Shannan Martin on Counterweights: Holding Grief and Joy in the Same Hands

Description:What do we do when the world feels like too much?

When the headlines won’t let up, when grief and uncertainty sit heavy in our bodies, when we’re carrying more than we ever thought we could—how do we keep going without numbing out or falling apart?

This week, Jen sits down with beloved writer and friend Shannan Martin to talk about her new book Counterweights, a tender, practical guide for living with hope in a heavy world.

At the center of Shannan’s work is a deceptively simple idea: when life gets heavy, we don’t eliminate the weight—we learn to carry something equally weighty in the other hand. Not balance. Not denial. But both/and.

Together, Jen and Shannan explore what it means to hold grief and joy at the same time, to resist despair without turning away from reality, and to find steady ground in the middle of it all. They talk about community as survival, faith that evolves and expands, and the small, ordinary moments that become lifelines when everything feels overwhelming.

This conversation is a fitting close to our Wilderness & Wonder exploration—because if the wilderness strips us down to what’s real, Shannan helps us ask: what will hold us up now?

If you’ve been feeling stretched thin, worn down, or just plain tired of carrying it all alone, this episode is for you.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “Now, what are the things that are keeping me going? For me, it’s clawing for those little tiny moments where we can. I need to see myself take care of myself.” – Shannan Martin

• “We have to carry a lot of really heavy things in one hand. We don't choose these things. We would never have asked for them. And we can't just put them down. We don't have control over them. We can't just set them aside. So how do we carry these heavy things? We fill the other hand with heavy goodness.” – Shannan Martin

• “The world feels catastrophic right now. My bowl of curry for lunch cannot cancel that out. There's no amount of beautiful sunsets that can cancel out a diagnosis that nobody wants or these heavy, heavy things that we are tasked with carrying because balance is impossible.” – Shannan Martin

• “When wholeness is our goal, beauty is our emergency.” – Shannan Martin

• “Anytime I can disrupt the algorithm, I feel it in my body.” – Shannan Martin

• “The abundant life is not getting all the things we ever wanted. The abundant life is you get this and this and the task now is to figure out how to carry it.” – Shannan Martin

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World by Shannan Martin - https://amzn.to/4sRdTRZ

• David Chang - https://www.instagram.com/davidchang/

• 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker

• Rainer Maria Rilke - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke

• Sara Miles - https://sara-miles.squarespace.com/bio

• Shannan Martin Book Tour - https://www.shannanmartin.com/counterweights-events

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.shannanmartin.com/