An Understanding of Thriving and Resilience
As you face challenges in your life at personal and systemic layers and witness the suffering of others, it can be tempting to resign yourself to just surviving or collapse into a sense of powerlessness. Even though you know this only makes things worse, you might struggle to respond differently. Tending to your own thriving and resilience is essential for staying engaged in a way that is in alignment with your values and contributes to others.
Let’s look at a few key aspects of Thriving & Resilience, which is MCD Relationship Competency # 9. Perhaps most central is examining your sense of identity— the more expansive your sense of identity can be the more resilient you become. For example, in a moment of identifying with your body, you will contract or perceive yourself as smaller than you are. At that moment, if you don't like the way you look or function physically, you have very little resources to respond to your own state of dislike or disappointment. You are temporarily cut off from your spiritual, emotional, or energetic resources. On the other hand, when you identify yourself as someone larger than the sum of your experiences, you have access to a full array of resources and perspectives which then allows you to respond to life with creativity and flexibility.
You can identify with an expansive sense of who you are without having to define that bigness. You can allow the mystery and still access a more neutral, fluid, and dynamically engaged relationship to your identity. This humility in the face of the mystery of who you are creates a spaciousness inside. And from this spaciousness springs a spontaneous responsivity to life.
We recognize those moments of spontaneous responsivity when they happen because we see them as beautiful and inspiring. When you have that moment of just being in connection with what's in front of you, it’s incredibly satisfying. These moments come from that spaciousness inside of you— that something bigger moving through you. A simple meditation practice* that’s helpful with expanding a sense of identity can be to repeat and attempt to experience the following:
I have a body and I am more than my body
I have emotions and I am more than my emotions
I have thoughts and I am more than my thoughts
So much suffering comes from contraction around what is unpleasant or what triggers trauma. Thus, another key aspect to consider is the difference between thriving and surviving. Contraction steals away thriving and resilience and trauma symptoms are a form of contraction. So it's also helpful to name at least a couple of things about trauma when discussing thriving and resilience.
First, we know that those who have intense and overwhelming experiences without having post-traumatic stress disorder demonstrate the capacity to stay connected to the truth of who they are, the capacity to choose, and the capacity to act. Victor Frankel’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” is a well-known example of this. We also see this capacity in our heroes like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Rosa Parks.
But, it doesn’t require great acts of courage to stay connected in an intense experience. It can also be something as simple as finding the smallest way to help in an intense situation. Even the smallest effort to help yourself and others in a crisis accesses a positive sense of self, a choice, and the capacity to act.
Second, after an intense and overwhelming experience when one is received with warmth, empathy and resonance and are helped to make meaning of their experience they also retain access to resilience.
Building confidence in your resilience in the face of potentially traumatic experiences contributes to thriving. As you build this confidence, you will find yourself shifting your consciousness from one organized around the question, “How do I survive?” to “How do I thrive?” Asking yourself how you can thrive, you can expand your sense of what’s possible.
From this level of consciousness we know that together we can thrive. When we are able to cultivate a certain quality of connection we start to find creative strategies to honor the needs of all.
For the MCD Relationship Competency of Thriving & Resilience we name six specific and doable skills. Let’s examine the first one here. It is the capacity to examine the difference between what happened and the meaning you made of it. This practice is important because it creates more internal space. When you examine the difference between what you think and what's happening around you, you're making a space inside for life to move through you in a way that you don’t expect and for you to respond in a way that you don’t expect. With internal space comes creativity, flexibility and responsivity.
At one level, of course you never perceive reality as it is. As we know from quantum physics, neutral observations are an impossibility at the most subtle level— and still, the effort to notice and question your biases is essential. This effort has an impact at all levels personal, systemic, and spiritual. When you suspend your view, you invite a diversity of people and other living beings to influence you and broaden your sense of what’s possible.
Practice
Take a moment now to review the practices named (see summary below). Notice what resonates with you as something you would like to experiment with and engage in for the coming week.
1. Expand a sense of identity through incorporating the following mantra into your meditation practice:
I have a body and I am more than my body
I have emotions and I am more than my emotions
I have thoughts and I am more than my thoughts
2. When faced with an intense and overwhelming experience find something to do that arises from your values and would be of help even in the smallest way.
3. Once a day take time either aloud with an empathic listener or on your own with journaling to identify neutral observations and your corresponding stories or interpretations about them.
*Thank you Jean McElhaney for suggesting this meditation in our workshop on Thriving and Resilience.
