Resilience is a Muscle
This Covid season that has lasted now through 4 seasons, has resulted in many people, today, experiencing unprecedented levels of chronic stress. Here’s a quick summary about what happens when people are chronically stressed: The body gets flooded with a hormone called cortisol and the sympathetic (stress) nervous system is turned on. Without a healthy release of stress, the body can go from states of fight or flight to collapse and freeze (shut down, depression, disconnect etc). Over time, it can lead to a cascade of physical, emotional and health problems, impact relationships and create dysfunctions in the brain as it essentially ages the brain and interferes with the genius part of your brain (pre-frontal cortex). Layered on top of the Covid stresses as we approach the end of 2020, is the Holiday season that will be remembered as that year that we could not gather or connect. And this inability to meet with family and friends means more disconnection and less ability to feel good and get doses of oxytocin (the cuddle hormone that elevates feel good and connected states). The outcome can be catastrophic to your emotional, physical and mental wellbeing. I get it and I feel it too.
Fortunately, we have this capacity to build our resilience muscle which can allow us to get through this time with fewer scars and, for some people, even come through with greater clarity, wellness and essentially come through thriving. Why do some people thrive in uncertainty and trauma and others get stuck in deep dark spaces, it is because of their resilience. Resiliency is being able to recover from difficult times. There are many people I know that are practicing their resilience muscle daily and will get through this stronger than they went into 2020 and, every time you build this muscle, you build it for life. My practices always involve yoga which has been one of my greatest teachers (and we did not start off with a friendly relationship). Yoga teaches you how to be resilient and how to show up, not only when the poses are easy but how do you show up when they are challenging? It is essentially a metaphor for life. What happens when you fall out of a pose, when you feel tension in a pose, when your mind is racing, when you have judgement? When you are invited to hold the pose. How can you “hold the pose?” What happens when you turn to your breath, when you soften, when you quiet your mind, when you find the pause, when you turn to self-love? Yoga is a teacher for it all. And the more you practice, the greater resilience muscle gets. Here are a few teachings that come from Yoga:
- You are stronger than you realize: Every time you hold the pose longer than you want to, you are building your physical strength and your mental resilience. Here you send a message to your body and brain that you can do it. It will allow you to change your beliefs about yourself and your life.
- How to surrender and letting go: Softening into the expansiveness of the pose while holding your strength is the key to the practice and becomes a practice to soften into the experience of life and let go of those things you cannot control (like the Covid numbers).
- Breathing: Breathe and everything changes is one of my mantras in life. Breathing in your practice helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system response which is the calming nervous system. When this happens a series of “good” feeling hormones flood the body and make you feel connected to others and a sense of bliss. This is what we call the “yoga high”. At the same time, you begin to build new neural connections (a passive outcome of breathing, moving and being mindful) and you get to practice sitting in the “space” in your practice which translates to becoming skillful at adding a pause before reacting when the next car cuts you off or the next person steps in front of you in line, or your relative brings up a negative memory. Instead of “cut and run” in your practice and in life, you learn to “hold the pose and show up to life.” Every time you turn to your breath instead of running away or collapsing, you are building your resilience.
- Flexibility and Acceptance: Yoga allows you to lean into the unpredictability of change that comes with the practice and life. So, the next time you have an expectation about your life today and how it “should” be (eg. I should be able to see my family for the holidays) and the reality of the event does not meet your expectations, you will be able to better manage the unpredictability and even, perhaps, accept and welcome the change rather than try to fight against change.
- Connection: When you become quiet in yoga, breathe, pay attention with kindness and curiosity, you can begin to tune in and notice what is present in your body, your mind and your heart. For many people, what comes up first is feeling numb or disconnected, unable to touch the deep sensations of the body and feeling stuck in their mind. Noticing the disconnect is a win because it is the portal to feeling connected. Connection is another word for love and self-love. Anytime you disconnect, you are moving out of love. When you move towards acknowledging the disconnect with tenderness, you are moving on the pathway to connection. You are not wrong, bad, flawed or a failure for disconnecting. We all do it, Covid is making it possible to do it more. The deep dive work is in the noticing and saying to yourself “oh, that’s what that sensation has been (maybe your whole life), it’s what it feels like (or numbs like) to disconnect. As soon as you give language to it you move towards the pre-frontal cortex or evolved part of your brain that can reason and begin to follow the breadcrumbs that have made the disconnect necessary to create safety at some time in your life. With that understanding comes compassion. That’s when true connection/self-love, and self forgiveness becomes possible.
- Truth: Your body holds wisdom and this wisdom is your truth. In yoga, you come face to face with the truth when you find the edge or the limitation of a posture. Then, this truth becomes a bold reality: you are doing the best that you can given your model of reality (or the limitations of your body). When you listen to your body wisdom, you will not force it into a place that is not intuitive. The same honest truth is required in your relationships with others and with yourself off the mat. When you realize that everyone is doing the best they can given their model of the world, blame, judgements and defenses begin to melt away to make way for truth, wisdom and love. When you own this truth, you begin to realize that everyone has their own perspective, and their narratives are there to protect whatever they need to protect at this time and your (and my) job may not be to change their minds or make them wrong but to practice forgiveness and understanding.
So, this holiday season, use your mat as an opportunity to practise building resilience, flowing with what is, loving yourself, accepting others, and breathing into acceptance. When challenges arise, remember how you would manage these on your mat and recognize that you can handle anything that comes up, even in the middle of a pandemic. If you need to find some practices, go to my Youtube channel where I have uploaded approx. 75 free practices (dianalockett).
Wishing you all a healthy and stress-managed December.
Love,
Diana