Cultivating Internal Resilience
How do we stay balanced and engaged even when we’re stressed, depressed, anxious or seeming to live through one crisis after another? How do we keep our hearts open when life seems too hard?
The internal resilience needed during such times, can be cultivated through regular meditation. Qualities such as patience, compassion, balance, clarity, energy, steadiness, natural peace and joy and connection can help us survive and maybe even thrive!!
Learning and strengthening how to be more present in your body is perhaps one of the greatest keys to internal resilience. When we are present in the body, we seem to be more ‘anchored’ and have more capacity to process difficult emotions and we can meet whatever comes with more inner stability and confidence.
According to Meditation and Communication trainer Oren Sofer:
“We all enter this world with a natural ability to feel sensations and to experience emotions vividly in our bodies. We learn to dissociate from our bodies through socialization, trauma, and a disembodied culture that values rational thought, consumption and instant gratification over emotional intelligence, contentment and embodied presence. “
For me, developing a more intimate connection with my physical body has helped in many different areas of my life including:
· Posture and confidence.
· Food choices: developing more awareness of my response to the food I’m eating and what foods support my health and wellbeing and recognising when I am comfort eating.
· Communication and relationships: being able to pause and reconnect with my body allows me to have more choice and skill with communication, how I am turning up to people, the direction I go in a conversation, and especially as a parent I’m much more aware of when I’m becoming reactive and I’m able to regulate more effectively.
· Being more aware while exercising and what my body and nervous system needs to function well and regulate without over exercising.
Developing a deeper connection with your body can take time, patience, and a lot of gentleness. Here’s a few points on how you can deepen your own body connection:
As often as you can during the day, bring your awareness to your overall posture and especially your spine. Imagine a cord from the top of your head drawing you up towards the ceiling and gently lift and lengthen through the spine. At the same time keep a sense of your feet on the ground – really plant your feet into the ground.
Take some time every day to consciously slow your movements right down. Really feel each movement and sink into the body.
Check in regularly to how you feel – not how you think you feel, but actually the physical body sensations. For example you may feel: tingly, achey, light, numb, heavy, hot, tight, nauseous, soft, trembly etc. really locate these sensations in your body and even outline if possible, notice how deep or superficial the sensations are.
And tune into your senses regularly, taking a conscious few minutes to check what can you see, what can you hear, what can you smell and what can you touch. Making space and cultivating acceptance for how you feel help build internal resilience to face what ever life brings.
