[Mindful] Rethinking Equanimity: Margaret Cullen on Equanimity and Quiet Strength

A conversation about how equanimity appears across contemplative traditions and everyday life, and the ideas behind Cullen's new book, Quiet Strength.

By Angela Stubbs | March 9, 2026

Equanimity is often discussed in relation to mindfulness, yet it extends beyond formal practice and into the ways we meet everyday life.

In this conversation, Margaret Cullen reflects on the ideas behind her book Quiet Strength and the five-year journey of study, practice, and dialogue that shaped it.

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.

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