“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anaïs Nin
Flow like water. That’s what my Qi Gong/Tai Chi teacher repeats to her students. The words have begun to echo in my head repeatedly even outside of class. When I began this practice a very short time ago, I realized that while the slow, swaying movements looked easy, it took great effort to perform the flowing exercises correctly. It took discipline, strength and concentration to flow like water.
In thinking further about water, I realized that water doesn’t worry about coming up against resistance. When faced with an obstacle, it either goes around, goes over, or sometimes it even goes through. It then simply reforms on the other side. So what happens when we come upon obstacles or challenges in our life? Hopefully we can have the resilience of water, the ability to return to our center and move forward.
Nurturing Resilience
How resilient are you? If you are thinking not so much, no worries because resilience can be learned, nurtured, and strengthened like any other life skill. We can learn to bounce back from adversity. We can learn to bend and sway with life without breaking, but just like the smooth flowing movements of Tai Chi, it isn’t always easy.
Research says that resilient people see life with hope. In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown writes about the research of sociologist, C. R. Snyder. Snyder describes hope not as an emotion but as a way of thinking. When you view life from a place of hope, you are better able to see what is possible instead of only what is impossible. In addition, resilient people are problem solvers and ask for help when needed. They have a positive self-image, view life from a positive place, and feel connections with family and friends.
Sounds great…in theory. And, yes, for everyday challenges I can see that working, but what about people facing chronic or life threatening illness, divorce, or the loss of a loved one.
When Life Gets Really Tough
My whole thought process about resilience began because I was wondering where I’d found the strength during the worst times of my own life, a divorce in my thirties when my children were young and the death of my second husband twenty years after that. How had I eventually moved forward from the black void that I’d found myself in? I remember that I had definitely not felt hopeful or resourceful and asking for help has never come easily to me. After all my research and much processing, it suddenly dawned on me what my two situations had in common.
At first I thought I’d only been driven by my fear, my fear of the black void that loomed behind me during those times, a place that threatened to swallow me up at any moment, a place of such depression and hopelessness that I feared I would never be able to recover from it. So what did I do? I ran in the opposite direction. I did everything I could to keep one step ahead of the darkness. I found myself asking for help, sometimes from people I barely knew. I set goals and took the necessary steps to reach those goals. One step at a time I moved away from the dark place; and with each tiny step (because I was only capable of tiny, little steps at the beginning) I found myself not just moving away but moving forward.
Make a Choice
Through this recent process of examining my own personal resilience, I finally realized that it wasn’t just fear that drove me forward. Fear was simply the impetus. I realized the common thread in both my life-altering situations was that I had made a choice. I stood up and chose to survive and to do it well to the best of my ability. It was as simple as that…I made a choice.
So yes, that means I did end up using all those skills that researchers talk about. I had to think out of the box, ask for help, stay flexible, feel gratitude for my family, friends, and the strangers that came into my life just when I needed them. I had to find hope when I felt hopeless, and I had to believe that I could do it and that I was capable, loveable, and worthy.
Was it easy? Absolutely not! And to be honest the thought of ever having to find that amount of courage again scares me. But it is true what they say. It is in facing our greatest challenges that we learn and grow the most. These are the times when we find our spirit, see our soul, and discover that the universe will rise up to help us once we simply make the choice and take those first tiny steps. We can each learn to flow like water over, around, and through life’s obstacles to reform on the other side even stronger than we were before.