Resilience: the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.the ability to withstand shock without permanent deformation or rupture – Webster’s dictionary

Who are we, as business heroines, but resilient? How many times will we fall and get back up? How many times have we been broken, only to heal and grow stronger?

How many times will we commit to pushing ourselves beyond what we once thought impossible?

Resilience is an essential life-skill. Without a basic supply of resilience, no one would survive the accumulated losses, traumas, transitions, and heartbreaks the thread their way through our lifelines. But there also exists a deep, secret, and subtle kind of resilience that arises from the practice of stepping beyond your edge.

This kind of resilience has less to do with survival than with self-transformation. A combination of attentiveness, insight, and choice allows us to tune in to the hidden energy lurking within a crisis and use it as a catalyst for spiritual growth. Although psychologists can list the qualities that resilient people have in common—insight, empathy, humor, creativity, flexibility, the ability to calm and focus the mind—this deeper resilience transcends personality traits.

COMMITMENT TO FACING ADVERSITY

Jungian psychologist and Buddhist meditator Polly Young-Eisenstadt discusses the matter elegantly in a book called The Resilient Spirit.

She points out that we become truly resilient when we commit ourselves to dealing with the inevitable and unavoidable pain in human life—without getting caught in the state of suffering in which  fear of pain and the desire to avoid it at all costs closes us off to the possibilities inherent in every situation.

Great spiritual practitioners all offer the same basic prescriptions for undoing inner knots of the human psyche:

(1)   Discover who you really are

(2)  Do the practices that purify the murky mind

(3)  Discover how to work with everything that happens to you by allowing difficulties to become life lessons. Pain and loss are opportunities for profound personal transformation.

THE POWER OF A DAILY YOGA PRACTICE

A wise mentor of mine once said, “a yogi is someone who can turn every circumstance to her advantage.”

Patanjali, the ancient physician who compiled the Yoga Sutras believed that these three essential yogic actions cut through the core of suffering:

(1)   tapas (intense effort or austerity)

(2)   svadhyaya (self-study or self-inquiry)

(3)   Ishvara pranidhana (surrender to the higher reality)—strike at the very root of suffering

Patanjali believed that  we suffer not because bad things happen  but because we are blind to obscuring forces called kleshas. The klesha  are the ignorance of who we are, egotism, attachment, aversion, and fear ; they act as “psychospiritual cataracts,” or cognitive veils that skew our vision.

These “psychospiritual cataracts” make us imagine that we’re separate from others and the universe. They delude us into over-identifying  with our bodies and personalities, into pleasuring a fantasy self and avoiding anything that gives us pain. Kleshas keep us in perpetual fear.

This motivated ancient yogis to do a daily yoga practice  —  to overcome the kleshas.  When free from them, we naturally expand into heartfelt joy and the freedom to be our authentic self.The basic methods for cutting through the kleshas are tapas, self-study, and surrender. They are also the secret of true resilience.

THE POWER OF TAPAS

One of the best reason to do a daily yoga practice is to overcome the kleshas.  When free from them, we naturally expand into heartfelt joy and the freedom to be our authentic self.The basic methods for cutting through the kleshas are tapas, self-study, and surrender. They are also the secret of true resilience.

Tapas literally means “heat”—the inner heat created as we undergo discipline or hardship for the sake of change. When we understand tapas, any hardship can be seen as a purifying fire, removing veils from our awareness.

Understanding the concept of tapas as purification has taken many a worldly yogi through challenging situations—situations that can be as mundane as surviving a 14-hour plane ride or as primal as a life threatening illness or the death of a child or parent.

An intentional daily yoga practice gives you the opportunity to push the edge in your practice.  Every time you push yourself to try a new pose or to hold a pose longer, you build emotional strength.  Every time you push the yogic edge in a pose or flow sequence, you build the strength to be braver and bolder in your daily life choices.

Meditation can help you sit through boredom, mental restlessness, and emotional upheavals without restless reactive energy just as it can help you rise into confidence to take on a challenge you’d previously avoid.

Other forms of tapas are truth telling or showing kindness and nonviolence.  During the tough times, tapas means pure endurance—hanging tight when fear, sadness, and frustration threaten to set us up to spin out.

In these moments of profound stillness, we become heirs to our spiritual predecessors who experienced longer periods of difficulty, doubt and darkness without losing sight of the light.

The promise of hope burns an eternal flame.

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May 2014 Issue