Building resilience through awareness

“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.” – Steve Maraboli, “Life, The Truth, And Being Free”

The Oxford Dictionary definition of resilience is, “The capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties.”. I would like to offer an additional definition, “the measurement between victimhood where you lack resilience, and empowerment, where you are resilient”, i.e. how resilient are you? As you slide from victimhood up towards empowerment you become more resilient. This is the gradual process where you develop tools to deal with the world around you and the experiences you have within.

There are a lot of reasons why we lack the tools to be resilient. When we find ourselves in a state of victimhood, we are essentially in a state of low-energy vibration. This is where we can’t let go of the narrative that we’ve created to define our identity within our story and our lives. We externalise our entire spectrum of experiences removing our ability to realise our roles in our experiences. Putting a distance between ourselves and our experiences causes us to blame external factors for our circumstances; we can’t realise accountability if we don’t realise we have a hand in our reality. In this process, we externalise control of our circumstances. The tools we develop are all focused on protecting ourselves from the external factors that are a threat to us, i.e. we compound the problem and perpetuate the victimhood while tricking ourselves into believing we are getting stronger.

Evidently, we have choices as to what path we take embarking on this journey towards resilience and empowerment. One path, as described above, will be a reflection of our shadow or ego aspect of ourselves where we find strength in our anger, shame, guilt, apathy, etc., but they’re all in the lower spectrum of vibration. The idea of resiliency at these levels is to control your experiences with force expressed outwards. Anybody who gets in our way is a threat and we are separate from them, so they become “collateral damage” in our pursuit of resiliency. This, like the reality construct that we think is our experience, is an illusion and we get stuck in a loop; empowerment is not available at these lower levels, only enforcement, which creates lower vibrations, resulting in more forcefulness. The alternative is to become consciously aware of our experiences and what they are. On this path, we don’t see the reality construct outside of ourselves as the experience but rather just as a reflection of the internal emotions and feelings that are building blocks of the real experience. When we choose to become consciously aware of our own experiences we become aware of our role in our own experiences. We can start building resiliency tools to control that which we can control; our thoughts, our words and our actions. This perspective brings with it accountability, not blame, without shame and guilt. It allows us to become accepting of ourselves and everything around us in our reality construct. We accept the external and connect with it, without attachment or judgement. Choosing this path is to choose growth and evolution.

Empowerment is all about shifting perspectives and understanding what our true experience is. To shift perspectives we need to open up to the possibility that there are more than one truth and that we can allow ourselves to look at the reality construct from different angles. Consider, for example, you have a body as opposed to you are a body. We simply move some words around and our idea of self suddenly shifts 180 degrees. We allow ourselves to be taken away from the identification in the physical reality to perceive ourselves from our consciousness. Once we start looking at ourselves and our existence from this perspective, we can then start to understand the multi-dimensionality that we are. From...