Feel It, Don't Feed It: Own Your Emotions Without Being Owned by Them (w/ Margaret Cullen)
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Takeaway
We explore equanimity — one of the most misunderstood and underrated qualities we can cultivate — with Margaret Cullen, author of Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity. You’ll learn why equanimity isn’t about feeling less, but about feeling more without being hijacked, how to access what Margaret calls “door number three” when your emotions are pulling you toward reaction or suppression, and three powerful thought experiments that can break the spell of reactivity in real time.
This one is deeply in line with everything we talk about on Chasing Excellence — and Margaret’s practical, science-backed, meditation-rooted approach makes it immediately useful.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. Equanimity Means Feeling More, Not Less
The biggest misconception about equanimity is that it requires dulling or suppressing our emotions. The opposite is true. As Margaret puts it: we feel more deeply with equanimity, but we’re less hijacked by our feelings.
Equanimity isn’t detachment. It isn’t the stoner’s “whatever, man” or the 13-year-old who shrugs at everything. That’s the near enemy — something that looks like equanimity but is actually indifference or withdrawal. The real thing is closer to being fully present and fully open, while retaining the stability to respond rather than react.
Think of it in terms of recovery time. We all get hijacked. None of us will reach some permanent state of perfect balance. The question is: how long do we stay hijacked? How quickly does our system return to center? That’s what equanimity training actually builds — not a wall against feeling, but a shorter fuse back to calm.
2. There Are Three Doors — Most of Us Only Use Two
Most of us were raised with a false emotional dichotomy: act it out or suppress it. And to make it worse, suppression was often glorified as strength. But there’s a third option — and it’s the one that actually works.
Door 1: Act out or ruminate. React, vent, replay, fuel the fire.
Door 2: Suppress, repress, avoid, deny. Bury it and call it strength.
Door 3: Feel it, don’t feed it. Allow the emotion to arise — and let it pass.
Door three is available to everyone, not just people with naturally calm temperaments. Margaret herself says she doesn’t have equanimity as a baseline trait. But like compassion and loving kindness, equanimity is an inborn quality — something we can access, not something we have to go find. The work is learning to recognize door three in the moment, and choosing it before the old conditioning kicks in.
3. Three Thought Experiments That Break the Hijack
Margaret offers three practical “cognitive hacks” for interrupting reactivity in real time. These aren’t things you can force — they have to be timed right — but when the conditions allow, they’re remarkably effective.
Is this as personal as I think it is? Most of the time, it isn’t. We see ourselves as central to everything happening around us, but there are enormous, complex causes and conditions behind every situation. If you’re making up a story about why someone did something — and we almost always are — try making up a better one. One that leaves room for indifference, circumstance, or an unmet need, rather than malice.
This too shall pass. Emotions, when we’re not fueling them, are fleeting. Jill Bolte Taylor’s research shows that the neurological signature of an emotion lasts about 90 seconds. Everything beyond that is us keeping it alive with thought. Reminding yourself that this will pass — quickly — can give you the courage to sit with it instead of running.
Zoom out. The overview effect — the spiritual awakening astronauts experience when they see the Earth from space — is available in small doses every day. Ask yourself: how will I feel about this in a week? A month? A year? From the perspective of history, most of what hijacks us is barely a ripple. The bigger the container of awareness, the smaller the wave.
4. The Body Is the Doorway to Reality
The four foundations of mindfulness — body, feeling tones, states of mind, and mental phenomena — are sequenced for a reason. They start with the body because the body is the most direct path to present-tense reality. The mind lives in the past and future, constantly distorting. The body is always here.
When Jon Kabat-Zinn brought mindfulness into hospitals 50 years ago, patients in chronic pain found relief not by eliminating pain, but by learning to see it as sensation — pressure, heat, tingling — rather than a story about pain. That separation between the sensation and the narrative about the sensation is one of the most liberating practices available to us.
The second foundation — feeling tones — takes this even deeper. Every experience we have registers as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. That unconscious micro-reaction conditions everything that follows. Notice the pleasant and you create stickiness — attachment. Notice the unpleasant and you lean away into aversion. Notice neutral and you check out. Just naming the feeling tone, before the story builds, can interrupt the whole cycle.
5. Equanimity Is a Form of Strength, Not Softness
One of the deepest fears around equanimity is that it’s too soft for the moment. That cultivating peace is a form of copping out, of failing to care enough. Margaret’s answer to this is powerful: equanimity isn’t indifference. It’s the opposite of it.
She points to 19 monks who walked from Texas to Washington with a single message — peace in the world starts with peace in your heart — and were greeted by governors, evangelical Christians, and millions of followers. She points to Rosa Parks sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That was equanimity. And it changed federal legislation.
The outrage machine wants our reactivity. It was literally designed to capture and hold it. Reclaiming your equanimity — staying balanced, present, and grounded while the world spins — is an act of resistance. We can’t think clearly when we’re hijacked. We can’t love well. We can’t do our best work. Equanimity isn’t a retreat from what matters. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. Which door do you default to — and what does it cost you?
When a strong emotion hits, most of us have a habitual response: we either go out door one (react, vent, ruminate) or door two (suppress, avoid, shut down). Think about your go-to pattern. What situations trigger it most reliably? And what has it cost you — in relationships, in your own peace of mind, in the person you’re trying to become?
2. Think of a situation where you took something personally — what would it look like to see the empty boat?
Margaret tells the story of a man in a fog who grows increasingly furious at a boat bearing down on him — until he realizes no one is steering it, and the anger instantly dissolves. Bring to mind a recent moment where you felt disrespected, dismissed, or wronged. Is it possible there’s no one in that boat? What story are you telling yourself about intent — and is there another story, equally plausible, that leaves more room for impersonality, circumstance, or unmet needs?
3. Where in your life are you trying to reach for equanimity instead of creating the conditions for it to arise?
As Margaret says, equanimity behaves like a shy animal — it only appears when the conditions are right. Our job isn’t to grab it; it’s to create space for it. Think about the practices, habits, or environments in your life that expand your container: nature, humor, meditation, awe, time away from the scroll. Where are you currently starving that container? And what’s one small thing you could add or remove this week that might let equanimity show up on its own?
🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY
Feel it. Don’t feed it.
Five words. Simple enough to remember in the middle of the moment when nothing else is accessible. And underneath them, one of the most important reframes in Margaret’s work: you are not your emotions. They arise in you, they move through you, and — when you stop fueling them — they pass.
The hijack loop works like this: something happens, a feeling tone arises (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), a story forms, the story generates more emotion, and the emotion generates more story. Around and around it goes. Most of us were never taught that we could step off that loop. We were given two options — explode or suppress — and told one of them was strength.
Door three doesn’t require superhuman discipline. It requires awareness, and a little bit of practice. The 90-second rule. The empty boat. Zooming out to the overview effect. Body awareness. Feeling tones. These are tools, not philosophy. They work in the grocery store, in the argument with your partner, in the moment your flight gets cancelled and everyone around you is heading for the counter.
Equanimity is not about caring less. It’s about caring more clearly — with less distortion, less reactivity, less noise. It’s about becoming the kind of person whose temperature doesn’t change just because the room got hotter. Not because you’ve walled yourself off from the world, but because you’ve built something stable enough inside to hold it.
As Margaret puts it, equanimity drains our lives of melodrama — but deepens the poignancy. We become more moved, not less. More present, not more distant. And from that place, we become more effective, more loving, and more free.
Feel it. Don’t feed it. That’s the work.