When Strength Comes Back Fast — And What That Taught Me About Equanimity, Grief, and Healing
A few months ago, I couldn’t open a jar of pickles.
Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I wasn’t trying.
Because I couldn’t.
After two hand surgeries — right hand in October 2024, left hand in December — my grip strength was gone. My physical therapist, Todd Holt, pulled out a hand dynamometer (that “squeeze thingy” that measures grip strength), and the results were humbling:
- 14 pounds of pressure from my left hand
- 38 from my right
For context, the average for someone my age is around 85 pounds.
That number felt miles away.
But I kept at it — squeezing putty, doing finger stretches, showing up. Nothing extreme. Just a bit of consistent, daily effort.
A few weeks later, Todd had me test again.
My left hand had jumped to 64 pounds. My right to 74.
I was stunned.
How could that kind of rebound even be possible? I hadn’t been hitting the gym or building new muscle. I hadn’t even been doing that much.
But Todd wasn’t surprised.
He nodded and said, matter-of-factly:
“This isn’t from muscle growth. There hasn’t been enough time for that. It’s muscle memory. Your nervous system just remembered how to connect again.”
When I heard those words, it landed like lightning.
Because this was exactly what was happening with my equanimity.
Muscle Memory and Mental Health: The Surprising Parallel
I wrote in my newest book, Come As You Are: Five Years Later, that my equanimity muscle had atrophied.
Not “might have.”
Had.
After more than two decades of dedicated vipassanā practice — I’ve been sitting since 1996 — I’d come to rely on equanimity like oxygen. It grounded me through the shock and heartbreak of Brian’s death in 2019. It was the inner strength I leaned on when everything else collapsed.
But in the years that followed, I drifted from the cushion. My practice faded. Life moved forward.
And when I fell in love again — something beautiful, unexpected, and deeply real — I was blindsided. Falling in love again four years after losing the love of my life unleashed what therapists often call anticipatory grief — but this wasn’t hypothetical or imagined. It was grief grounded in reality. I knew what loss felt like. I’d lived it.
The fear of losing again struck with a ferocity I didn’t expect.
And I found myself caught off guard.
And my equanimity was nowhere to be found.
Vipassanā, Grief, and the Speed of Spiritual Reconnection
Eventually, I returned to the mat. Not with the same rigorous consistency I had five years ago — if I’m honest, I’m not practicing daily.
And yet… the results stunned me.
My equanimity came back fast.
I couldn’t believe how little I had practiced and how much calm, balance, and perspective came rushing back in return.
It was as if the mental pathways — forged over years of discipline and silence and sitting — had never fully disappeared. They were just waiting for me to tap them again.
Todd’s comment about muscle memory echoed in my mind:
“The strength was there. The connection just needed to come back online.”
Physical Recovery and Emotional Healing: An Unexpected Bridge
This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed striking parallels between my physical recovery and emotional well-being.
In Come As You Are: Three Years Later, I wrote about the disconnect between how people respond to visible injuries versus invisible grief.
“Over the last two years, I’ve had both knees replaced. People ask about my knees all the time. They acknowledge the limitation and move on.
But when it came to my grief — when people did ask — it wasn’t acknowledgment. It was advice. Platitudes. A deluge of discomfort dressed up as support.
And now?
No one asks anymore.
Not about the grief. Just the knees.”
What I didn’t realize when I wrote that passage was just how deep the metaphor runs.
Because healing — whether it’s your hands, your knees, or your heart — doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. It means reconnecting. It means trusting that the strength, the memory, the capacity is still there, waiting.
Equanimity After Loss: What I Learned from Falling in Love Again
Rebuilding equanimity after loss — especially after falling in love again — isn’t just about being calm or composed.
It’s about being willing to stay in contact with everything.
Even the terror.
Even the grief.
Even the tenderness of knowing that what you love can be taken from you — again.
And still choosing to open.
Still choosing to stay.
And here’s what surprised me most:
The more I sat, the more I remembered what it felt like to let go — not of love, but of control.
Equanimity isn’t apathy. It’s not detachment.
It’s trust in the unfolding.
It’s the ability to be with what is — without needing to flinch, fix, or flee.
The Truth About Healing: You’re Not Starting Over
If you’re reading this and you’re in the thick of grief — or just trying to find your footing again after a setback — I want to offer you this:
You’re probably not starting over.
You’re reconnecting.
And your nervous system remembers.
Your heart remembers.
Your practice remembers.
You just have to begin again.
Even gently.
Even imperfectly.
The signal is still there. It just needs time — and space — to come back online.
Want to Go Deeper? Read the Books That Brought Me Back
If any of this resonates, you might find comfort, insight, and even a little companionship in the Come As You Are series:
- Come As You Are: Meditation & Grief
My raw, unfiltered experience of grief in the early days after Brian’s death, grounded in vipassanā, ānāpāna, and mettā-bhāvanā. - Come As You Are: Three Years Later
Reflections on what changed (and what didn’t), how grief echoes through time, and the aching difference between how people support physical healing vs. emotional pain. - Come As You Are: Five Years Later
A deeper exploration of falling in love again, the terror of anticipatory grief, and how I relearned equanimity — not as a theory, but as a lived, trembling return.
These books weren’t written to teach from the mountaintop. They were written from the floor.
And if you’re somewhere on the floor right now — maybe reaching for your own version of that pickle jar — I hope you’ll find something in them that reminds you:
You’re not alone.
You’re not broken.
You’re just reconnecting.
