Resilience: The Insurance You're Missing

How many kinds of insurance are you paying into right now?

Car insurance?
Home insurance?
Health or dental insurance?

Chris Rock once joked that instead of insurance, we should call it “in-case-shit.” As in, we give companies our money in case shit happens.

But there’s another kind of insurance we can pay into—without paying it to somebody else. That insurance is our emotional, mental, and spiritual resilience. The more we invest in it, the more protected we are—and the less we suffer when the kind of shit happens that can’t be solved by submitting a claim. 

But what do we really mean when we talk about resilience?

We often think of resilience as a personal trait. But this definition can be limiting if we then start to measure ourselves by it, or see it as something we do or don’t have. This is why family therapist Alan Jenkins describes resilience not as something that “is” but something that “does.” Put another way, resilience is the kind of “atmosphere” we create when we are truly connected with ourselves, with others and with the world around us. 

Similarly, world-renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg describes this kind of resilience as the essence of mindfulness: that is, that rather than simply accumulating greater concentration, true mindfulness is the practice of allowing and flowing with its inevitable fluctuations. Just like the breath itself, it is the act of letting go, and beginning again. 

So, how can we nurture this kind of resilience in ourselves, so that we are more fully “insured” when shit does happen?

Like most things, it starts with awareness. We first need to become conscious of the kinds of situations that most lead us to feel let down by life, and our autopilot responses to them. The more deeply we come to know our patterns in this way, the more potential we create to step outside of them. 

In other words, the more quickly we come to recognize our “autopilot,” the more quickly we can also choose to engage our “pilot.” And once you’re in the cockpit, two ways you can consciously foster resilience are through “zooming out” and “zooming in”

Zoom Out

When we’re in a “shitty” situation, we can often get stuck in the immediacy of the moment. In contrast, “zooming out” brings our attention to the equally important time frame of what some call “generational vision.” So for example, we can choose to meditate on the strength we are generating in moving through a difficult situation, and how that strength could serve us—or even our children, or our children’s children—in a future moment that is yet to be seen. In doing so, we can see beyond the “wave” of an urgent moment into the horizon of our broader context. 

Zoom In

Where “zooming out” widens the expanse of what we currently know, “zooming in” is an act of seeing what is already here more deeply. This is akin to what the international peacebuilder John Paul Lederach calls “haiku attitude.” Just like whittling down the complexity of an experience into three careful lines of a poem, we can also choose to move closer into the immediacy of a challenging situation. For example, we can choose to stop, put our hands on our heart, and fully experience the physical sensations that accompany whatever difficult emotions we’re feeling. Or we can choose to recognize the subtle signs of humanity in a person with whom we’re in conflict: the way they fidget with their fingers, or the flash of a genuine smile, however fleeting. 

How do you nurture your own resilience? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

~ By Shaina List