A funny little word entered my life this past month. It is called, re·sil·ience
/rəˈzilyəns/ Noun. A google search led me to the following definition. “The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” Now that is not a word that I would necessarily choose to describe myself or others. However, let me tell you why it’s my new favorite term to articulate courage and self love.
In short, resilience is about reclaiming our personal power and physical well being. More specifically, it is being brave enough to own all parts of our story. It is the ability to reboot our emotional, spiritual, and physical health. It is surviving an episode of pain and learning to once again find harmony and balance. While we may have called it a zillion things in the past, resilience is the true evolution of the spirit in which we find compassion for ourselves.
In more ways than one, that little word called, resilience, seems to be making a bold entrance everywhere I turn. It’s as if it has become a larger theme for women across the world. Just look around. Women are marching, shedding old layers and stereotypes of who we once were, and asserting boundaries for ourselves and men and stating our greater allegiance to one another.
Yes, resilience may be the word that we’ve all been searching for. It is some beautiful representation of who we are right now despite our emotional wounds, fractured relationships, weight gain, dysfunctional families, addictions, medical issues, sexual trauma, codependency, or grief. Resilience may be that one thing that binds us in our humanity because we are reminded of our vulnerability and imperfection. You see, resilience is not just about surviving pain or crisis but answering the call to live more consciously and graciously. It’s another level of soul care.
Stay with me for a moment because I may be onto something. Resilience is that courage that we find at the bottom of our lives when we have nowhere else to go. We are forced to come to terms with our messy little lives while trying to salvage our humility and self respect. May I share with you a story about my own struggle with self care? I went to the doctor for some mystery pain in my gut. I could not for the life of me figure out what was causing me so much anguish and physical discomfort. It became a full disruption to everyday life and I found myself sidelined through the holidays and the better part of January. I shut down and I shut off all the noise. I said “No” to excess food and alcohol and removed the toxic things from my life that made me feel unhealthy and undervalued.
After a boatload of tests, there was no medical finding or diagnosis … .just a terrible month of doctor appointments, stupid worry, and a colonoscopy. I went to my spiritual healer, Julie, for answers. Her intuitive guidance made a correlation that nobody else could make. She connected my physical health issue to grief. She told me that the stomach is the third chakra for personal power and she could sense that I was stockpiling feelings…. one on top of the other for months. She asked me if I had any loss or sadness going on and if I had given myself permission to grieve any of those changes. That inquiry turned the light on to what was a dark eerie channel and suddenly the floodgate opened. My eyes got murky and welled up in tears, my dry lips quivered, and my throat started to hyperventilate. All the things that I was trying to fix, manage, and hold together were trying to make their way to the surface, but I wouldn’t let them. All those trapped feelings created some little rodent nest in my gut….scratching and burrowing so deep…so incredibly deep.
While it was unconscious, my emotional harbor was completely filled to capacity and there was no room for anything fun or delicious. Those muffled feelings manifested into a physical crisis in my body. I couldn’t function the same way. The Universe was telling me to stop everything, feel everything, and begin some recalibration of self.…..so I did. I gave myself permission to feel one uncomfortable thing after another. I stayed in bed with my dog, poured tea, and wrote down a bunch of shit. I wrote every single thing down that I could think of that I needed to let go. I purged all of it.
While we may think that we have outsmarted life by hiding from our feelings, those emotions will eventually find the surface like an old buoy in a quiet lake. Sure, we might unconsciously believe that we are being strong and holding everything together nice and tight, but if ignored, pain will eventually manifest into a health crisis or some other destructive behavior. I suppose the reason why I never considered myself resilient in the past was because I wasn’t actually giving myself permission to get to the other side of my pain. Change seemed too scary and difficult. I wanted to hold onto the shit, and I still don’t even fully understand it. Is it habitual…dysfunctional? I suppose it’s both. I now know that there is no amount of stubbornness that can stall our spiritual progress. The Universe will push us along whether or not we are ready to stare at ourselves naked and vulnerable in the mirror.
We will learn over and over that pain just sits there until we are ready to look at it, and we will need to let people and traumatic experiences go that have run their course in our lives. Now, I don’t pretend to do that very well, but this entire health experience brought me some important wisdom for my life. We must trust that divine plans are continuously unfolding in our favor. Our feelings are not meant to be trapped or sealed in some dark place but felt and released onto some open peaceful field.
It’s true, we won’t ever have all of life’s answers at once, but that is when faith becomes our lighthouse. Pain management is not fun or convenient. However, exploring our grief does not break us down. It repairs our inner strength and prepares us for other blessings and obstacles that are coming to our life. For those of you who have had trouble with the idea of surrendering your feelings….. you are not alone. Perhaps, you may need to change the narrative. It is not an admission of weakness but a statement of truth and power. Listening to your emotions does several important things, it helps your soul evolve, it relieves your mind, body, and spirit of tangled energy , and it links all of us together in our humanity. It is the path back to our most authentic self. Just for today I will recognize that I am a resilient women, I trust that you are a resilient person, and we are all on an incredible faith journey that requires us to let things go from time to time. And so it is friends……and so it is.
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