Going slow has always been accompanied by an air of wisdom. “Adopt the pace of nature,” advised Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Her secret is patience.” A couple millennia and change before that, Lao Tzu said something similar: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
Yet these days, paeans to slowness have taken on a slightly more urgent tone. “We are on a bus speeding faster and faster toward a cliff, and we celebrate every added mile per hour as progress,” wrote the French economist Timothée Parrique in Slow Down or Die, published last May. “It’s madness. Maximizing growth is like stepping on the accelerator with the absolute certainty of dying in a social and ecological collapse.”
The Japanese philosopher and economist Kohei Saito covered similar territory in Slow Down, his 2024 degrowth manifesto. Our obsession with GDPs is contributing not only to our collective suffering but to our eventual demise. After all, economic growth might be seen as the societal manifestation of individual craving—we want, therefore we buy.
In the age of AI, when the average person consumes more information in a day than someone in the 15th century would have in their entire lifetime, one can see why slowness feels essential. People are caught up in the rat race, leading stressful, overly connected lives. Yet it is one thing to slow down at a systemic level, and quite another to slow down as an individual.
In the age of AI, when the average person consumes more information in a day than someone in the 15th century would have in their entire lifetime, one can see why slowness feels essential.
Can mindfulness help us take our foot off the accelerator? And can a personal practice have a meaningful impact on the speed at which society moves?
Doing Mode to Being Mode
“Mindfulness practice is certainly a tangible way of slowing down,” says mindfulness scholar Andrew Olendzki. “If only for a brief session, one deliberately drops out of ‘doing’ mode to linger in ‘being’ mode.”
Lingering in being mode has a tangible impact on our internal speedometer. “Mindfulness practice is a way of re-training oneself to slow down in every way, and the rate of breathing is the most accessible way of doing this,” says Olendzki.
Indeed, research shows that long-term meditators display slower respiratory rates than non-meditators. Being able to slow down physiologically when one is operating at a higher register might bring a degree of deliberateness to “fast-paced” endeavors. It can help us embody the tortoise despite the prevalence of so many hares.
Being able to slow down physiologically when one is operating at a higher register might bring a degree of deliberateness to “fast-paced” endeavors. It can help us embody the tortoise despite the prevalence of so many hares.
When this deliberateness pervades the body, it can extend to the mind, providing a countercurrent to the speed at which modern life moves. It can teach us not just to slow down during common contemplative practices, like meditation or journaling or yoga, but to access a lower gear in the midst of the everyday, which is when we most feel the pressure to maintain forward momentum.
“For most people today, the speed comes from external engagements: busy schedules, phones set to notify every incoming message, and the basic tendency to ‘do a lot’ in the modern lifestyle,” says Olendzki. “I think the pace at which one lives one’s life is a matter of habit, and like all habits is learned. Much in our society encourages moving fast, and I like to think we still have some choice in how much we participate in this.”
Unlearning Our Addiction to Speed
In some respects, then, slowing down involves a type of unlearning. We are so used to moving at the speed of information that we don’t realize that we don’t have to respond to every notification that vibrates in our pockets. The anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen distinguished between “fast time”—writing an email or completing a report, and “slow time”—leisure activities like creating art or sitting still. He noted that when fast time and slow time meet—deadline pressure versus writing poetry—fast time always wins. But when we notice this imbalance we can choose to prioritize slow time.
Mindfulness might support our efforts to slow down insofar as it reorients us toward the rhythm of the breath, the pace of nature, and the workability of the mind.
We may need support in making this choice. Perhaps this is why the past couple of years have seen books about Slow Birding, Slow Productivity, Slow Pleasure, and Slow Seasons—a guide to reconnecting with nature. In an age of abundance those of us in privileged positions are not thirsty for more but for less.
In this sense, Lao Tzu, Emerson, and Weller may be on to something when they advise us to take a cue from natural rhythms. In his book Weller recalled his mentor, Clarke Berry, placing his hand on a rock and indicating that he operates at geologic speed:
Geologic speed—the rhythm of eons, of millennia—is etched deep in our bones. When we grant ourselves the time and pace of stone, we come into a deep memory of who we are, where we belong and what is sacred. We remember the values associated with this ancient cadence, among them patience, restraint, and reciprocity.
Mindfulness might support our efforts to slow down insofar as it reorients us toward the rhythm of the breath, the pace of nature, and the workability of the mind. Whether or not that can address the political and economic issues that plague society is questionable, but individuals that can achieve respite may help shape systems that prioritize it. After all, mindfulness isn’t about getting anywhere, or getting ahead, or even getting it.
“Be as mindful as you can of the pace you inhabit in any given day,” wrote Weller. “Try to notice what happens when you slow down and enter the stream of connection with the daylight, the wind, the sounds of the city, birdsong, cricket, or silence.”
Life may be terminal, but our velocity doesn’t have to be.
If you find you often react without thinking, explore this practice to respond with greater awareness.
Daily life is full of irritations: moments of inconvenience, situations where we don’t get what we were hoping for, delays, disappointments, prickly interactions that can leave us confused and exasperated.
If we’re honest, we can probably admit that sometimes our reactions in those moments tend to be reflexive rather than intentional. We feel our anger or annoyance rise, and we react almost as though we’re reading a script.
Can we explore these habitual reactions in a way that gives us enough space to respond differently? In today’s practice, teacher Patricia Rockman guides us through a meditation to help us meet whatever is arising, so that we have more agency when the next moment arises.
This meditation is about working with habits. In particular, our habitual reactions to difficult situations that commonly arise. These could be anger at being stuck in traffic, sadness at not getting what you want, or frustration when dealing with companies that keep you on hold for what feels like eternity. Whatever it may be, whether it is something significant or something that might seem mundane, mindfulness practices can help us deal with our habitual reactivity in more skillful ways.
A Meditation to (Gently) Interrupt Habitual Reactions
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
Get into a comfortable posture, one that is familiar to you and that you use when engaging in a practice, and bring attention to your body. If you are sitting, bring attention to your points of contact; where your sitting bones are on your chair or cushion, or where your feet or legs are in contact with the surface.
Bring attention to where your hands are in relation to your body, whether they are resting on your thighs or folded in your lap. Bring attention to your chest rising, your chin in line with your navel, and your tongue at rest behind your teeth. If you are choosing to lie down for this practice, it is preferable for you to lie on your back.
Bring attention to your body as it makes contact with the mat, floor, or bed. Note your points of contact, and also note where your body is not in contact. Whatever your position, allow the surface that you are lying or sitting on to take on the work of holding you up. Bring attention to the front body and the back body, and everything in between.
Now shift your attention to the sensations of breathing where they are most readily available, whether at the nostril, the chest, or the abdomen. Really hone in on the sensations of the breath as they make themselves known to you, picking one place and resting your attention there.
Attend to the in-breath and the out-breath. Attend to the movement of the body as the air moves in and out. Attend to the nostrils; you may be noticing the coolness of the air as it goes in, and the warmth as it moves out. Attend to the breath or the chest, focusing on the expansion of the body with the in-breath, and the deflation of the body as the breath leaves.
Allow the body to settle. Allow the breath to settle. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Each breath is a new breath. Each breath is a receiving and a releasing.
You will notice from time to time that your attention will move into thinking, into the future, past, planning, anxiety, or daydreaming. Your task is simply to notice this habitual tendency of mind, and gently return to your breath over and over again, without judgment and without a story. There is no right or wrong here, there is simply attending to your breath, noting when your attention moves, and bringing it back again.
Notice when the breath is low, and when the breath is short. Notice when it is shallow, and when it is deep. Mindfulness is about coming to know our experience in its entirety, whether wanted or unwanted, and in this case it is coming to know the experience of breathing.
Breathe out and let go of this primary focus on the breath, and allow it to be present but in the background. On an in-breath, establish attention in your entire body. Bring an open receptivity to experience and to sensations in the body as they come and go. Note their arrival, persistence, or passing, and explore these. Bring a friendly interest and curiosity to this investigation of the sensorial nature of experience, whatever it is.
Notice how your body feels. There may be ease, tension, relaxation, discomfort, or pain in a part of your body. Whatever it is, when a sensation calls out for attention, investigate it and explore its depth and various qualities. Whether you lean into it or lean away, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or even neutral, without changing anything in this moment, simply attend to what is arising in your body as it shows.
Attend to what is arising as best as you can and without judging it, but notice judgment or aversion if they do arise. As best as you can, explore the sensation as it is, without judgment.
Investigate sensations as they arise. Once you are finished investigating one sensation, wait for another to arise and investigate that one. Remember that a sensation may be internal or external. Perhaps sounds are making themselves known as they come and go. Get to know your bodily sensations, in your body, in this moment.
Note when your attention moves into thinking, or you feel an impulse to act or shift position. Acknowledge that this is what is here right now. Turn your attention back to your body, over and over again. Explore one sensation, let go of it, and then bring your attention into another as it enters your awareness.
Now, if you want to, bring to mind a manageable stressful situation. Maybe it’s a recent time when you were irritated, sad, confused, or anxious. Perhaps it was a situation in a relationship or at work. Bringing to mind this situation, remember that if what comes up is at all overwhelming for you, feel free at any time to turn your attention back to breathing with your body.
If your eyes are closed, open them. Consider a stressor and note what arises immediately. It could be a bodily sensation, a thought, or an emotion. Perhaps there is a behavior or an impulse to act. Start to get to know your stress reactivity signatures.
If there are thoughts, observe them as best as you can. If there are emotions, try naming them, such as “sadness”, or “anxiety”. Remember that labeling emotions helps to settle them and make them more manageable. Labeling emotions creates an opportunity to give you a choice about what happens next.
If there are body sensations, make a note of these, and actually turn your attention to them. Explore them even if they’re unwanted. Get to know them. Stay with them for as long as they are holding your attention. Note whether they increase, persist, or fade. Recognize that this is a moment of stress, and that it’s ok; it’s already here. Bring a compassionate and kind holding to this experience. Be with it as it is, even though it may be unwanted. Explore your body and the sensations for as long as they’re here.
Now, shift your attention back to the sensations of breathing, perhaps in your belly. If there are any remaining sensations, hold attention at the same time. Engaging in the option, should you choose, to expand into these on the in-breath, softening, expanding, and releasing on the out-breath, letting go, or allowing and letting be, if this is possible. If this is not necessary, then simply bring attention to the belly and the rising and falling of the breath that comes and goes.
Expand around the breath to the entire body once again, to any and all sensations. Be with the body, with your breathing in the background and sensations in the foreground, from head to toe. Bringing a feeling of spaciousness to your experience; be open and receptive, with an open front and strong back.
When you’re ready, let go of this practice, and if possible bring a more expanded and spacious awareness to your next moments.
Now, if you feel inclined, take a paper and pen and write down any words, thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and impulses to act that came to mind. Write down what came up for you in that practice when you introduced the stressor. Name the emotions, and listing them. What bodily sensations and what impulses to act or behaviors, if any, went through your mind? These components of experience may show themselves in a variety of ways, moving from thoughts, to emotions, to bodily sensations, to behaviors, and back to emotions and thoughts, and that’s OK. Record these as they show up to you.
Once you’ve finished, take a moment to look at what you’ve written and think about where in your habitual reaction you might intervene with mindfulness. How might you bring awareness to these habitual reactions when they arrive, to provide more choice if this is needed, or to introduce other options about how to respond? How might you stop yourself, to be able to take a step back and gain perspective?
Bring Mindful Attention to Habitual Reactions
Perhaps make a commitment to yourself about how you might practice with this in some small way when difficulty arises. Perhaps once a week or once a day, simply bring mindful attention to an experience, or bring the breath your mind when difficulty shows, or shift an attitude, or engage in a different behavior.
Whatever you may do, remember that awareness is always a moment away, and mindfulness is portable it can be with us wherever we are, in any moment, at any time.
Unchecked stress may lead to overwhelm, unhelpful coping, and burnout. When you learn to recognize the warning signs, you can take wise action to manage your stress—with a little kind attention, and a lot of self-compassion. Read More
In honor of the power of mindful women leaders, a look back at our 2013 cover story on clothing designer Eileen Fisher.
I’ve known for some time that Eileen Fisher is a person who brings strong values to her business ventures, but she really caught our attention in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy, when her company’s headquarters in Irvington, New York, were flooded, putting a serious crimp in their year-end business shipments.
Despite having to haul a dozen dumpster-loads of damaged goods out of the offices and the nearby Lab Store, to the tune of $1.5 million, Eileen said at the time, “It was just stuff.”
You can only imagine the emotions that might arise in a chief executive if they saw their sewage-soaked products floating by. Eileen and her staff did not linger there. They mobilized quickly—organizing carpools, impromptu meeting spaces, and arranging interest-free loans for staff needing cash during the crisis. That kind of resilience and caring told us this was a company with a human face.
Mindful Leadership Matters
A year after Sandy, I was at the (partially) restored Eileen Fisher HQ, learning about the kind of care the company takes with its clothing: from helping a Chinese silk dyer use fewer chemicals and less water, to launching a recycled clothing program, where customers return garments they no longer use, with the proceeds going to an initiative that helps improve the lives of woman and girls. There is a yoga/meditation room. In another room, young women are cutting pictures out of magazines and learning about the stories they are told about themselves through the media—an exercise in the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute.
In an industry where fleeting trends and heavily marked-up products manufactured in overseas sweatshops are the norm, Eileen Fisher is paying attention to the life cycle of a garment, from cradle to grave, as well as the future of the people who wear them and the people who create them.
We often hear about inner calm, but it can be so much more than a fleeting moment of peace after yoga or the perfect massage. Inner calm is actually our ability to let go of attachments and reactions to life’s events, resulting in ease and clarity.
As a mindfulness skill, inner calm is the ability to let go of attachments and reactivity based on an understanding of impermanence—the changing nature of our thoughts, emotions, and desires. When we find ourselves rushing and reacting, we can remind ourselves, This too shall pass. The purpose is not to negate what we’re feeling but to put brakes on accelerated feelings. Once we return to our inner stillness, we can look at the source of our reactivity, intimately seeing its changing nature: This right here is what frees us.
Once we return to our inner stillness, we can look at the source of our reactivity, intimately seeing its changing nature: This right here is what frees us.
As a practice, inner calm is the art of stopping, looking and letting go for purposes of healing and clarity. It involves physical composure and mental tranquility. It can be seen as the ultimate balm for your soul—like a cool breeze on a hot day. Inner calm brings ease to body and mind alike. In the body, composure is experienced in the muscles and as an overall feeling of ease. In the mind, inner calm creates the space to hold everything without attachment and resistance. Conversely, the absence of inner calm may show up as restlessness in the body and agitation or reactivity in the mind.
Seeking inner calm can often leave us wanting more, but it’s ironic that true inner calm is achieved when we let go of our desires, even the desire for inner calm itself—a catch-22 if there ever was one. This paradox becomes evident when we consider the case of a client dealing with anxiety who turned to meditation as a way to ease his mind. Surprisingly, he found himself even more anxious post-meditation. He had hoped that meditation would improve his sleep, but he was left frustrated when he observed his restlessness during a body scan meditation, which only seemed to worsen his sleep problems.
The moral here? To find peace, he had to let go first of his expectations around finding peace. In order to let go, he learned to see the three hindrances to his achieving mindfulness: running in circles (a restless mind), pulling (striving to sleep), and pushing (frustrated with his restlessness). With practice, he learned to accept his restless mind, which softened the striving and frustration, and he was able to find ease, even when he couldn’t sleep, which ultimately allowed him to sleep.
Letting go of attachments to certain outcomes doesn’t, however, mean that we’re suppressing or evading challenging situations. Instead, this release occurs organically when we comprehend that emotions arise and dissolve—all within ninety seconds.
The Ninety-Second Rule
Inner calm is not about suppressing, denying, or avoiding our emotions. When we don’t give in to the urge to react, we’re cultivating the ability to stay with unpleasantness (knowing that emotions are physiological responses in the body that will arise and dissolve). Just as happiness triggered by external events doesn’t last, negative emotions also don’t last. Have you heard of the ninety-second rule? Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor reveals in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey that all emotions have a beginning, middle, and end—all within ninety seconds from when they first arise.
The reason we continue to experience negative emotions, sometimes for days, weeks, and even years, is that we continue to fuel these feelings with our narratives. Instead, if we stop and let the emotion move through our body, we’ll create space in our minds to better understand what they are trying to tell us. Rather than suppressing or using positive thinking to bypass our experience, we can form an alliance with our feelings. By doing this, we can uncover how they’re trying to protect us, address our unmet needs, or draw our attention to new information in the environment.
The ninety-second rule is a helpful reminder to ride the waves of our emotions, but emotions can sometimes be so powerful that they hijack our rational thought processes. It’s helpful in these situations to remember where those emotions come from—deep in the past, when we were hunter-gatherers facing real tigers!
How Inner Calm Supports Resilience
So much of our lives are marked by perceived threats to our identity, career, or relationships. Our primal reactions—fight-flight-freeze—can be unhelpful when it comes to navigating these everyday psychological and social stressors. What’s needed to resolve problems common to the modern world is clarity and creativity, but our reaction is the opposite—to fight, flee, or freeze. This evolutionary response to any threat is automatic and unconscious.
What’s needed to resolve problems common to the modern world is clarity and creativity, but our reaction is the opposite—to fight, flee, or freeze.
When our emotions are triggered such that we can’t think or see clearly, it’s called an “amygdala hijack”—a term popularized by emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman. The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain. One of its functions is to scan the environment for threats and prepare the body for an emergency response. When it perceives a threat, such as a tiger lurking in the bushes, it sends an immediate signal to release stress hormones—adrenaline and cortisol—that ramp up an emergency response. Blood stops flowing to the organs and instead floods into the limbs to prepare us for fight or flight. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for thinking and executive decision-making) shuts down because there is no time to think and analyze when we’re facing what the brain perceives as a life-threatening situation.
During an amygdala hijack, it is said that our IQ temporarily drops by ten to fifteen points. Maybe this explains that feeling after we’ve reacted to a verbal trigger: What was I thinking when I said that? That’s exactly the point. We stop thinking rationally. It also compromises memory, which is why we can’t remember a single good thing about a person with whom we have a conflict or why we can’t find our keys in the middle of a panic attack. Being in a continuous state of fight or flight from modern threats also compromises the integrity of other systems, like immunity and digestion.
Cultivating inner calm is an important step in avoiding the amygdala hijack so we can think clearly even in highly charged situations. Using practices to promote inner calm—like breath awareness—helps slow our escalating emotions and allows the parasympathetic nervous system to kick back in so we can once again think clearly. Another activity that nudges the prefrontal cortex to start thinking again is “noting” or “labeling.” The act of noting or labeling our emotions gets the prefrontal cortex to regain healthy communication with the amygdala and avoids the hijack. Inner calm offers opportunities to learn and improve or for us to provide a deeper understanding of the “what” and the “why” behind our actions. We can replace tension and misunderstanding with harmony and understanding. Inner calm is key for resilience in relationships and life in general.
Where Are You on the Inner Calm Continuum?
You can strengthen your ability for inner calm, regardless of your circumstances. First, pay attention to when you’re calm and when you’re not. Next, notice the causes and conditions that promote calm and what stops you from being calm. By cultivating a habit of calming the mind and body, you’ll develop the ability to access this place more quickly and easily.
Daily Practice: One-Minute Rest
Rested, we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. —David Whyte
Take time in your day, several times a day, if possible, to empty your cup and make space for what matters. You can do this very quickly by checking in with your body.
Any tension or tightness in the body is a clue that you’re holding on to something that needs your loving attention. You can’t let go without knowing what it is you’re trying to let go. Just turning your attention to places you’re holding tension can help you uncover the emotions and thoughts associated with that tension.
Once you can see the cause of your tension, you can figure out the solution. It’s also clarifying to realign with your intentions as you’re emptying your cup—what is it you’re clearing the space for?
Return. Take a one-minute rest and return to your body. Rub the palms of your hand and place them on your eyes, allowing them to rest. Move your hands to your jawline, neck, shoulders, chest, or wherever feels good in your body.
Listen. Listen within. What can you let go of at this moment to make room for what matters?
Begin. Begin your activities with a relaxed body and mind aligned with what matters.
Try practicing and playing with this reminder with your family, with team members, and in your community before beginning a meeting or activity together.
If you find yourself stuck in a stress cycle, try this gentle practice to pause, calm your nervous system, and reset.
It’s not always an instinctual go-to for us, but self-compassion is one of the most powerful forms of healing and restoration for our mental and physical well-being.
In this meditation, mindfulness teacher Shamash Alidina offers three ways to show compassion for yourself when you’re stressed and need a reset.
Shamash Alidina has been practising mindfulness since 1998 and runs his own successful training organisation. He is the author of Mindfulness For Dummies and most recently, The Mindful Way Through Stress. He frequently pops up in newspapers, magazines and on radio shows. Based in London, he runs online trainings and speaks at conferences all over the world. He’s been teaching mindfulness full-time since 2010.
Self-Compassion for Nervous System Reset
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
Let’s take these 12 minutes for a nervous system reset—to step out the doing mode and into the being mode. Start by finding a posture that feels like a hug for your body, whether you’re sitting or lying down. See if you can be one or two percent more comfortable. Maybe that means a cushion behind your back or unclenching your jaw just a fraction.
Now let’s take a deep slow breath in. And as you exhale, imagine you’re letting go of the days to-do list. Just let it drop to the floor for now. It’ll still be there later, if you really want it, but for now, you’re off duty.
What is the state of your nervous system? Is it buzzing? Is it tight? See if you can greet it with a bit of curiosity rather than judgment. Instead of saying, I shouldn’t feel stressed, try saying Oh, that’s interesting. Stress is visiting me right now. That’s okay. It’ll pass in time.
Now let’s bring some kindness to the physical body. Our nervous systems often get stuck in high alert because they’re trying to protect us. Let’s send a signal that it’s safe to rest.
Begin by bringing awareness to your lower abdomen. Invite it to soften. So as you breathe in, it gently expand. And as you breathe out, it gently contracts. If it feels okay with you, placing a hand over your heart. Or if you prefer, cradling one hand in the other. Feel the warmth and the gentle pressure. This isn’t just a gesture, it actually releases oxytocin. The body’s natural soothing chemical.
As you gently bring awareness to your breath, there’s no need to breathe “perfectly.” Just feel the breath moving in and out, like the tide of the ocean. Each inhale is a gift of energy. And each exhale is an opportunity to release.
You could say, breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I gently smile to my nervous system. When we’re overwhelmed, we tend to isolate.
Let’s practice the three steps of self-compassion together. Step 1: Mindfulness. Acknowledge any struggle that you’re going through right now. Silently say to yourself, This is a moment of suffering or this is really tough right now. You’re not trying to minimize it. You’re validating your own experience.
Step 2: Common humanity. Remind yourself that you aren’t alone. Thousands of people will feel exactly like this, right now. This buzzing feeling or heaviness feeling is part of being human. You’re part of the big, messy, beautiful club. The Club of Humanity.
Now Step 3: Self-kindness. Ask yourself the magic question. How can I be kind to myself right now? Maybe you need to hear the words, It’s going to be okay. You’re doing the best you can. Say these words to yourself, with the warmth you’d use for a dear friend. Or perhaps to a little puppy that’s struggling.
Now, just sit in this stillness for a moment for a bit. If your mind wonders, which it will, because that’s what minds do, just gently, playfully invite it back. Imagine a golden light of kindness radiating from your heart, filling up your chest, your limbs. And there’s space around you, creating a buffer zone of peace. The nervous system is gently recalibrating. Shifting from fight or flight to rest and digest and restore. You don’t have to earn this rest. You deserve it simply because you exist.
When you’re ready, as we gradually come to the end of this short journey, give your fingers and toes a little wiggle. Try to carry this kindness muscle with you into the rest of your day. Things get hectic later, remember you can always come back to that soft lower abdomen or that gentle hand on your heart. Thank yourself for taking this time. It’s a radical act of kindness to stop and breathe. When you’re ready, slowly open your eyes. Do a good stretch. And perhaps give yourself a little smile.
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.
Angela Stubbs: You’ve said equanimity found you when you really needed it. Can you share what was unfolding then, and how equanimity began to function as a teacher for you?
Margaret Cullen: There have been several times when equanimity has appeared as a teacher for me, but the first was on a retreat with Sharon Salzberg. We had done basic mindfulness and lovingkindness practice, and then spent a week on equanimity.
In the Vipassana tradition, equanimity is often cultivated through reflecting on certain phrases. One of them invites you to imagine someone you love who is suffering and reflect: their happiness and unhappiness are the result of their thoughts, actions, and circumstances, not your wishes for them. And even so, you continue to wish them well.
That was a complete revelation to me.
I worked with those phrases in both sitting and walking practice. One morning after breakfast, I was walking in the desert in Southern California, during that exquisite, fleeting springtime in Joshua Tree. I wasn’t formally meditating, but the phrases had taken on a life of their own.
I thought of my mother, and the phrase arose: I am not responsible for her happiness. And not only that, I could still love her and wish her well. It wasn’t a binary choice between taking responsibility for her happiness and being a bad daughter.
My mother struggled with depression and other mental health issues. As long as I could remember, it had felt like my job to make her happy. It was an impossible task, and by my twenties, I had become more and more depressed myself because I was failing at it.
In that moment, seeing clearly that, oh my goodness, I can’t control her happiness, was incredibly liberating. It sounds obvious now. But at the time, it was a revelation. And, beyond that, it is neither disloyal nor unloving to let go of this futile effort.
We come to believe that loving someone means managing their emotional state…Equanimity is love without attachment: to outcomes, to roles, to what I need from you, to how I need you to be, even to needing you to be happy.
Angela Stubbs: Many of us feel responsible for the happiness of people we love, especially within family. How does equanimity shift that dynamic?
Margaret Cullen: Women, of course, have been inculcated to be caregivers in roles as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. Those stereotypical roles, which hopefully my daughter’s generation, maybe your generation, Angela, is breaking out of, have given us distorted pictures of what it means to love.
In my mother’s case, and often with our children, we take on responsibility for their happiness. We come to believe that loving someone means managing their emotional state.
But Buddhism is fundamentally a path of connecting with reality. There’s no safer ground to stand on than reality. And the reality is that I am not responsible for your happiness.
These equanimity phrases expose how easily attachment masquerades as love. In Buddhism, attachment is considered the near enemy of lovingkindness. Without careful attention, we conflate the two. We accuse others of not being loving when they’re not expressing attachment, and we feel guilty ourselves when what we’re feeling is attachment, not love.
Angela Stubbs: Can you unpack that a bit more?
Margaret Cullen: Equanimity is one of the Four Immeasurables in Buddhism, along with lovingkindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. They’re all aspects of love. So equanimity is love without attachment: to outcomes, to roles, to what I need from you, to how I need you to be, even to needing you to be happy.
It acknowledges your complete sovereignty over your own life. Even that language can be misleading, because I don’t grant or withhold your freedom. I never had that control in the first place. The belief that I do isn’t aligned with reality.
That’s where our ideas about love get tangled. We confuse attachment with care.
The author with her forthcoming book, out March 10, 2026.
Angela Stubbs: In the world we’re living in now, where there’s always something to care about, how do you work with equanimity as a tool in difficult times?
Margaret Cullen: Having just written a book about it and being interviewed about it, I have unique pressures on myself, and from my friends and family, to be equanimous. The good news is we can turn that into a joke. Humor is actually a great doorway into equanimity.
I’m reaching for it a lot these days. There are also a few cognitive hacks that I use very frequently. They’re related to the three characteristics in Buddhism that are very close to my heart and central to my practice.
Angela Stubbs: Tell us about the hacks.
Margaret Cullen: First, I ask: Is this situation as personal as I’m making it? As meditators, we taste non-self, the experience of being connected to all things. And yet we walk around in our separate, contracted egos. It’s a reminder that there’s another way of relating to experience.
Second, impermanence. If I’m caught in reactivity, in a moment of suffering or even joy, I remind myself that things change. I loosen my grip on attachment or aversion. That’s reality. That’s the reality I want to align myself with. Things are usually less personal and less permanent than they seem.
And third, I like this question from Byron Katie: Is it really true?
Given the current political situation, it can feel like the end of the world. We say the world is on fire. It can feel literally true. But if I step back and ask, is it actually on fire, the answer is no. That’s an expression. And that expression amplifies fear, outrage, and anxiety, and pulls us out of equanimity.
Angela Stubbs: People often misunderstand equanimity. How do you describe what equanimity is not?
Margaret Cullen: Equanimity is definitely not indifference. It’s not apathy. It’s not passivity. Those are the near enemies of equanimity.
Equanimity is not withdrawal.
I think for a lot of people who care deeply about the world, even if they understand this intellectually, emotionally, it still feels like a withdrawal. I have friends who are longtime practitioners who are afraid of equanimity. They think the world is in so much trouble that equanimity somehow forecloses their opportunity to be activists and engage with the world’s problems. That’s a very important misunderstanding. It’s deep and pernicious. Equanimity is not withdrawal.
This is part of the beauty and paradox at the heart of equanimity. It’s caring perhaps even more deeply, not less, but draining that love of melodrama.
This is part of the beauty and paradox at the heart of equanimity. It’s caring perhaps even more deeply, not less, but draining that love of melodrama. It’s loving without attachment. We care just as much, perhaps even more, about this beautiful planet and all the people and species who are thriving and suffering upon it, but without the melodrama and the outrage. That frees up our energy to be as effective as possible in whatever way we engage.
Angela Stubbs: Earlier, we talked about the overlap between mindfulness and equanimity. If mindfulness is awareness, where does equanimity fit? You’ve described it as a kind of balance. What does that mean?
Margaret Cullen: The balance we’re talking about is dynamic. It’s not static. We’re not aiming for some frozen state. It’s more like walking. With every step we lose our balance and regain it.
Equanimity is the capacity to recover more quickly, to create space around our experience when we’re knocked off center. It’s not about being chill or detached. That becomes a near enemy. It’s about flexibility. It’s about resilience.
Angela Stubbs: The book is titled Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, Love Boundlessly. It wasn’t always called that. How did the title and subtitle evolve?
Margaret Cullen: I originally wanted to call the book Equanimity: The Quiet Virtue. If it had stayed small and focused only on Buddhism, that might have worked. But once the vision grew, that title no longer worked for my agent or publisher.
They first suggested Quiet Power, which I liked. Equanimity is quiet but incredibly powerful. In martial arts, power comes from fluidity and balance, not brute strength. But politically, “power” felt like a tainted word. So we landed on Strength.
The subtitle, Find Peace, Feel Alive, Love Boundlessly, is not language I would normally use. I have an aversion to telling people what to do. My language as a teacher is more invitational and provisional. This is declarative. I joked that I felt like a circus barker for equanimity.
But the book has a wider vision than my own. I’m one voice among many contributing to what it’s meant to do in the world.
Angela Stubbs: Is there anything in the book that people haven’t asked you about yet?
Margaret Cullen: Surprisingly, I’ve been asked very little about the neuroscience. No one has asked about the time I went to a lab in Arizona and had transcranial stimulation applied to my brain to supposedly engender equanimity.
Neuroscience labs that have studied mindfulness are now adding tools like transcranial stimulation and sophisticated fMRI mapping to reverse-engineer advanced states of meditation.
Angela Stubbs: That feels like a verydifferent angle on equanimity. What happened when you went into the lab?
Margaret Cullen: They stimulated my brain and asked what I was experiencing. I didn’t feel anything. I was disappointed because Shinzen Young was there, along with Jay Sanguinetti, who runs the lab at the University of Arizona. Over lunch, they described extraordinary experiences they’d had using the technology.
I wanted to feel that. I even considered changing my flight home to try again. I believe them. But I didn’t have that experience.
From my perspective, equanimity is part of some of the most cutting-edge research just beginning to unfold. It’s early. Where it ends up, nobody knows.
Margaret Cullen is a licensed psychotherapist and a pioneer in bringing contemplative practices into mainstream settings. She was one of the first ten people to be certified as an MBSR instructor and has taught around the world. As a therapist, she facilitated psycho-social support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for over 30 years.
She also developed Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance and co-authored a book about it with Gonzalo Brito Pons. She was a Senior Teacher and Curriculum Developer for Humanize, a contemplative-based dyad program founded by German neuroscientist Tania Singer. Margaret is a Mind and Life Institute Fellow, on the advisory board of the Global Compassion Coalition, and has been a meditation practitioner for over 40 years.You can findQuiet Strength here.
Do mindful people feel better in their own bodies? Does mindfulness make you kinder? Researchers are diving into these questions and uncovering the benefits of mindfulness.
People come to mindfulness practice for many reasons. They might need support dealing with stress, or want a go-to way to help improve their sleep. There are plenty of questions, too, like: What does the research say about mindfulness and physical health? Does it really matter how often you meditate? Does mindfulness make you kinder for real, or is that mostly just what people just say?
While studies are numerous and ongoing, and of course not every question can be answered definitively—we can look at some research gathered from Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, Center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin–Madison, Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School, and American Mindfulness Research Association, to help explore some of these questions more deeply.
Feeling good in your own skin
Do mindful people feel better about their bodies? Researchers asked 115 female college students about their level of mindfulness, body responsiveness, body shame, and overall health. Women who reported greater awareness and who tended to be nonjudgmental and nonreactive—key mindfulness skills—had less body shame, were more attuned to their bodies, and were healthier overall. The researchers say it’s not yet clear whether mindfulness increases body satisfaction, or vice versa.
Building your meditation muscle
In a comparison of adults who listened to either a guided meditation or a podcast daily for 13 minutes, researchers found that meditators reaped more benefits. For instance, after eight weeks meditators felt less anxiety and reported fewer negative mood states. And their performance on a set of computerized tests showed that they’d developed better attention and memory skills than podcast listeners.
The brain networks that work to keep us in the present moment and remember information are like mental muscles: They need exercise to keep them sharp and well-functioning, and meditation may provide that workout. The study also found that people in the meditation group were better at regulating their emotions, which was tied to having fewer negative moods.
But before you think this was a quick fix, think again. When the researchers checked to see if these benefits could be detected after four weeks, they came up empty-handed. Most of the gains didn’t show up until after eight weeks of steady practice. As with exercising a physical muscle, it takes time, patience, and repetition for change to take effect.
Does mindfulness make you kinder to yourself and others?
Self-compassion may make aging easier. A review of the research showed that adults over 65 who practiced self-compassion tended to be less anxious and depressed, and felt a greater sense of well-being, than those who didn’t. (Tip: It probably doesn’t hurt to start practicing when you’re young.)
Mindful menopause
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota surveyed nearly 1800 women aged 40 to 65 to see if those with a more mindful disposition might experience fewer menopausal difficulties. In fact, those with higher mindfulness scores were less stressed and had fewer symptoms like mood swings, hot flashes, insomnia, and fatigue—encouraging results for the millions of women experiencing this midlife passage.
Mindful ripples
Does mindfulness make you kinder? That’s the question researchers asked when reviewing 31 studies on mindfulness and prosocial behavior. They found that dispositionally mindful people and those who completed some form of mindfulness training tended to be more compassionate and helpful. Being nonjudgmental, empathic, having a positive outlook on life, and knowing how to regulate emotions also increased behavior that benefitted others.
There were a few catches. Adults tended to be more prosocial than teenagers, and people who rated themselves higher in mindfulness were more helpful to people they knew than to strangers.
This didn’t apply to those who’d attended formal mindfulness training, though. They were just as kind to people they didn’t know as to those familiar to them. One big surprise was that people who’d received mindful awareness training and those who’d had compassion-focused instruction were equally prosocial, debunking the myth that the benefits of mindfulness are only limited to the individual. In other words, just being mindful may be enough to up your kindness quotient.
So, what does care look like in the presence of difficulty? I think we can safely say that we all care, but are we caring about the right things? These are the words of Hafiz, a poet from antiquity: “My dear, is it true that your mind is sometimes like a battering ram, running all through the city, shouting so madly inside and out about the 10,000 things that do not matter?”
I think we all have moments in our lives that wake us up to what matters most. I have one: when my son Valentino was about a month old, I had to rush him to the hospital. It’s there that we learned he needed emergency surgery. It wasn’t even me running into that hospital with him—it was every parent who ever carried their sick child or sick baby. It’s easy to forget in those moments that what we’re actually doing is learning something about this human condition.
So…what does it even mean to live with an “undefended heart”? How do we train the heart to relax so we can learn about this phenomenon of being human? And how do we make it less about our individual pain, but connect instead to THE pain, and all the beings who share this condition with me? Because that’s when we’re able to allow the most caring part of ourselves to come forward.
It’s not easy, though. We have to keep an eye out for where we get stuck and bring compassion to that very place, to that VERY experience. Really loving means having to surrender a part of ourselves. The practice of compassion, then, is waking up to all the barriers we put up between ourselves and love.
Seeing where we’re hooked or locked up is important because there’s no chance of freedom if we can’t first recognize where we’re stuck. And if we can’t differentiate between an unskilful response and a skilful one, we’re sure to remain in our unconscious patterns. Tara Brach puts it this way, “Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, you’re awakening to truth can deepen. There’s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that’s witnessing what’s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning. You are actually spiralling toward freedom.”
As we open to what’s difficult, we will also open to understanding. Last week we talked about the ability to stay with the sensations in the body and not the mind’s story about what’s happened or is happening. We can usually bear the sensations. It’s the stories that overwhelm us. It’s the story that we’re always going to feel like this; that we’ve always felt like this; that whatever is happening is the only thing happening.
With this practice we can learn how to direct awareness in a very specific way—particularly with regards to the heart’s relationship to pain. We may not be able to save the world, but we do have to find a way to respond, to hold our experience of the world. Knowing in our hearts that we are not separate from this world is an important first step. Because, as we allow ourselves to be touched, we encounter the courage of the undefended heart. And our willingness to touch, to be moved, to hang out in this realm can bring a kind of beauty to the hard stuff of life.
A Meditation to Nourish an Undefended Heart
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Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
1. Find a position that’s comfortable, steering your awareness inward. Let go of any demands you may sense in this moment; just let them fall away.
2. Check in on your heart and your belly. As you do, let’s set an intention to meet whatever arises with as much gentleness and acceptance as possible.
3. Bring to mind someone you’re familiar with. Let’s make it a person we see regularly, perhaps at the grocery store or in our neighborhood. What we’re doing is expanding our circle of care out to those we feel neutral about (so no big feelings either way). Picture them in your mind, knowing that they, too, have their own difficulties. They too know pain, struggle.
4. Now let’s offer them the same care that we wished for ourselves last week. I care about your difficulties. May you be held in compassion. May your heart be at peace.
5. Bring to mind all the different people you regularly cross paths with. Offer them the same phrases we offered ourselves: I care about your difficulties. May you be held in compassion. May your heart be at peace.
6. As we close this practice, notice if there are any ways in which you’re judging yourself. Are you telling yourself that you’re not doing this well enough, or expecting something else to happen? No need for judgment here. We all just get to set our intention and care about what arises.
Over the course of the next week, allow yourself to see where compassion naturally arises and where it may need a little bit of help to flourish.
Vinny Ferraro has been a practitioner of insight meditation (vipassanā) since the early 1990s. He is a co-Founder of the Dharma Punx and co-Guiding Teacher of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He is also a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk adolescents and is currently Senior Trainer for Mindful Schools. In 1987, he began leading groups in drug rehabilitation centers, juvenile halls, and halfway houses. In 2001, he began teaching for Challenge Day, a nationally recognized, social & emotional learning program, eventually becoming their Director of Training and leading workshops for over 110,000 youth on four continents. Vinny is also a board member and former Training Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project and is the principal author of MBA’s mindfulness-based curriculum for incarcerated youth. Vinny has received national media coverage for his work with adults and youth; his work is the subject of the MTV series “If You Really Knew Me…”
When I was 23 and just starting out in journalism, I made an awful mistake. While covering a high-profile trial in San Jose, California, I wrote that a woman who hadn’t been charged with any crime had plotted a murder.
The woman I’d wrongly incriminated sued me and my newspaper for libel, demanding $11 million. Had she won, it would have killed my career and financially damaged my employer.
In the preceding weeks I’d made a series of smaller mistakes, mostly getting names and dates wrong, although once I’d quoted a rancher as telling me he had to leave to “shoot a horse” when he’d really said “shoe” a horse. He called the news desk the morning that story appeared to demand a correction, saying his sister worked for the Humane Society and had given him hell.
As these errors piled up, I feared my days at the newspaper were numbered. But I still couldn’t seem to slow down and take the time to check my work. Instead, whenever possible, I blamed the flubs on others. The rancher had mumbled. The copy editor hadn’t done his job. My editors were overworking me and I was tired.
By the time of the libel lawsuit, I’d run out of excuses. But surprisingly, instead of firing me, the paper’s managing editor—a tough-on-the- outside Lou Grant type who until then had been my biggest fan—suspended me for three days, giving me just one more chance. He also bluntly suggested I use the time to get professional help.
“You’re sabotaging yourself,” he warned.
I had no choice but to change: to stop looking for excuses, and to do the hard work to become the kind of person I’d long wanted to be.
I took his advice and, even before I left the newsroom that day, tracked down a psychiatrist to make my first appointment. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing a job that was then my whole identity, and understood in that moment that I had no choice but to change: to stop looking for excuses, and to do the hard work to become the kind of person I’d long wanted to be—both more competent and more trustworthy. In other words, I had to start being more accountable. The main problem was, I still had so little faith that I could make such a big change.
SlowDowntoSpeedUp
This was (ugh, how time flies!) 1981. Mindfulness wasn’t a mainstream thing yet. But Freudian psychoanalysis, couch and all, was available for those who had really good insurance or could otherwise find the money to pay. My psychiatrist was still in training, reporting to a supervisor. He offered me a hefty discount that made it just affordable.
His mantra was, “Mistrust your sense of urgency,” which was at once the most helpful thing I’ve ever heard and the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Again and again, he urged me to sit still and experience my feelings, rather than doing what I most yearned to do, which was to run from them, in any way I could. It’s embarrassing to look back on all the hours I wasted in ridiculous debates with him about whether I really needed therapy at all, and in trying to change the subject, and in throwing myself harder into work and pleading exhaustion as a reason to cancel appointments.
But at last something shifted and I managed to face my all-but-overwhelming shame at having screwed up so repeatedly—and, more deeply, in believing I was destined to keep screwing up. Only then could I see how much shame had determined my behavior until then, particularly in my insistence on looking for other things and people to blame for my own mistakes. My editor was right—I had been sabotaging myself, for reasons that would take a long time to understand. Four years, to be precise.
A couple of decades later, when I was bringing up my kids, a wise swim coach observed my eldest son’s fast but awkward freestyle and told him, “You’ve got to slow down to speed up.” Sparing the grisly details, my own speed, just as clumsy, had some roots in childhood events that had conditioned me to tune out whenever I was stressed. Sticking with the therapy helped me first slow down enough to bring my brain’s pilot back into the cabin and stop making those mistakes, and then to patiently learn why I’d been making them. As time went on, my psychiatrist also helped me stop playing the victim whenever I was challenged. He insisted that I behave with integrity, beginning by charging for missed appointments whenever I canceled without a good reason.
Eventually, this practice—although it still wasn’t popularly called that—of learning to be aware of when I felt like outrunning my feelings and then patiently returning to face them would help make me not only a more careful journalist, but also a better listener. That, in turn, helped me be a better friend, wife, daughter, and mother than I otherwise ever could have been. I’m not suggesting that four years of therapy is the best solution for anyone making errors at work. But for me, slow accountability saved my life.
Working with the Shame Response
Once you stop to notice, you may be surprised by the prevalence, variety, and depth of human error. From the simple fender-bender on your way to work to immensely more devastating plane crashes, botched surgeries, and downright horrific cases of parents leaving babies in hot cars, we constantly, mysteriously, act against our own self-interest.
Once you stop to notice, you may be surprised by the prevalence, variety, and depth of human error.
My own experience with a far less consequential but still potentially devastating error early in my life has made me obsessed by human error, and particularly how people recover from the shame of seemingly incomprehensible mistakes. Mitch Abblett, a clinical psychologist and former executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, shares this interest, writing powerfully about the way shame can paralyze us.
“The shame response is very old and comes from a primal part of the brain,” he told me in a recent interview. “As a psychologist I think of our evolutionary biology: Tens of thousands of years ago, if we did something that caused us to feel shame, it was related to our very survival, to fear that we’d be rejected from our social group and die.”
Abblett says a mindfulness practice can help people move past seemingly intolerable shame, as they ride out the physical sensations arising from shame and the “indignant arrogance” he says often accompanies it to arrive at regret, an emotion that more easily allows us room to make wiser choices—and to be more accountable. He gave the example of the 2007 documentary film, The Dhamma Brothers, which followed four convicted murderers on a 10-day meditation retreat in an Alabama prison. The prisoners said it was agonizing at first to sit still with the awareness of what they’d done to others and what others had done to them. But once they stuck with it, it was also liberating.
Taking Accountability for Failure
It’s interesting to contrast the Dhamma Brothers’ experience with the movement, over the last several years, to destigmatize failure in a hurry. “Fail fast, fail often!” and “Move fast and break things!” are the relentlessly cheery slogans of Silicon Valley, a place in which three-fourths of startups go bust. The archives of the TED Talks—the Valley’s influential e-sermons—include more than a dozen presentations about failure, many of which tout its “surprising” benefits. A paean to “celebrating failure” by Astro Teller, the “Captain of Moonshots” at Google’s idea factory, X, has been viewed more than 2.6 million times.
In 2009, the same ethos inspired a popular program called “Fuckup Nights,” in which entrepreneurs take the stage to talk about their business disasters. The Mexican entrepreneur Leticia Gasca founded the project after her startup, a philanthropic effort to help Native women sell their handicrafts, went bust. Since then, “Fuckup Nights” have been held in more than 250 cities in 80 countries. Gasca’s organization also offers workshops to businesses to help “create a culture that celebrates trying, rather than stigmatizing failure,” according to their website. Using storytelling and a Q&A session, the workshops aim to “eliminate shame to turn it into accountability and autonomy.” FailCon, a similarly themed day-long conference, was founded around the same time by Palo Alto software designer Cassandra Phillips and has also gone global.
My reporting errors were in another class than the Silicon Valley sorts of failures, which mostly involve mistaken strategies and decisions. But both kinds of blunders share two important things: the potential to harm other people—say, when livelihoods are lost after businesses go bankrupt—and the corresponding need for someone to take responsibility and make changes. Both, in other words, demand accountability. And that might require something more mindful and systematic than just sharing stories of failure.
Sam Silverstein agrees. A former manufacturing business owner and author of several books about accountability, Silverstein’s main point, which he stresses repeatedly, is that accountability never happens in isolation. “It’s always a matter of being accountable to someone,” he told me. “Accountability is keeping your commitments to people. We’re responsible for things, but we’re accountable to people.”
I thought back on my tough-love treatment by the managing editor, and how much I’d wanted to redeem myself in his eyes. I also remembered the bond I’d established with my psychiatrist, who so skillfully, over months and years, had gained my trust and respect. It made sense that accountability depends on these kinds of strong relationships, which require long and steady investments of time. Still, I don’t believe you can achieve it without also devoting a lot of individual effort.
As I recalled all that work with the psychiatrist, predating the mindfulness movement, it felt as if he’d helped me build up my muscles to face down shame on my own the next time it emerged. At the end of our time together, it was up to me to keep those muscles in shape, by honestly questioning my behavior and, importantly, by making sure I always had other relationships in my life—both in and out of work—that would help hold me accountable.
Failing With Presence Is Slow, Daily Work
My slow accountability practice has helped me in my marriage and in deepening friendships, but it’s probably helped the most in my relationships with my children. I grew up with the notion—handed down from my own mother—that mothers should be perfect, that we’re older and thus wiser and our mandates shouldn’t ever be challenged. But times have changed, and I do believe that even as parents should set limits for our children, we should also model virtues, including being humble and owning up to our mistakes. So even though my first instinct, after forgetting, for instance, to pick them up from Hebrew School (leaving them waiting an extra 20 minutes) was to deny it ever happened or to make an excuse, I instead took a breath, took the hit, and apologized (sincerely but not excessively) for losing track of time. One of the greatest and also most painful things about having children is they inevitably give us so many opportunities for humility, as long as we’re willing to recognize them and not get defensive or play the victim.
That kind of accountability happens over time, and because of deep relationships. Contrast that with Fuckup Nights, which offer the hope of a quick catharsis: a funny, self-deprecating story in the spotlight and you’re done. But the more I thought about them, the more they seemed like just another version of running away.
In fact, the slapdash Silicon Valley approach to failure has been getting some pushback from the people you might least expect. “Every time I listen to Silicon Valley types or students bragging about failing fast and often like it’s no big deal, I cringe,” Gasca said in her own TED Talk last year. She was now extolling the notion of failing “mindfully,” which she described as being aware of the consequences of what you’ve done and the lessons learned—and the responsibility to share those lessons with the world. In other words: failing with presence.
Somewhat similarly, Phillips, the FailCon founder, told me she’d recently abandoned that effort out of frustration. “I was tired of people not discussing the actual takeaways, the next steps, and taking ownership for what really happened,” Phillips wrote me in an email. Something like that would demand regular, smaller conversations over time, she explained—something she wasn’t then interested in doing. But I understood her point. Genuine accountability depends, as Silverstein told me, on relationships of trust, which take time to develop, as well as on each of us building the habit of rigorous introspection.
Any way you look at it, it’s not a speedy process.
A slowly growing body of research suggests that our common aversion to failure is itself a failed strategy. Being curious about our mistakes is the royal road to learning. And mindful techniques can help. Read More
Explore this loving-kindness practice variation to cultivate more ease and openness within the moment-to-moment unfolding of life.
One of the hardest parts of life for me, and I think for everyone I know, is that it’s always changing—and sometimes in unpleasant, unpredictable, and unplanned ways. And when changes happen like this, things that we don’t want to happen—someone we love dies or we have a breakup or a divorce, maybe an injury or an illness of ourselves or others, or even getting fired—then we struggle not only from the pain of this loss, but from the unexpected nature of it. Part of the reason for this upset is because so little is in our control.
One of the hardest parts of life for me, and I think for everyone I know, is that it’s always changing—and sometimes in unpleasant, unpredictable, and unplanned ways.
Everything is impermanent. It’s always changing, coming together and falling apart. And it’s frustrating to not be able to make things go our way. But paradoxically, when we can accept that everything is not up to us, and we stop trying to control what we can’t change or trying to predict what we can’t predict, then we can feel a lot more at ease and more open to the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. By accepting change, we can bring kindness to our experience, even if it’s painful and sad at times, and we can feel more at peace with changes in life.
Key Summary
Benefits of Acceptance:
Reduces suffering caused by resistance to inevitable change
Builds resilience for navigating life transitions
Develops psychological flexibility
Creates space for new possibilities to emerge
Key Principles:
Distinguishing between acceptance and resignation
Working with impermanence as a natural law
Cultivating an open attitude toward uncertainty
Practicing letting go as an active, compassionate choice
Application: Particularly helpful during major life transitions, loss, relationship changes, and when facing situations beyond our control.
Guided Meditation: Let Go and Accept Change
First, find a place where you can just sit down and be still. Turn off your devices, close your eyes, and just take a few breaths. Noticing your feet, your seat, your belly. Bringing your attention to your forehead, your cheeks, your jaw, allowing sound to enter your ears, allowing taste to enter your mouth.
Put your hand on your belly. Just notice how you feel your belly inflates as you inhale and how it contracts when you exhale.
Call to mind someone you know who’s struggling right now. You could maybe imagine that they’re here with you, visualize them, or just have a sense of their presence. If you like, put your hand on your heart and silently offer them this phrase: May you be at peace with the changes in life. May you be at peace with the changes in life. May you be at peace with the changes in life. Continuing silently repeating this, as though you’re giving a gift to this struggling being.
Notice: Where is your attention? If you’ve lost the connection with this struggling being, reconnect, begin again. May you be at peace with the changes in life.
Let go of this connection with this other being. Noticing your feet, feeling your seat, relaxing your shoulder blades, bringing your attention to your breath, to the light entering through your eyelids.
Next, put your hand on your heart and connect with yourself. You can imagine that you’re looking in the mirror, imagine yourself as a child, or just connect with your beautiful presence. Give yourself the same wisdom: May I be at peace with the changes in life. And continue here just for a minute or two, giving yourself this compassion and wisdom.
Notice where your attention is. If you’ve lost your connection to yourself, and gently come back, reconnecting. May I be at peace with the changes in life. Just for one more minute, giving yourself this kindness. May I be at peace with the changes in life.
Keep this connection with yourself, and now include that first being and perhaps everyone that you know and love. May we be at peace with the changes in life. May we be at peace with the changes in life.
Expand the phrase to include all of the beings. All of the living creatures in this ecosystem we call Earth. All of us struggle with change, with loss, with impermanence. Giving your wisdom and your kindness and your good heart to all of us, including yourself. May we all be at peace with the changes in life. May everyone be at peace with the changes in life.
When you’re ready, conclude your meditation. You can close your practice by thanking yourself for your good intention, for your beautiful heart, for these joyful efforts.
Remember that you can practice in this way whenever you need to. Stop, feel your feet, put your hand on your heart, and say to yourself, May I be at peace with the changes in life. If you’re struggling with an unexpected loss, be sure to be patient and kind with yourself, and check in with your good heart as often as possible.
By drawing our attention to endings and our developed habits about the way we meet endings, we can learn how to step fully into our lives with appreciation and gratitude, says Frank Ostaseski. Read More
