Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Patrick. Thank you for joining us this week. I'm really excited

for this conversation. I'm excited to bring you this conversation I have here with me on the line.

Margaret Cullen. How you doing? Excellent. Thank you.

I'm so excited to have a conversation with you. You're the author of a new book. It's called Quiet Strength, Find Peace, Feel Alive, and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity. I loved this book, and I thank you for it. It was really, really fun to read, and I was really excited when we got to, when we scheduled this,

and I knew I got to talk to you about it. So thank you for coming here. Thank you for inviting me and for actually reading the book. Oh, my gosh. The show is called Chasing Excellence. And when we started it almost 10 years ago, it meant one thing. And as we've developed the show, as we've had these conversations, it really, the thing I kept thinking about is we should call our show chasing equanimity because it's so much in line

with what you are talking about in this book. I'm not going to change the name of the podcast,

but like if we did, it wouldn't be inappropriate. So just to give a focus a sense of it, like,

this is so in line with what we talk about here on the show all the time.

I would love to start with just table sticks, just setting the table for us with what equanimity is and what equanimity is not.

And you write this and I'll just give this quote just to start us off.

You write, I've come to understand equanimity as the ability to fully feel

the entire range of human experience, but feeling without reacting. Reactivity clouds our ability

to clearly apprehend what is happening or to discern the most skillful response. And so can you just

talk to us about equanimity a little bit? What is it and what is it perhaps

often thought of that it is not? Yes. Thank you. And thanks for reminding me of how I defined it in the book.

I'm often asked to quote it from memory and I think, what did I say? What did I write? Yes. So the biggest misunderstanding that I've

encountered about equanimity is that in some way, we are dulling, limiting, suppressing

our feelings. And what I've come to discover is that actually we feel more deeply with equanimity, but we're

less hijacked by it, by our feelings.

And that's really what equanimity is aiming for.

And it does so in two different ways.

So in one way, it's creating space around our experience so we can

...