In yoga, bend yourself into a pretzel, and your stretchy nylon lycra leggings are your very own Elastigirl suit. If only Edna could make your mind as springy when you’re in a heated argument with your partner.
Enter resilience, “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” The crucial part here is “recover.”
Being resilient doesn’t mean you avoid hardship or suppress your emotions; it means you cultivate the skills to efficiently move through challenges.
Building resilience is like building drainage ditches in a flood area. Without them, a flood can be debilitating and halt everything. With them, the flood is still inconvenient, but the damage is minimized. Working on your resilience is preventative mental health care for tough times.
But often, we only realize we need to be more resilient during hardship, so how can we get ahead of it? Here are some practices to try.
Acknowledge Your Emotions & Learn to Process Them
Being aware of how you’re feeling and how that might impact the way you act is essential to living your life in the driver’s seat. It’s healthy to feel your emotions, but you don’t want to let them rule over you.
If you have an inkling this is currently out of balance, learn to process your emotions. As a society, we can get stuck in the “toxic positivity” trap, which is suppressive and can lead to maladaptive processing.
Meditate Your Reactivity Away
Practicing a form of meditation, like Vipassana, is a great way to reduce how reactive you are. In this meditation style, you don’t shut out or ignore the world around you; instead, you focus on not reacting to it.
Picture this. You’re meditating, and suddenly a big, noisy truck pulls up outside of your place and continues to idle. You could find yourself suddenly down a thought spiral about how inconsiderate the driver is, how much they’re polluting, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve reacted to the situation by creating a story and assigning intent.
It takes practice to catch yourself doing this, but when you do, a helpful question to ask yourself is, “am I creating unnecessary drama?” With practice, you’ll find yourself sweating the small stuff—and eventually the big stuff—far less.
Stay in The Pose – You Know the One!
We all have that one pose (or five!) in our asana practice that we absolutely dread. For me, it’s Trikonasana. I didn’t realize it until one day, my long-time teacher saw me once again avoiding the pose by deciding to either fix my hair or take a drink. She asked me to wait, joking how I wasn’t getting out of it this time.
I’d been unconsciously avoiding it when really, part of asana is to help us learn to stay in discomfort and face challenges on and off the mat—and I didn’t want to miss out on that. I haven’t skipped a Trikonasana since.
(That said, there are times our body is avoiding a pose because of injury or unsuitability, if you’re experiencing resistance, tune into where it is coming from.)
Do Something You’re Scared Of, Often
Like above, choosing to challenge ourselves is an opportunity for growth. What better way to build your resilience muscle than having to put self-coaching and perseverance skills into practice?
Whether that’s going bungee jumping or learning how to surf, getting to apply the practices needed for resilience—while having fun—trains your brain to realize the reward is worth it.
Practice Gratitude & Live With Intention
Guess where gratitude falls on the 19 Steps to a Powerful Morning list? Number 2, just after waking up, that’s how important it is to shaping our outlook.
Gratitude can also help us start the day with intention. How do you want to show up for the world that day? What drives you?
Living your life with intention, and feeling a sense of drive or purpose, has a way of reducing stressors and challenges to small bumps in the road. Because you’ve got places to go, things to do.
Create a Support Network & Ask for Help When You Need It
Being resilient doesn’t mean being self-contained. Psychologists have found that feeling supported by family, friends, community, or an organization adds to a sense of security and resilience.
When working towards resilience, it’s also essential to recognize what may be holding you back and when you’ll need a professional’s assistance, like with cases of PTSD or unresolved trauma. The brain and nervous system are incredibly complex, and sometimes we need a guide to navigate them.
There’s a famous Franklin D. Roosevelt quote, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” But a storm does not make a skilled sailor either. It is the sailor’s regular practice of their skills that make them able to withstand, and grow in, the storm.
