Endurance, Resiliency, and Standing Where I Am

As we welcome the Fire Horse of 2026, my year did not begin with momentum or clarity. It began with sickness.

The first two weeks of January were spent slowed down, feverish, and unsteady. My body insisted that I stop before I could move forward. Instead of leaping into a new year, I found myself simply trying to get my feet back on the ground. Perhaps that, too, is part of welcoming a Fire Horse: learning how to stand before learning how to gallop.

When I finally felt well enough, I made a quiet but significant decision. I joined a gym!

This may not sound momentous, but for me it was. I have lived a largely sedentary life for decades, and stepping into a gym felt less like self-improvement and more like confronting a long-avoided truth. Something in the way I was living had to change, not from self-judgment, but from care.

At the same time, another kind of letting go had taken place. I had finally found closure in a relationship that shaped me deeply. What surprised me most was learning that closure did not erase love. I could let go and still love someone deeply. Two truths can co-exist at once. That realization softened something in me. Strength, I was learning, does not require hardness.

Still, returning to the body was not easy. Exercise was exhausting, awkward, and humbling. So, I did something I know does not sound very Buddhist. I created cravings as incentives. I bought six months’ worth of personal training sessions. I allowed myself to watch K-dramas, but only during the second hour of cardio. It was a bargain with my own mind, a small bribe offered while my brain slowly rewired and remapped itself.

I know this strategy leans directly into craving, something we are encouraged to examine and release in Buddhist practice. Yet I also know that habits do not dissolve through idealism alone. My hope is that after enough days, perhaps sixty-six, showing up will no longer require negotiation. For now, I am choosing direction over purity.

The classes I attend, Pilates, hot yoga, and core circuit, are not about perfect poses or competing with the person on the mat next to me. They are about endurance and resiliency. They ask me to stay when my muscles shake, to breathe when discomfort rises, and to respect the limits of the body I actually inhabit. These practices remind me, again and again, that the work is not to become someone else, but to be fully who I am, right here.

This theme followed me into the dharma talk I attended today at the LP Chalee Meditation center, which focused on the Seven Factors of Awakening: mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. Equanimity, in particular, confused me.

I asked about the difference between a neutral state and indifference. On the surface they can appear similar, but internally they feel worlds apart. Indifference feels cold, disconnected, a turning away. Equanimity, as it is described, feels warm yet steady. And yet I struggled: compassion, kindness, and empathy require vulnerability. Vulnerability hurts. How, then, can equanimity exist without becoming emotional withdrawal?

Indifference says, “I don’t care about your pain.”

Equanimity seems to say, “I feel your pain, and I am still here.”

That distinction matters deeply to me.

I have come to understand compassion as a sincere wish for others to be free from ill will, illness, anxiety, and suffering. This kind of compassion asks me to let my heart be touched, and yes, sometimes hurt. I worried that equanimity might be a form of self-protection, a way of not letting anything in.

What shifted my understanding during the talk was the introduction of endurance and resiliency when I talked to Phra Bryan after the dharma talk.

Equanimity does not mean an absence of feeling or indifference. I am beginning to see that it emerges when endurance and resiliency are cultivated. Through my exercises, endurance allows me to stay present with difficulty without fleeing. Resiliency allows me to bend, recover, and return without hardening.

I’m starting to see that equanimity is not emotional armor. It is capacity.

Indifference says, “I won’t let this touch me.”

Ignorance says, “I don’t see what’s really happening.”

Equanimity says, “I might be steady enough to let this touch me without breaking.”

This reframing echoed my experience at the gym. Endurance is showing up even when it’s uncomfortable. Resiliency is returning after soreness, frustration, or doubt. I am noticing that neither requires perfection, and both seem to need honesty.

I am still confused. I understand this intellectually, yet I know understanding alone is not enough. Like my body, my heart is learning through repetition, staying, softening, and beginning again.

Perhaps equanimity is not something I achieve, but something I grow into slowly, as endurance and resiliency take root. Perhaps it is not self-protection, but the strength that allows the heart to remain unprotected.

For now, I will keep showing up to the gym, to the cushion, to my own uncertainty, standing exactly where I am.