Thoughts about resilience

One of the benefits of being self-employed is the ability to do random things you feel like doing… today I spent a few hours at a beach. I love the ocean… the tides were extra low today.

While I was walking up and down the coastline, I did a lot of thinking…

One of the things I was thinking about was that my therapist had asked me to write a book about my life. She felt if I shared all the crazy things I have lived through and have mostly not only survived, but thrived in spite of, that it might help other people to learn how to be more resilient. I said, “Sure… I can do that. If it would help someone else, that would be cool.”  I started writing it… and I have pushed through some really ugly chapters. I’ve taken some rather long breaks in writing also, because to tell the story you have to relive everything a little and that doesn’t feel great. I have already relived everything multiple times to process different issues and patterns and heal from trauma. I don’t need to pick at those scabs anymore. It feels like going backwards.

It occurred to me today that my story will not help others to be more resilient. Dragging someone through tales of abuse, neglect, drugs, murder, mental illness, ignorance, intolerance, and death does not make them stronger. Especially having always been an intuitive empath, I have a “different” perspective of some things… which just makes it more complex because I have to sort out what I felt that was mine and what I felt that belonged to other people and try to express it in a way that isn’t overly complicated (not to mention deciding if spirit interactions detract or are just part of the story and should be shared with everything else). At best – the reader may be thankful they haven’t had the same challenges in life, and at worst they might actually feel some of the ugliness… but none of that would inspire resilience. For instance -Reading about hardships the soldiers at Valley Forge faced never taught me how to keep going through something – LOL. Watching the news or some abusive/violent movie is never uplifting or inspiring. I stopped watching the news 12 years ago… it’s too negative.

What might be useful would be explain the actual mechanics of resilience…

The definition of resilience is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”. The decision to move forward through challenges feels like the only choice to me. Curling up in a ball and giving up was never an option in my mind… I guess because of a couple of things. First – we are all a piece or the divine. Our soul is part of the collective consciousness that is in everything. As a piece of the divine, we all deserve to be joyful. We are not here to live a miserable existence – it’s not why we incarnated here… and anything we are experiencing is temporary unless we hold the vibration that is creating it… so you get back up and keep going. Secondly, we are responsible for creating the life we want to experience. Granted, there are things and times that are not within our control at that moment – a child can’t create a stable home life for themselves for instance – but I could choose to try to look for the good… find the things that could be learned… and know what I wanted to create in the future and decide to be resilient anyway.

The basics of the mechanics we need to be clear on for the foundation are: We are made of energy. Everything is energy. Thoughts and feelings are energy.  Energy vibrates at different frequencies. Positive thoughts and feelings vibrate differently than negative thoughts and feelings. Like attracts like – so whatever vibration you are experiencing, you will attract more of. You have the power to control your vibration through your thoughts and feelings and you get to decide what you attract. Solutions are never found at the vibration of the problem… and what you focus on expands (like attracting like). Because what you focus on expands and draws more of the same to you, the thoughts we think are important.

Resilience is like this… If you imagine a really long stick – negative thoughts and feelings on one end and positive thoughts and feelings on the other end. You can’t jump from the place on the stick that is “depressed” directly to the place on the stick that is “joyous”. You have to work your way to another place on the stick somewhat gradually or methodically and on purpose… one thought and feeling at a time. You could call the long stick a “vibrational scale”. If someone is experiencing challenges or setbacks or not enjoying what they are experiencing, they have to raise their vibration through the thoughts, feelings and beliefs they choose to have/feel/think.

For example; If someone is experiencing a financial setback (I’ve been here too many times to count – LOL), it is common to feel very unhappy about that. It is not uncommon for them to think about the way things were before and that it may not feel “fair” that things changed. They might compare where they are to where other people seem to be. They may think negatively about where they are, feel stuck, feel sad, feel angry, and may even say negative things to themselves about where they are at this moment – tell themselves bad things always happen to them, and they are a loser or some such other negative self-talk. They focus of the lack of money, the lack of what they can do or have. Focusing on lack creates more lack to focus on. They are on the negative end of the stick and attracting more based on their vibration and the vibration of their thoughts and feelings.

To be resilient, they first need to slow the momentum of the negative thoughts and feelings. Stop negative self-talk immediately. Catch it and correct it to slow the negative momentum. Not by lying to themselves, but rather by choosing a better thought. Instead of saying something like “Bad things are always happening” (or whatever the thought might be), stop it, correct it… say something true and somewhat soothing, like “This is a temporary situation”. “Things always end up working out for me.” They have to begin changing their vibration and the vibration of what they attract by spending time with no thought (meditation) and through spending time finding things to be appreciative of… even if they are so small they seem silly – like “I like petting my cat… the fur is so soft… they love me and are contented in my lap…” – if they were to walk around just looking for things to appreciate, they would begin to feel a little better – which attracts more thoughts of things to be appreciative of. They can remind themselves everyone has challenges like this at some point in their life. Not wallowing in the sad and hard things… softening, finding ways to comfort themselves and their thoughts… gently moving up the vibrational scale.

They can slow the momentum by changing the focus (thoughts and feelings), pause (meditation is a great way to pause), and start going the other way… attracting better and better thoughts and feelings, and eventually reaching the point where they can remind themselves that we live in an abundant world and as a divine being, in charge of their own energy, they can attract everything they need… The tides will turn, and they will attract more money (provided they don’t have some limiting beliefs that need to be changed – like that there is a finite amount of abundance… there is a never-ending amount of abundance.)  When they are feeling better and attracting better, they will be inspired to take actions that are in alignment with having more abundance. That would be being resilient to the setback.

Am I explaining this in a way that makes sense???

Being resilient from things like divorce or death of a partner, the process is similar, but I tried to find things I learned from the life altering experience to be thankful for and appreciative of in addition to other things to randomly appreciate. You also have to make time and space to comfort yourself a for a little while before you can start moving up the vibrational scale. I learned so much from my marriage… and I created three amazing humans. I learned so much from the person who died on me too. I don’t regret those experiences, although if I had to do them over again, I would try to have more grace – LOL.

I’m tired… It’s been a long day. Maybe I will figure this out tomorrow.