Resilience is not a special skill, it is a part of our lives… An endless cycle of circumstances changing and us trying to find our way. Being thrown off centre by the sudden news, affected by others around us…
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from the challenges and adversities we face.
“Resilience is our ability to bounce back – like moss after we’ve stepped on it, or to find our intactness again. It is our ability to “come back” to ourselves, to connectedness, and to positive vision, even when the experiences and conditions are difficult”
Staci Haines
It’s not about being happy all the time and not feeling affected. In fact I think the narrative that we should be happy all the time is the problem. We end up numbing ourselves to not feel our pain or our anxiety and that is something very different from being resilient.
Ropes taught me the difference between resilience and resistance.
In ropes, I resist the impact as little as I can. I let it get me, I let it hurt. I’m not stoic, I react to the impact. If I need to cry, I cry. If I’m made to reduce my breathing, I will just do that. I “resign” myself to my breathing, to my pulse, to my core – once I do that, I might notice, life is going on, it is sustainable. I feel my breathing and pulsating, I feel my heartbeat, and this is all there is.
And there is a peace in that realisation, peace and calmness and bliss, actually. It allows me to stay in my center even in the most difficult situations. It can be read as reduction, but mainly it is about maintaining softness under pressure.
Resistance is an action that is “narrative based”. We are fighting to protect our narrative (that is somehow against that impact) and this is what brings us into muscular tension. In ropes, I’m doing in fact the opposite – with every breath I’m letting go of the narrative of what I should be feeling. My only truth is what I feel at the moment, and this is what feeds my resilience.
The truth is, we really don’t know what we can find in these places when we follow the challenge and do not resist it.
Sometimes in ropes, we resist not even the real challenge, but the anticipated one. Often it is that we act from thinking “I cannot take it”. But if we try, we actually find that it is very possible. Coming back to what I was writing last time, or remembering the first time I was hanging upside down in suspension, that did something with my head. I understood how much of what I think reality is, is only my perception of it. So why fight. That might not even be true 🙂
What is resiliency to you? How do you experience it?