Resilience has little to do with being “fine”
It would be easy to think of human resilience the way you think of the resilience of objects or fabric. When you look up the word, in fact, resilience is defined as the ability to spring back into shape; to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Definitions like this leave me imagining those brightly colored, crazy, human-esque, inflatables that you see flapping hysterically as you drive past rug stores and auto dealerships. The wind pushes them over and moments later they are back upright, grinning crazily as if to say, “I’m fine! Everything’s OK! I’m good!”
As much as we might strive for resilience like this (and some of us strive for a very long time), it just does not seem to be the best course of action for us human beings. When we get knocked about by life, what seems to work best is to acknowledge that things are tough; that we’ve fallen and perhaps can’t get up just yet; that we need a minute to process what the heck just happened.
Resilience can be practiced
In other words, resilience may not come quickly or easily, but it can be developed. It can be practiced. It can be strengthened a little like a muscle. Just as when we begin to practice anything – knitting, basketball, or writing poetry – we will travel an arc from beginner to experienced. The difference is, when we’re practicing resilience, our “training” doesn’t happen simply by being resilient.
Imagine if you could schedule a series of gently gradated crises, spaced out over the course of a reasonable amount of time that allows for healing, after which you can trust that you have this resilience thing down to a science. “Go ahead,” you might say confidently, “hit me with your best shot. I’m resilient!” If only.
We can cultivate spiritual and emotional resilience through mindfulness practices such as yoga. With yoga, you often don’t even know it is happening. In fact, it mostly feels like you’re practicing discipline simply by showing up day after day, whether you’re in the mood or not. Which, when you wind up in a life situation that is stretching you to your full capacity (or beyond), is pretty much exactly what you need to do.
However, resilience takes more than discipline, more than showing up. Resilience requires us to acknowledge ahead of time that things are likely to go wrong. Better yet, resilience is a change of perspective. Resilience is the ability to trust that the things that go wrong are not getting in the way of our life, they ARE our life.
Krista Tippet, in her book Becoming Wise, writes that resilience “honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are … . It’s a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope.” In short, resilience embraces the messy reality that is human life. Not accepts it. Not simply acknowledges it. But embraces it.
Resilience embraces the mess
When we embrace the mess, we stop waiting for this challenge, whatever it is, to end so that we can get back to the life we’d planned to live. Waiting is no way to live. The willingness to view whatever is going on in your life as the life you’ve been given to live is a resilient approach to anything uncomfortable, painful, or difficult. It doesn’t mean you like it. It doesn’t mean you’d ever have picked it. It simply means that it IS and that the best thing for you to do is to jump in and live with it.
Resilience isn’t going back, it’s moving forward
Which, I suppose, you could say is what those crazy inflatable “people” flapping on the sides of the road are doing as they smile and bounce back up from yet another gust of wind looking exactly the same as they did before they were knocked down. But – and this is the key – if we’re truly resilient, we real people don’t bounce back looking just the same as we did before.
We don’t bounce back to who we were before life knocked us down. Each metaphorical gust of wind changes us. Resilience is not about going back to the way we were before. It’s about the assurance that life is always about moving forward. It’s about moving forward as the person you’ve become because, in large part due to grace, you’ve navigated something difficult and allowed it to form you into someone new, someone a touch wiser, someone slightly more evolved, someone filled with a little more humility and a little less fear.
Doesn’t that sound a whole lot nicer than being tough enough to bounce back?
Resilience requires the two qualities that Patanjali says our yoga practice requires in order to bear fruit in our lives – abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa is steady practice, the discipline to show up. Vairagya is letting go, letting go of the notion that we get to choose what we’re showing up for in life. With lots and lots of practice (on a yoga mat or in day-to-day moments), these two qualities join forces rather naturally when we’re challenged by the drama of human life.