awareness tools
Cultivating Resilience
Life offers us many challenges – some more stressful, traumatic, or tragic than others. In the face of difficulties, we all try to best deal with them. Through some of the information that popular psychology and mainstream media provide, you may have the impression that if someone was raised in a certain environment, she/he will end up in a certain way. For example, if your parents were alcoholic, you may have the nagging feeling in the back of your mind all the time that you are destined to be like your parents someday. It’s almost like a curse.
Fortunately, there has been a growing number of researches that have focused on human strengths, rather than problems. Those research findings suggest that we are not simply victims of personal history or even genes. For example, Drs. Sybil and Steven Wolin have conducted pioneering studies of the people who were raised by alcoholic parents who did NOT later become alcoholic themselves (which was 85% of the total number, by the way!). He extracted some of the characteristics of the way they dealt with life’s challenges and proposed the term resilience as an umbrella word to describe what they had in common. Resilience is the capacity to rise above adversity by changing perspectives, stretching identity, finding humor, and so on; in other words, to deal creatively with life’s challenges. Researchers of human resilience suggest that most of the people have innate resilience that can be cultivated further by enhanced self-awareness and practice.
Renowned cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton showed through his groundbreaking research that, contrary to the widespread belief, genes and DNA do not determine how our bodies turn out, and that our belief /perception can rewrite and change the genetic codes. This has a huge implication on how we use our self-awareness, in that we have more power than we previously assumed. We have the capacity to influence how we shape our lives, for better or worse. Dr. Lipton also asserts that if we just stay in an automatic mode, 70% of our thoughts fall on the negative and redundant side. That is why it is so important to practice inner awareness and wakefulness if we are to participate in creating realities that support personal and planetary transformation.
Resilience, like muscles, can grow with use and practice, by going just beyond your comfort zone. We have introduced various exercises on this site that we hope will help stretch your awareness muscles and go beyond your usual identity.
Our upcoming tele-workshop, ‘Living Fully; Navigating through the Unknown’ will also offer ideas and practical tools to cultivate your resilience. We hope you will join us! (Click here to sign up)
Back to List