rain grows resilience
"Resilience is nothing more than the capacity and capability to see ourselves with a love that enables healing. Resilience is the energy that allows us to change our mindsets and perceptions from the lens of fear, scarcity and separation to the lens of safety, abundance and wholeness. If we choose to see beauty in ourselves, we will see it in everything and in everyone else. This is true wealth. This is wholeness. This is health."
West Virginia University's Dr. Clay B. Marsh wrote this in April 2018. Fast forward to today. Pausing here.
Two other definitions: Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover and adapt in the face of stress, challenge, adversity. Resilient people not only survive after a setback, they come back stronger, wiser, having found healthy ways to integrate their difficult experience into their lives; they accept that what has happened cannot un-happen, find a learning opportunity in any situation with which to go forward.
The way to become this resilient is perhaps only through Marsh's pathway. No short-cuts. To see beauty, live wholeness, practice self-compassion. Even today. There's no other way. We have resilience hard-wired in us. If it's a matter of developing this innate skill, it starts with befriending ourselves.
Whatever is occurring is part of this universe. Us. A deadly virus. And yet, we react, go to war. Fighting the virus, fighting each other. What might happen when we approach difficult situations with the language of peace?
Meditation teacher Michele McDonald designed the acronym RAIN for this approach. Recognize. Accept. Investigate (be curious). No need to identify with feelings or thoughts. Take a step back, witness weather as if you were the vast sky.
Just this. Rain. When it rainS, I am polishing a new way of Seeing," with a calm self-care that befriends. The power of rain, tender and clarifying at once. Tending seeds. Trusting that our engagement with the world, from this space, will be stronger, more effective.
"In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart," writes Blaise Pascal.
Rain. Training attention and awareness with kind neutrality. What's happening? Wants to happen? Clarity will surface. Skilled response will surface. Resilience will increase in this courageous love. The willingness to find meaning in the smallest of happenings. It's all so impermanent and beautiful.
One more quote, by the author Mark Manson: “Because pain is the universal constant of life, the opportunities to grow from that pain are constant in life. All that is required is that we don’t numb it, that we don’t look away. All that is required is that we engage it and find the value and meaning in it.”
A final story about the resilient mind: When the Apollo 13 oxygen tank failed and the lunar module was in danger of not returning to earth, Gene Kranz, the lead flight director overheard people saying that this could be the worst disaster NASA had ever experienced—to which he is rumored to have responded, “With all due respect, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.”
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