The Power of Resilience

The longer I go in my private practice as an energy healer and life coach, the more I come to realize that resilience is one of the primary keys of happiness and fulfillment. Resilience involves two things – the ability to process stressful situations as they’re happening, and the ability to recover quickly after a setback or traumatic experience. The goal isn’t to live a painless life or to never have a challenge, but rather to weather those challenges with grace and ease, so you can learn the lessons they offer you.

On the physical level resilience helps you recover from injuries and illnesses rapidly. It has a profound impact on your immune system. On the emotional level it numbs your triggers and makes you less emotionally reactive. On the mental level, it allows you to think clearly and respond effectively when you face a challenge. It also allows you to see and understand things in their proper perspective, so you don’t minimize vitally important things or blow insignificant things out of proportion.

Resilience requires an ability to purge negative energy from your body. That is, it requires the ability to let go. If you have the habit of clinging to trauma and outrage, stress accumulates in your physical body, in your energy field, and in your ling-term memory. Over time your resilience can fade, and when that happens you become less able to tolerate even the most mild disappointment, you become rigid in your thinking, any slight variation in your routine feels threatening, and your immune system begins to fail. In short, without resilience the aging process accelerates.

The physical world we inhabit is characterized by contrast. Negative experiences help us appreciate the positive. A pain-free life with no challenges might sound blissful, but you’d probably get bored very quickly, because a challenge-free life is essentially meaningless. Without contrast, there’s no reason to grow or learn. In fact, the desire to never face a challenge is form of spiritual bypassing, which we talked about in the opening discussion.

Those of you who are parents know that incessantly coddling your children and shielding them from absolutely every danger and disappointment does not serve them at all. It leaves them incapable of handling stress when it does happen, and this is the exact opposite of resilience. Remember our discussion of learned helplessness? A child who’s treated as fragile and helpless grows up to be hypersensitive, and never learns to manage for himself or herself or control their emotions. And so they crumble at the earliest sign of difficulty. Resilience is like a muscle – it only develops if you use it, and you can’t use it without facing challenges.

Other children grow up in environments that are so deeply infused with pain and struggle, they’re overwhelmed from the moment of birth. The stresses they face on a daily basis are so extreme that they never have the space to develop healthy resilience. Instead, they develop shielding. I’m sure you know people who look like they’re always bracing for impact. And they become so habituated to stress and drama that it feels bizarre not to have it. The very peace and equanimity they crave feels uncomfortable and alien when they experience it, so they invite in chaos, because it feels normal.

For both of these extremes – the coddled child and the abused child, an ironic condition develops. In both cases they tend to give up too easily when things become difficult, but also get bored when things are too easy. Resilience heals this condition. With resilience, you have the ability to forge ahead in difficult situations, and you appreciate and savor your moments of peace and joy. People who lack healthy resilience also tend to have and addiction to venting. Proper venting purges energy. If you’re angry about something and you shout your rage to the world, your anger should then be gone. You vent the anger so you can then manage the problem that created it effectively.

Venting feels awesome. But some people love the feeling of venting so much that they learn to vent without letting go. They vent without the purge. So after they shout their rage to the world, the anger is still there, and they can experience the joy of venting over and over again. Remember, resilience requires letting go. But if you never let go, all that anger and resentment and outrage just accumulates in your energy field. It becomes pressurized, and it explodes outward at inappropriate times. People who vent but never let go eventually find themselves in a highly destructive pattern. Whenever something angers or hurts them, they don’t simply respond to the problem in the moment, they respond to the memory of every other time something similar has happened to them. So for example, someone cuts them off on the highway and they explode with road rage, not in response to that one incident, but in response to every time they’ve ever been cut off while driving. Their reactions are rarely proportional, because they cannot see things in their proper perspective as isolated events.

Healing your life requires work, and this work requires courage. You cannot change the conditions of your life if you’re not willing to question your habitual thoughts and behaviors. I often say there is no magic wand. Miraculous healing does sometimes happen, but they’re short lived if you continue to drink the poison that created your mess in the first place. But if you don’t have the capacity to process pain with grace and ease, you will never look inward to even begin the work that needs to be done. You’ll instead go through life on the hunt for the mythical magic wand. Or for a savior, someone else to do the work for you.