What is resilience?

The podcast above supports the information below, and you can scroll down for the Kind Resilience meditation. 

To best get an idea of resilience means, consider the following question; when something challenging happens, how well do you recover?

 Resilience is the how well we bounce back after adversity. Life will always present us with joys and sorrows and we need to feel one to be able to experience the other in a fully-rounded emotional spectrum. Resilient people have the ability to meet change and difficulty as opportunities for self-reflection, learning and understanding how the circumstances or events may be part of their growth and self-development.  

Resilience is not something we are simply born with or not, but a skill that can be learnt and cultivated. Our brains have an innate capacity for rewiring according to habit (neuroplasticity) and resilience is part of a learning new attitudes from perceiving challenge as failure or catastrophic, to being able to step back, adapt and move on. Mindfulness (fully experiencing the present moment as it is, without judgement or self-criticism) has shown to foster this change in mindset and to relieve this ‘negative thinking bias’ that can lead us into panic, anxiety, depression and freefall when things don’t go according to plan or we feel threatened.

Resilience is mostly cultivated from within by how we perceive and then react to stressors.

Many studies have demonstrated the link between mindfulness and resilience found that those showing mindful skills of being able to stay in the present moment, can better cope with difficult thoughts and emotions without becoming overwhelmed or going into freeze mode and shutting down (emotionally). Pausing and observing how thoughts can actually be projections or ideas, rather than the reality of any moment, is to Being aware of what is truly happening in the moment, helps free us from tendencies to get stuck in our stories and associations, and even tendencies to catastrophise about ‘the worst that can happen’. We have the choice to shift our perceptions and therefore our thought patterns when we are cultivating this kind of attention and attunement. This consciousness has shown to go a long way in empowering us to move forward with a new outlook and sense of possibility.

Most of life’s stressors are subjective and with mindfulness, we can offer compassion for our own suffering. It is this loving-kindness over self-criticism that allows us to increase our resilience, hence the title here Kind Resilience. 

Difficult emotions such as fear or anger are not enemies to be subdued, suppressed or criticised. They are important part of our survival responses and emotional expression, but often we are not taught how to relate to them from an early age. Thus they can come out in inwardly focused ways or in uncontrolled outbursts. Finding more elegant and helpful ways to be able to express can also help us listen to what they are saying and the unmet needs that they are pointed towards.

When anger or fear are present, our lower, primal brain is running the show and we are on purely knee-jerk response mode for survival; probably playing out our unconscious strategies laid down in very early life. Mindfulness helps draw us back to consciousness and so support the capabilities of the higher brain to see the bigger picture with calmness and clarity.

Kind Resilience Meditation

The meditation below focusses on cultivating Kind Resilience, to bring in the qualities of kindness, peace and acceptance that bring the higher brain into the equation to change responses to difficulty. It brings in four phrases to continually offer kindness, peace and acceptance to your brain to create new neural pathways run by these qualities, rather than simply heading straight towards anger, panic, despair or immobilisation. You can repeat these phrases in whatever order or frequency that feels comfortable to you, within the meditation or at any time:

May I be kind to myself.

May I find peace and healing.

I am doing the best that I can in this moment.

May I accept and find ease with things just as they are. 

Bringing the Kind Resilience practice in your daily life:

Practice the Kind Resilience meditation daily and note when the phrases can help you in daily life. 

If practicing a physical, mindful or meditative practice of any nature, notice which phrases for 'self-talk' support your capacity to come back to the moment, whenever your mind has wandered off the track.

Throughout your day, from conscious awareness of inviting these spaces and shifting your mind towards kindness, peace and acceptance, make a list of points in your life where these could come in to help you cope and simply observe how they are playing out at the moment.

At any time you feel overwhelm or panic, if you are able to actively step away (eg move to another room or place in a room) to state the phrases that you have instilled and feel the effects with curiosity and self-compassion. 

You can learn more about Adaptation and Resilience for Your Health with the Whole Health webinar recording of that name...

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