The Flower of Meditation–Resilience

Oct 9, 2017 | Mindfulness Meditation | 2 comments

Purple flowers growing up through cracks in concrete.

Breakdown of Resilience

One evening last week I became very upset by an interaction that occurred between one of my housemates and myself. It doesn’t even matter particularly what the content was. More relevant to me were the aftereffects. 

I was extremely agitated. So much so that I had difficulty being in my body. I just wanted to put myself in child’s pose and stay. I slept poorly, woke early and didn’t know how to lift myself out of a heavy mood. 

Fortunately my housemate was willing to talk through the incident. We sat together and alternated in presenting two different takes on what happened. To be heard and received fully by a friend is a precious gift. We experienced healing, and, as always, when vulnerability is present, understood each other better.

Breaking Through with Meditation

I am an elder but that does not always make me wise. One of my goals in doing regular meditation is to develop the quality of resilience. To be able to get myself out of a heavy mood in a reasonable timeframe. To get up off the floor when I feel like I’ve been run over by a Mack truck. The Japanese have a saying, “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” 

The problem with getting older is that ageing can erode your resilience. Things that used to work well don’t anymore. Reading requires close-up glasses. Driving requires distance glasses. Dining out requires a sound-friendly restaurant. Weight creeps up and patience wears down. Fools can no longer be suffered.

Meditation offers practice in pausing and breathing. It lets you extrapolate from the peace of your practice to the way you deal with situations in the ‘real world.’ You can practice creating a parenthesis around disturbing communications. A buffer between hearing and seeing, and reacting.

The mechanism for how this happens is that meditation ultimately exposes your Self, the part of you that is aware and capable of watching.

Meditator, Peter Bregman of the Harvard Business Review says:

Unless you find solid footing in your consistent, unshakable Self, you’ll be thrown off balance and lose your way. You’ll change your mind at the first resistance. You’ll become overconfident when praise abounds. And you’ll make poor decisions, just to feel better.

Connecting with your Self is the key to maintaining your equanimity, your peace, your clarity, and your judgment, even in the face of changing circumstances and pressures.

Resilience gives you the space to recover yourself, your best self, your higher self. You get to bounce back.

2 Comments

  1. Thanks Eve. What I like about regular meditation practice is the way it enables me to recognise when a troubled emotion or mental state comes in. It’s like I’ll find myself going ….. for example…oh Im feeling anxious! And the watching starts…. I’m able to not run with it making it bigger… I know it will pass and also I can be clearer about whether it’s really an alert in me of something I need to pay attention to or an unnecessary emotional state. I’m finding it’s helping me be clearer with others too.. in so many ways. I guess owning what’s just my processing of life…. taking personal responsibility. But it’s so ongoing. It’s not like I can imagine I’ve reached that place and it will just stay there. If my consistency of practice is not there I do notice the difference.

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  2. Thanks for posting so vulnerably,Eve.
    It always surprises me when I react to a situation before noticing what I’m feeling – not that it happens often, but that’s even more reason for the surprise.
    Years ago when I first started meditating seriously, with a daily practice, I had a profound experience. I was up to my neck in writing school reports for a class of thirty-two children (all written by hand in those days (no computer short cuts as happens nowadays). Every now and then I would leap up from my desk and rush to the fridge to grab a snack. I was grateful that my close friend and meditation instructor phoned me at that time and suggested to me that when this happened, I should go inside and feel the feeling and then see what happens.
    Well, at first I didn’t remember to do this but on one occasion I had my hand on the fridge door and remembered to tune into what I was feeling. I stood there feeling the feeling of wanting something (something to ‘feed’/distract me from my onerous task) and as I did this, the feeling faded away – disappeared – “I” didn’t really want anything at all – it was my unconscious part driving me. I went back to my desk and completed the report writing in record time.

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