Reslience in Challenging Times

How are you these days? With so much accelerated change and disruption, it can require a lot of courage to keep up, and overwhelm is often only a hair’s breadth away.

It can be healthy to feel upset. It can be healthy to feel grief. Feeling difficult states does not mean there is something wrong with you. And, as I imagine we’ve all noticed, there are more and less skillful ways of being with it all. The less skillful ways tend to lead us further and further down a path of depression and despair, paralyzed by a sense of futility.

The first thing I find I need to do in such times is be still and come home to myself, feeling all there is to be felt. Awareness can be like a safe harbor welcoming in all that feels unsafe, the many sensations like ships returning from the storm. When feeling unsafe, be safety.

If I notice my attention caught up in distressed thinking I track that thinking back closer into the root, and bring whole being presence and acceptance to the direct experience of sensation in the body, for as long as is needed. As we learn to be the sanctuary for our own experience, we learn also how to offer that to others.

In the words of a great Tibetan Buddhist Master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche: "Clarity of awareness may, in its initial stages, be unpleasant or fear-inspiring; if so, then one should open oneself completely to the pain or the fear and welcome it. In this way the barriers created by one's own habitual emotional reactions and prejudices are broken down…This produces a tremendous energy which usually is locked up in the process of mental evasion and a general running away from life experiences.”

When the energy that was caught up in bracing ourselves against our experience becomes liberated, our mind returns to the natural state of curiosity and possibility. Here we can begin to see more clearly into the nature of our own creative agency, and how to bring through some goodness.

Over these last weeks, I found I needed to up level my practice. Dig deeper. Be really honest about habits and limitations. Begin my days in stillness. Listen with my ear close to the ground. Create. Create. Create.

I’ve been sitting with some wise words shared by my teacher Tomas a couple weeks ago: “When the going gets tough, you get what you practice…If I am stuck in feeling battered in negative reactivity and suffering when things are tough, then I need to look at my practices to see what needs to be changed, or strengthened or fine tuned, or perhaps let go of entirely and instead develop new practices that more effectively help me respond to the pressures I feel. How are your practices holding up to these challenging times? So important to be present in this day, this time, this moment. What worked yesterday might not work today, for circumstances have changed and we need to change to meet them.”

This is resilience. A living practice of adaptation and response to change. A native ability to bounce back, to return to love, and to be in service to all that is worthy of our devotion and our protection.
How are you keeping up with the needs of the moment?