That’s one way. You’ve got a bigger container for this outrage or whatever it is. You feel it, but you’re not caught. There is the uncaughtness.
The other way that equanimity can show up is I get up, I read something on social media or in a news article, and I get really, really, really angry. I’m totally caught. And then a minute later, it’s gone. Equanimity is in how quickly I recover from that [reaction].
To be clear: There’s still the same buffet of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Equanimity is not going to change that ratio, but they’ll blend together a little more. The sweetness in the sorrow and the sorrow in the sweetness become more noticeable.
The Overview Effect
When Earth is seen from far away, all the boundaries blur, and the greatest dramas of history are no more consequential than “the squabbles of mites on a plum,” as the cosmologist Carl Sagan writes in Pale Blue Dot. This epiphany is so common among astronauts that it has a name: the overview effect, and it reminds us how powerful it is to step back and see things from the widest possible angle.
In this experiment, I invite you to adopt a cosmic view — one that holds our delusions of self-importance and feelings of primacy with tenderness and a sense of perspective. Seeing our troubles from space can offer some relief from that narrow perspective that comes with reactivity.
But perspective-taking is not simply a tool for bypassing pain. It actually helps change our relationship to discomfort, making more room for it and putting it in perspective. This changes our experience and creates room for other feelings.
- Think about a situation that’s troubling you. Choose something that feels workable, one in which you have enough wiggle room to entertain different perspectives.
- Consider the situation in as much detail as you can. Bring a spirit of scientific investigation to your experience. Notice the emotions that are triggered. Notice the feelings in your body.
- Now imagine that you could look back on this same situation in one year. How might it look?
- How would it look to you five years from now? Ten years?
- Now, what if you were in space? How would this situation look from the moon? Can you find it on the pale blue dot?
- How does this situation look from the perspective of the universe? Dwell there for a while.
This exercise is adapted with permission from Margaret Cullen’s 2026 book, Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity.
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