Building Resilience in Challenging Times

re·sil·ience

/rəˈzilēən(t)s/

noun

1. the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

Resilience is not a word that I heard much while growing up or even in adulthood, until I entered the world of Somatics where it is a mainstay. Since then, the word seems to be entering more and more into pop culture, showing up in Instagram memes about ecology, mental health, and community building. My guess is that its emergence into the zeitgeist points to a deep collective knowing that we are in times that are going to require immense amounts of resilience.

So how do we cultivate it?

In Somatics there is a notion that your Soma (body, mind, spirit as one unified organism) has a shape, which is forged by the forces you grew up and live within: family, community, institutions, culture, country, natural landscape. The more rigid your Soma is, the more likely you are to break under pressure. This might look like burnout, overwhelm, checking out, flying off the handle. It might look like one side dehumanizing the other, so convinced their way is the only way. It might look like an inability to be with nuance and complexity.

We can recognize pretty quickly that all the above imbalances are rampant within the individual systems (aka bodies) of our ourselves, our friends, family, facebook frenemies, as well as in collective systems like governing bodies.

Somatics is largely about balancing the forces acting within and upon the body - which results in resilience. If we want to shift systems out there in the world, we have to begin by shifting the system of our body. When we create space in our bodies to hold and be with anything, we stop being ruled by overwhelm and start becoming grounded agents of change - for the betterment of ourselves, our families, and our communities.

I’ve been an activist since the start of the Iraq War in 2003 and started organizing in 2009. Over nearly two decades, I’ve knocked on thousands of doors, dialed tens of thousands of numbers, fundraised, gotten arrested, lobbied, protested, spoken publicly, and so much more. And here’s the truth: it never stops being scary, overwhelming, surprising, enraging, and disappointing.

And even when you're active, it’s so easy to slip into the trap of believing you’re not doing enough, that you can’t change the world, and that humanity is hopeless. If we hope to alter the world we live in, we cannot continue to show up as reactions waiting to happen. That pattern — defensiveness, overgiving, shutdown — is part of what created the systems we are now enjoying.

Somatic work offers another way. It’s about cultivating the capacity to be present with anything, to move from commitment and curiosity instead of collapse. Change in municipal, state, nation, and global systems starts with a shift in our nervous systems so that we can keep showing up again, and again, and again. This work is an endurance sport, after all.

In October, my online Monday evening classes will focus on how we can build that resilience within ourselves so that we can be the agents of change our world needs now. Reach out if you’d like to join.