Resilience: The Strength to Handle Life and Thrive
Resilience refers to the capacity to handle stress, recover, and even thrive despite trauma. It is about how well we can manage changing conditions, adapt, maintain equilibrium, and master our circumstances. Individual qualities and attitudes make people more or less affected by the same event. While these traits vary widely among individuals, they are not fixed and limited; resilience can be learned and increased by intention. Here are some of these stress-handling, trauma-mitigating factors. You may feel unlucky that you weren’t born with some of these, but you can develop them in many creative ways. Here we add just a few examples to get your resilience-building underway.
Relationships are a primary factor. Whatever the past and present quality of relationships, make positive connections with others. Be with those who value you. Ask for and accept support. Be in a group, volunteer, be a good friend and share yourself openly when it is safe to do so. Build a positive self-image (see Emotional Liberation, Chapter 11 on Shame). Take good care of yourself with kindness and your health with good habits. Make plans and take action toward improvements. Keep learning about yourself and what you need to be happy (see E.L. Chapter 5 on Desire). Accept that life brings difficulties, but keep doing what you can. Learn to manage your intense feelings and impulses—that is what Emotional Liberation is all about!
Receiving the advice to have hope, confidence, self-esteem and other positive attitudes when you are down and not feeling it can sound unfair or impossible. Knowing that anyone can actively increase these qualities is at least a place to start. Some factors, like emotional sensitivity and nervous system strength, may be inborn. But there are ways to improve whatever you have, such as yoga and diet for the nerves, meditation for focus and mental control, personal growth work for behavioral changes and spiritual work for attitudes and beliefs. Sometimes our pain has to become greater than our inertia and fears to motivate change. And if things are going well already, that’s an excellent time to develop resilience against future challenges.
Positives Neutralize Negatives
Each of us responds uniquely to situations because the impact is mainly about perception and perception involves genes, socialization and other personal histories. How you perceive an experience and the beliefs through which you filter it affects the lasting impact it will have on you. This same variable, mental agency, gives you the ability to take back control of the stories you tell yourself about what happened, what it means, what you expect and how you respond. Our survival-oriented brain retains impressions of adverse events more strongly than the positive ones to avoid similar pain in the future. That’s why one repeats positive affirmations and prayers, why we tell tales of noble virtues again and again, why aspirants seek high spiritual values with determination for years. So these positives have a chance of sticking! Positive neural pathways can replace previously imprinted negative thought-feeling habits, but it takes work.
If you take the overall effect of positive experiences in your life, minus the cumulative impact of negative experiences— weighted more heavily by childhood and severity—you get a reliable predictor of your psychological health and overall well-being. Lack of control to help oneself dramatically increases the negative impact of any situation. Conversely, nurturing, understanding, loving care, and support decrease the detrimental effects of an event. Happily, whatever conditions made it worse back then, those same conditions can heal any harm when received now. If safety or love were scarce then, you can find them now. And fortunately, you can give them to yourself.
To effectively heal painful memory and affect, the positive replacements must be more than thoughts. You must have a “felt” experience, emotionally and somatically. Uplifting and nurturing truths spoken, repeated, chanted and sung with the power of voice and feelings have a much more significant effect. Mass in grand cathedrals was one technology developed to bring higher inspiration and aspiration to the laboring masses by vividly touching all the body’s senses, the mind with lofty thoughts and the spirit with mysteries. There are simpler and more private ways to achieve the same effects. Multi- dimensional experience embeds in your nervous and glandular systems—it is real, just as negatively shocking experiences register at all levels of your being. Do you have such practices in your life? There are lots of choices out there, systems, groups and gurus; experiment and find things that work for you. Get started today increasing your resilience, and build reserves for what may come tomorrow.
- excepted from: Emotional Liberation: Life Beyond Triggers and Trauma
Blessings,
GuruMeher
