← Compassion in a T-Shirt
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl and welcome back to Compassion in a T Shirt where we explore the science and practice of compassion and how it can genuinely transform our lives. Today, I'm really pleased to be joined by Margaret Cullen. Margaret is a licensed psychotherapist and a true pioneer in bringing contemplative practices into mainstream psychology, healthcare and community settings. She was among the very first teachers certified in mindfulness based stress reduction, has taught internationally for decades and spent over 30 years supporting people living with cancer and their loved ones. Margaret has also co developed major compassion based programs including Stanford University's Compassion Cultivation Training Program. She's led research across diverse populations and founded Compassion Core, bringing compassion training to underserved communities around the world. Her book Quiet Strength explores a quality that feels especially relevant right now. Equanimity. In a world shaped by uncertainty, division and overwhelm, Margaret invites us to rediscover equanimity not as detachment or numbness, but as a steady, wise presence that allows us to stay open, engaged and human without being hijacked by reactivity. This is a conversation about calm, strength, holding space, and how we can meet life as it actually is. And so I bring you Margaret Cullen. Margaret Cullen, welcome to Compassion in a T shirt.
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B
Thank you for inviting me. Should I be in a T shirt?
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A
You're absolutely okay. That's right, yes. And congratulations about your wonderful book Quiet Strength coming out in March.
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B
Coming out March 10th.
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A
Yes, March 10th. So I'm looking forward to that. My favourite thing about it really is your writer's voice, actually. It's sort of beautifully written and your warmth and personality, I think, shine through which, which actually makes the content even more engaging. So I, I really appreciated that. To begin with a little segue though, I. My New Year's resolutions this year is to read 12 romantic comedies in actual fact. And the one I'm currently reading is the Toll Gate by Georgette Heyer, I think published in, in 1954. And just last night I read a passage in which young Ben, the stable boy, was very upset because he thought Captain Staples was. Was leaving him. And so Captain. The captain tried to kind of reassure him by showing him that all his toiletries were still in his room and so on. And so just let me read what happens next. Ben stopped knuckling his eyes when he had assimilated the fact that the captain's ivory brushes still graced the chest of drawers together with his shaving tackle and the knife he used for paring his nails, he became very much more cheerful. And by the time Joseph Lydd arrived at the toll house soon after 8 o', clock, he was able to greet him with perfect equanimity. So I thought, isn't that amazing? I read that last night and I thought I'd throw back to you. When you use the word equanimity, what do you mean? And maybe what people sometimes misunderstand too about equanimity.
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B
That'S quite a segue. I love hearing that. I love learning about different ways that the word is used. It's interesting that the book is from the 50s, I think you said.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And the word is kind of old fashioned. We don't use it in conversation very much. And it can even sound a little, I don't know, pretentious or kind of fussy or something. You know, he, he met his master with perfect equanimity. It's just something we wouldn't use in conversation at all. So, so it's been fun. I've really had to educate people a lot about this word and it's been fun kind of reclaiming the word. And I don't think I've really succeeded at my elevator pitch yet for equanimity because it's actually quite a complex and nuanced concept. But I think we can start the approach in towards equanimity with a simple but not easy idea. And that is that equanimity is the capacity to feel fully all of life's experience without getting hooked in reactivity, without getting hooked by the drama. And in reality, when we unpack that on a day to day level, even like the example in your book, sometimes what that looks like is widening the window of tolerance so we simply can experience a broader range of feelings while remaining fairly centered and calm. Other times it means a very quick recovery time. And I think this is kind of the most realistic and important dimension of equanimity because we're really looking at how quickly we come back into balance. When we start unpacking on a kind of micro moment level, we're always losing our balance and coming back into balance. That's what nature does. We're a part of nature. Nature is not static, it's dynamic. We're also dynamic. So we're looking at this kind of suppleness, resilience, the capacity to recover balance more and more readily.
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A
That's really helpful because when I read the passage, I thought to myself, I wonder if that's quite what we might mean now with equanimity from the point of view of your, your work and and so on, because in a way, Ben returned to equanimity having been sort of reassured, I suppose, or, you know, that sort of thing. But what you're saying there is that it's not necessarily always remaining calm and composed, but rather also being able to return to that sense of balance quite quickly. It could have been that Ben might have continued to fret, you know, but he was able to return to that sort of. That equanimity really quite quickly once things had unfolded.
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B
Yes. And it's not cheating for Ben to kind of use a cue from his environment to help him recover balance. That's perfectly okay. There are a lot of different ways that we do that. He got some reassurance, and that helped him. And that's wonderful. And sometimes we get that and sometimes we don't. And you also asked about misunderstandings. So one direction of misunderstanding is that equanimity means kind of not having strong feelings and never losing our balance or never getting activated. That equanimity can actually coexist with arousal, and it can also reduce arousal. So these are kind of subtle, but I think important distinctions. And, you know, the classic misunderstanding about equanimity is that it's apathy or indifference or, you know. Yeah, detachment. That's the other near enemy of equanimity. Detachment.
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A
Yes. We can feel things very strongly and still remain balanced and in equanimity with those feelings alongside almost that sense. And also, equanimity can help to soften perhaps those feelings at the same time.
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B
Yes, yes. Well, I think it doesn't really change the feelings. It puts more space around the feelings. So the feelings still have whatever their arc, their natural arc is. And that's another subtle, I think, but very important thing to point out, because so often in the work that we do both around compassion and psychotherapy, people mishear instructions as regulation or as an instruction to in some way interfere with the emotion, you know, to make it smaller, make it more manageable, or, you know, regulate it in some way. And I think the promise of equanimity is more about having more space around the emotion so that we can tolerate it and recover more readily, that we don't have to manipulate it, we don't have to be afraid of it.
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A
Yes. We can have sometimes the emotions themselves and then a difficult kind of relationship with those emotions, and we sort of struggle with them or fear them sometimes. Equanimity is about kind of making space for them and allowing them to be there in a way and staying kind of cultivating a calmness around the fact that, you know, actually we've got a lot of emotions on board.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
I suddenly thought, I, I wonder whether my New year's resolution of 12 Rom Coms is, is sort of actually in a sense a way that I was trying to cultivate equanimity, you know, in, in this rather tumultuous time actually, because it does help to sort of make space, I suppose, for, for a whole, for a range of emotions. Not only the. More just the light hearted laughter that goes along with, you know, a funny book.
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B
Absolutely. And you know, we can get in trouble with the more pleasant emotions as much as we can get in trouble with challenging emotions, you know, so in some ways we're talking about what we would call in Buddhist philosophy, Vedana, or the feeling tone of experience and our relationship to the feeling tone. So sometimes if it's really pleasant, it's sticky, we get attached. Right. And we lose balance because things change. And if we're still holding on to something that's gone, we're out of balance. We're no longer in balance in the present moment. So we can kind of do a physical metaphor like aikido or karate or something like that. If we're pushing away the feeling because it's unpleasant, it has an unpleasant feeling tone. We're also off balance. So we're aiming for this capacity to be fully here and now with the range of experiences, not getting caught in the feeling tone and our reactions.
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A
You describe the worldly winds. Is that something you're referring to there? The sort of life's difficulties or also life's victories, say, or something like that. But yeah, so how is. Tell us more, I guess about how equanimity perhaps is different from detachment or emotional suppression or even emotional regulation. Yeah.
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B
Yes, good question. And just to say in terms of the worldly winds, before I talk about those distinctions, you know, there are these pairs in Buddhism that are called the worldly winds or the vicissitudes of gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute. What's the fourth? I can't remember right now, but there are four pairs. And the important part is that there are both sides. And when we, at least when I think of the word vicissitudes, I think of the unpleasant. I associate that with that word, but it refers to all of them. So it's our relationship not just to the pleasant to the unpleasant, but to the pleasant too. Finding balance in relationship to both and to the reality that they're constantly changing. They're constantly changing and One other digression, if I may, quickly, about the vicissitudes that was just so interesting to me in writing the book. These worldly winds, or vicissitudes that are named in Buddhist philosophy turned out to be the through line among all major religions in relationship to equanimity. So Judaism, Sufism, and actually Stoicism. Not a religion, a philosophy, but they all had a version of the worldly winds, and they all described equanimity in relationship to these constantly changing winds of life. So that's a perspective that's shared and stories and language that's really similar across traditions. Wisdom traditions.
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A
Yes, it's a deep, deep wisdom, you know, sort of that, that we arrive at these. These worldly wins, pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and infamy. I. I went to the page in the book, so I was able to. But yes, those are the four kind of. It's. It's really fascinating that they cross over religions and cultures and thought traditions and spiritual traditions.
- [15:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. And then your question was about detachment and the near enemy. Is that correct? How do we know where we are? Are we in a near enemy or in the real thing of equanimity? So if we lose a sense of care or love, then it's not equanimity. And again, turning to Buddhist philosophy, which is what I know the most about, and originally the book was just going to be a Buddhist perspective. It had its own kind of life and it grew. But equanimity is a flavor of love. It's an expression of love, just as compassion is. So, you know, we have these four measurables, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And they're all about love. So if the love isn't there, it's not equanimity. And one of my favorite teachers, Matthew Brensilver, said, I put it at the. In the first chapter of my book, a quote of his, that equanimity actually deepens the poignancy we feel more deeply. The love, the tenderness, there's just less melodrama around it. So detachment. You know, one way to tell is if we're numbing out, if we care less, if somehow or other we're not moved or tenderized by life or touched by life, then that's not equanimity.
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A
It's a sort of a delicate sort of pathway there, isn't it? Between the melodrama, I suppose, and the detachment on the other side. And instead this ability to sort of still hold love at the heart of it and a role for mindfulness.
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B
There absolutely no question and mindfulness and equanimity overlap so much, especially the way mindfulness has been taught in the west in all the secular programs that I've been very involved with for many years. And back in the very early days of mbsr, I interviewed Sharon Salzberg for my book, among many other teachers. And originally I planned to write a chapter that was theoretical about mindfulness and equanimity and that looked at the suttas and kind of Buddhist philosophy. But it was so difficult to tease them apart that I ended up really writing from my own experience. I started to say, I asked Sharon, I asked a bunch of different Buddhist teachers, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of equanimity and mindfulness, how much would they overlap? You know, what would that look like? And Sharon said, completely. They completely overlap. Other people I talked to said, no, I don't like that question. And, you know, I got a big range of responses from Buddhist teachers about that question, which, you know, pointed to the complexity of teasing them apart. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but what worked for me was really to think of mindfulness as being fully present in this moment, paying attention intentionally. And that piece of our relationship to experience is the equanimity piece. And most mindfulness teachers would say that, I know it really isn't mindfulness without that equanimity piece. There's some debate that's probably too much inside baseball about this that we don't need to get into, but I think. I think that's the simplest way to wrap our minds around it, that that relationship quality of a loving spaciousness towards experience is really the flavor, the quality of equanimity?
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A
Would you say that that's true of all the four immeasurables? That in some ways they are all intimately a part of mindfulness and also vice versa, that mindfulness sort of helps to sort of bring us to the fore.
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B
All four, yes and no. And here's why. I tend to think of compassion, loving kindness, and sympathetic joy as love in a certain context. And so compassion is love in the context of suffering. And we can practice mindfulness in many contexts. There isn't always suffering, but as far as I understand it, suffering is kind of a prerequisite for compassion to arise. It's what changes the flavor of love to compassion is this component of suffering. Whereas equanimity can be present in any circumstance, right? No matter what the flavor is of the love. And, you know, sympathetic joy is the context is kind of the success or the flourishing of someone else, and we're celebrating that, you know, so they have kind of slightly different contexts, at least from my understanding, in a Buddhist perspective.
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A
Yeah, that's really, really helpful, actually. Just the distinctions there and the notion of context. That's a really great takeaway. I mean, just as a little kind of personal curiosity, you alluded to it that. That you really were part of the MBSR sort of approach from very early on. What's your memory of that or discovering it or how you got involved there?
- [22:41]
B
It was thrilling. It was so exciting and unexpected. I wrote in my book, so you read, Stan, that I was doing an internship for my clinical license as a therapist, working with cancer patients in psychosocial support, and the first MBSR program had been taught in Southern California. And somehow the head of this program knew that I had a meditation background, and it was very private then. I wasn't teaching. And he said, you know, we're thinking of bringing this program in. We'd like to pay you to take the class and check it out for us. So I was paid to take the second class offered in Southern California, and I took it. And I thought, this is. I am. This is it. I need to do this. And I signed up for a very early teacher training with Jon Kabat Zinn, long time ago. It was one of the. I don't know when, but I ended up being, I think, among the first 10 people to be certified as an MBSR teacher. And I was part of the early group in California that was figuring out mbsr, what we were doing, who we were, where we teach, and watching, really, the rising and rising and rising of the wave of interest and how it was getting taken up in all these mainstream settings. You know, we were there watching with amazement. And I remember, I mean, just for fun, when I launched the mindfulness program at a big healthcare system here in Northern California, and they wanted my meditation background on my resume. And I was like, I thought that would never in a million years happen that I'd be writing all my retreats and my teachers and whatnot on my professional resume. So that's as far back as we're going. That's way far back.
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A
Yes. Yes. It gives me little shivers to hear that. It really was an exciting time and revolutionary time, really, and things changing and, as you say, growing and growing and. And growing. So your book, though, I guess getting back to that is it then, sort of discusses many ways in, I guess, to equanimity and. Well, just for example, just to Sort of focus on the notion of bottom up equanimity. What, what role does the body and the nervous system, I guess, play in helping to develop. Develop equanimity?
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B
Absolutely. There's no question there are so many doorways in. And we know now that this system is multidirectional, completely bidirectional, that we can intervene at numerous entry points and impact the whole system. Right. And you know, our notions, our Cartesian notions of the mind body split are problematic. And you know, we've been trying hard to overcome those. They were helpful for a while. But we've started really tripping on this false dichotomy and this kind of binary view of mind and body. Yes. So I think there are a myriad of ways to work with the body to cultivate a template for balance in the body that we can then extrapolate to other dimensions of life. I had that experience directly with a unique form of yoga called Kaiyute Yoga that I ended up doing during the pandemic and found that the instructions, the work was so much about exploring the dynamic nature of balance in my body with kind of like a really acute attention and not trying to get the body to be still or, you know, it was really just exploring on an intimate level how that works, what that looks like, what it feels like. And it was really, really helpful for me. And I know there are lots of other modalities that I'm not as familiar with, but I feel confident, you know, Tai chi and qigong and lots of different forms of yoga that there are a lot of different ways to work through the body with understanding. I think it's important to add here. I talked about this in a podcast yesterday, you know, the kind of the polyvagal heart variability approach that, you know, we're not looking for calm, we're looking for suppleness. You know, we're looking for resilience. You know, that, that the vagal nerve, heart rate failure, ability, like what we're aiming for is not some calm state. And so we can tune into that in a lot of different ways and develop a language like what I call the inner geography of equanimity. That's how I like to refer to it in the body. What's the inner geography?
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A
Yes, I really enjoyed the dozen, what was it, a dozen things I've learned about equanimity through the bottom up practice of Kayuf Yoga.
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B
Yes.
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A
Yeah, it's the right, right pronunciation, but. And I don't suppose you would be able to recite them, but yeah, give Us a feel for some of the key learnings there, I suppose, that maybe might come to mind.
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B
As I talked about in the book, a really significant part of equanimity has to do really with trust. It has to do with trusting that this moment I can fully live in, this moment I can experience it, I can trust the unfolding of my life, that I am a part of nature and finding a way to kind of take refuge in reality, in the truth. We spend a lot of time dodging it. And, you know, you're a clinician, we spend a lot of energy curating our experience and there's tension that comes from that and it's often unconscious and there's precious energy that gets used up doing that and relaxing into the truth of nature. Finding the ways that my body is aligned with nature is a part of nature and expression of nature is part of what I got through equanimity. So this idea of equipoise, that something dynamic that I can actually get a direct visceral experience of if I pay attention in a particular way, there's some mindfulness involved there, but it also has something to do with a lot to do with my relationship to my body in that moment. How much am I striving? Am I. You know, this comes up a lot in many different forms of yoga. Am I pushing so hard that I'm overriding some pain and therefore shutting down in some way to whatever truth is emerging through the body in this moment? Yeah, so there's also, of course, the disruption of hyperarousal by going more slowly and focusing on the body. Because, again, as you well know, it's the rumination in the mind, often the hijacking, the reactivity that keeps the hyperarousal going. So dropping into the body often short circuits that rumination. You know, we're just not giving it purchase, we're not giving it a place to land. We keep coming back to the physical sensation. And it's a wonderful way to. Yeah, I like short circuit as a word to short circuit, what's called. It's a wonderful Pali word for. This is papancha, the proliferation of thought. Papancha, a very anamana poetic word. Yes, that I like a lot. Yeah. And you know, the. Another one that I'm. Look, I'm looking at my list right now. I mentioned inner geography. You know, a term in Buddhism that has been so important to me over the years is right effort. And you get to really explore this idea in a visceral way in this kind of yoga. It's kind of the three Bears test. What's too little effort, what's too much? What's just right? And it's a titration, it's an experiment, It's a laboratory. Oh, there was a little bit of backlash that was too much effort or, oh, I'm just kind of slack and spacing out. That's not enough effort. So that's something that's learned, and that's a wonderful dimension of equanimity.
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A
The last item on the dozen things learned was these physical correlates can become a map to both find my way back to equanimity and to help me recognize it when I am there. And I just thought there's a sort of a bodily wisdom of sorts that really can help be something of a guide. When we have awareness there, then it sort of guides us back to equanimity and we. And helps us know when we've arrived.
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B
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for reminding me of that.
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A
It's very good. Very good and very helpful. In fact, the book does have lots of personal anecdotes and practices and handy sort of lists and even some diagrams. I mean, there's a lot in there that I think was really helpful and gave a lot of food for thought and also takeaways. One of the little things that you said just at the end of the book, part about pathways to equanimity was sort of just a little nod to the idea that there can be some obstacles of the mind that arise to equanimity, that we can sometimes feel fearful of what might happen, or so there might be other blocks to equanimity and so on. One of the reasons that stood out for me is, of course, I practice compassion focused therapy. And Paul Gilbert talks a lot about fears, blocks, and resistances to compassion.
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B
And.
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A
And it just sort of reminded me that there might be similar sorts of things happening with equanimity.
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B
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. There's no question about that. And I think one thing that comes up a lot in both all the mindfulness practice and I think certainly in compassion and in equanimity is the fear that will be too soft, that we'll lose our edge, that will get taken advantage of, that will withdraw, that will fall into the near enemies of indifference that will miss important feedback. You know, there are so many different fears that come up, and I think these are all worth testing in a very safe, simple, quick way. And, you know, just try and experiment. Try and experiment and see, you know, okay, if I'm more equanimous with my partner in this moment, which might mean, okay, pausing for a beat, you know, letting the emotion ride and reach its peak before I respond. Am I, you know, does that make me a SAP somehow? Does that mean that he's going to take advantage of me if I pause and choose to respond out of equanimity? You know, see if you can test it in some real life way and see if whatever those fears are might be true. You know, Another thing that I bring up in the book, although I don't think it's in this section, I think it's in the next one, but I can't remember to tell you the truth that I think is really important is that equanimity is not something we can inflict on ourselves or others. We can't like, use it as a cudgel to beat ourselves up with. And those habits run very deep. You should be more equanimous. I mean, you can imagine me, I wrote the book about it. So it's very tempting for me to say it to myself, let alone my adult daughter to say it to me. And it doesn't work right. You know, it's like if you're upset about something and someone tells you to be equanimous, whether you're telling yourself or someone else is telling you, you basically want to strangle them and you get more upset. So that, I think is a really important caveat, is that we can invite it, we can create the conditions, we can cultivate the habit so it's more accessible. But we can't like inflict it on ourselves. It just. We get the opposite, you know.
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A
Yes, it's almost a. It's almost like a systematic desensitization into it or something where we just do little experiments with it and see how that feels and try it in this context first, that maybe feels a bit safer. And then expand it to other contexts, texts. And it's not something that we can force upon ourselves or others. I think the great sage Taylor Swift wrote a song, something about calm down. And it doesn't work to try to tell people to calm down. But I guess there is an opportunity to model equanimity and to bring equanimity into an interpersonal kind of space. And whether it's through inspiring or mirror neurons or something like that, it might help to bring equanimity to both or all parties. So it can spread, but not forced or something like that.
- [39:33]
B
No question. And I think it's important not to underestimate the power of that at this moment. In the United States, a lot of people feel helpless and overwhelmed by the political situation and the stuff that we get in the news every day. And it's rippling around the world. And other countries have their own issues and what's happening here affects other countries too. But that person who isn't contributing to the melodrama is really doing a lot of good to everyone that they touch. Because the melodrama is pretty easy to escalate. It's already escalated. You know, the algorithms in all of our social media are genius at doing that, and it's very hard not to be exposed to it. And so I'll just give you a brief example. I was talking to a rabbi who went to Minnesota a few weeks ago. A lot of clergy went after the recent murder there. They went as part of the big protest in Minneapolis that I'm sure that news went around the world of ice, killing several protesters. And this was Alex Pretty and she was there with a multi faith group of hundreds of clergy. And that was a lot of people and a lot of feelings were running high. As cold as it was in the city, the feelings were hot, very hot. A few organizers were so equanimous that they kept, you know, like people would, even among the clergy, they'd have organizational meetings and people get really angry. But the organizers stayed equanimous and it kept this protest really effective. And it could have derailed. It could have. There were so many ways that these giant protests with tens of thousands of people can go off the rails. And those economist people, they contribute so much. So it could be at the dining room table, it could be out in the streets, it could be on the boats that were leaving Vietnam with the boat people. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about the person who didn't lose their head. He wrote about this on the boat. It could be in so many places and it could have an impact we don't even know about. So it's really not to be underestimated. The power of that.
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A
It's very powerful. And the word that was in there from what you were saying was effectiveness. It actually can also then mean more effectiveness in whatever that situation, interaction, protest might have been. It can be more effective. One of the things that's appeared on my dreaded social media sort of feed though has been the Buddhist monks walking. And that feels like a real show of equanimity perhaps, and, and, and other things too. But it's sort of, I know that's really moved people and impressed upon people the importance of these kinds of things.
- [43:21]
B
I agree completely. They are an embodiment of dignity and quiet strength, of equanimity. They are equanimity embodied, and they have catalyzed the hearts of almost 3 million people, maybe more. We are hungry for this. We long for this. You know, we don't want to be pulled and pushed by the kind of lurid side of politics, the cruelty. We're capable of the worst stories. We are so hungry for what these monks represent. I think people here in the United States on both sides of the political spectrum are hungry for this. I. People don't want to be in conflict. People don't want to be hating and arguing, and that's not what anybody wants. So the monks are. You know, this has happened across centuries and countries where nonviolent resistance has affected profound change. They are the Rosa Parks who sat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and changed the course of the civil rights movement through an act of equanimity. Quiet, sitting on a bus. Same thing. Gandhi and his peace walks. There are many examples. Many, many. Mandela walking out of Robben island with equanimity in his heart and how he led, you know, through a commitment to non reactivity, non escalation of violence. Yeah, it's very powerful.
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A
He knew that if he continued to hate his prison guards and wardens, that he would still be in. In jail sort of thing. And. And equanimity was the inner work of freedom, in a sense, for him. And the conflicts, the anger, the hate, it's all very caught deep in our threat systems, isn't it? And of course, then we are suffering. And I suppose the other chapter that really stood out to me was chapter 18, which is the brokenhearted equanimity. And. Yeah, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about. About that and about compassion and its relationship with. With equanimity as well.
- [46:12]
B
Yes, I remember that chapter. Yes. Yes. I kind of had a real life test because I had to give a talk on equanimity at a moment when I was very brokenhearted. And I grappled with that in real time. Am I a fraud? You know, what does equanimity look like? What does it mean for me to embody it? How can I speak about it authentically when I am crying several hours a day and really going through a very difficult, dark time in my life? And what I found was extraordinary, that, yes, equanimity was as wide as the world, and yes, it could hold brokenheartedness, and they weren't mutually exclusive. And it suddenly just opened for me it was like a doorway into this beautiful, vast room. Like, oh, equanimity can hold this place. I feel so broken in this moment. And equanimity can hold that. So that was an amazing discovery for me personally. But before that time, I had been teaching Equanimity, really in the context of compassion training. So, as you know, I was part of the group at Stanford that developed the Compassion Cultivation training. And I had trained a lot of teachers in cct, and we didn't talk about equanimity. And I started getting curious about it, and I started teaching it both to students who had taken CCT and also to the teachers who were teaching it. And what I learned was that. And this is true, of course, in Buddhist philosophy, but that, you know, equanimity and compassion, of course, are deeply interrelated. You know, they're very connected. And we might say that equanimity is what prevents compassion from falling into its near enemy. And there are two near enemies of compassion. Typically one is overwhelm. So in that moment, for me, feeling so broken, Equanimity let me rest in that without feeling overwhelmed, I could find a certain okayness because of equanimity. Okay, this is true. This is how I feel right now. And I can rest in that with a certain kind of peace. So one near enemy of compassion is overwhelm. And as you know very well, part of what happens when we encounter suffering in the world is that we are reminded of our own suffering. And that's fine. You know, that's part of empathy. You know, we discover in our own experience, we know what suffering like. We know what it's like to go through something similar. It allows us to feel for the other person. But one way we get derailed is that our suffering gets bigger than the other person's suffering. And suddenly we are overcome by how much it hurts, both because of our own history. And I feel overwhelmed. I don't know what to do for you. I'm worried about you. And now it's a story about me. And I'm no longer really compassionate. I'm preoccupied with me. I can't effectively respond to you anymore. So that's overwhelm. And equanimity intervenes there. And it intervenes between the feeling of compassion and, in a sense, this derailment, this overwhelm, this hijacking, it also intervenes. Another near enemy of compassion is pity, you know, and pity. So you're going through something, and I'm a little scared of feeling what you feel. It feels a little Threatening to me. I'm afraid of being overwhelmed by it. I'm afraid it's going to trigger my own pain and suffering. So rather than feel with you, I kind of look down at you, oh, I'm so sorry you feel bad, but I don't. So I pity you. I'm in a somewhat of a one up position looking down at you, saying, poor you down there feeling bad, but I'm not connected with you. You know, we're not on the same plane. So another thing that equanimity does is it. It's a way of practicing impartiality and shared common humanity, seeing our connection, making a level, even playing field for all beings. That's an aspect, that's a quality of equanimity. And in, you know, Tibetan Buddhism, that impartiality, certainly compassion is more emphasized and that impartiality is key. That capacity to remain compassionate and extend compassion to others and to different groups is key without falling into pity or overwhelm.
- [52:32]
A
Such a practical look at the near and far enemies of compassion, which I think about myself a lot in compassion based work and equanimity and the role that it plays even as a therapist. You know, sometimes as a therapist we get caught in a fixing reflex or something. You know, we sort of think we know best or we step in and tell people what to do or. And then that often goes in a difficult direction. But with equanimity we can just, just have space again for that feeling, that sort of overwhelm or fear of overwhelm and that sort of pity or sort of looking more down on the person. You know, we just make space for those feelings and are able to remain effective, I guess, by working and listening well and so on.
- [53:25]
B
You know, you brought up another important point. I know we're almost out of time, but I just wanted to respond to what you just said, said, which is equanimity also helps us not to be attached to outcomes and with loved ones, with clients when they're suffering, that attachment gets in the way of compassion being effective. And equanimity lets us see clearly, you know, that we are not the other person and there's a limit to our ability to influence their happiness or unhappiness. So thank you for bringing that up.
- [54:06]
A
Yeah, well, Margaret Cullen, I felt quite privileged to read the book because it is being published on the 10th of March, but I got to see a copy and learned a lot and took a lot away. It's going to make a real impact, I think, and be a very important book. I'll include links to things in the description, not least your website, which is also really helpful with, with various resources and other links. And I know your. Perhaps your daughter put some of the photos there or took the photos. So that was fun to see.
- [54:42]
B
It's me. I took the photos.
- [54:45]
A
Oh, you took the photos. Sorry, I misread that. On the, on the thing. Well, they're gorgeous. It's a, it's a lovely looking website. So I'll put all those links there. But. But yes, thank you very much for speaking with me on Compassion in a T shirt.
- [54:59]
B
Thank you so much for inviting me, Stan. I really enjoyed it.