Yoga of Resilience: Crafting a Story of Resilience
There is no question: we are here to live. Yet rather than give comfort, that fact simply generates countless other questions- where is “here,” what does it mean to live, who am I, what’s the point? That we are here to live is just the beginning, what we do with that, and how we traverse it, is what defines what it means for each of us to be ALIVE. Generating our unique story is the work of living. We are born into an already existing outline; families, generational traumas, cultures, places, time periods. The start of our story is rarely (if ever) ours to define, but as my dad used to say, “we make the best out of what we have to work with.” At some point in our journey of living, we begin to enact choice, and as we do, we begin actively shaping our story for ourselves. We say no or yes, we wander off into a direction of our choosing rather than simply doing what we are told. We begin to form a story all our own, sometimes boldly, sometimes timidly, and always unique, even if we don’t realize it.
How we shape our story is a crucial part of our personal resilience. We are the main character in the story we are creating. Each of us is the *star* of our many and complex expressions of aliveness. How we view the fact that we are here to live, and its relationship to being alive is the context of our story, how we engage with our context creates the content. We rise everyday to live out and in the saga of our life. We frame all events within a preconceived outline of understanding. We feel, think, strive, grow, and surrender all within our individual story. We frame all of our experiences and interactions within our individual view of the world, forgetting that how we see things is just a fraction of what there is to see. We reduce or diminish our setting, plot, or storyline based on our limited perception, which is not necessarily negative or bad. We are simply seeking to create familiarity and predictability – we want our stories to fit into an existing template – so that we feel safe knowing how it will turn out.
But, though we are the authors, the characters, and the narrator, we are rarely omniscient. Seldom do we have a full picture of the story we are writing, and the ways it touches and impacts others and our world. We often don’t see when our context is shaping our content in ways that limit our growth, and we often don’t understand why the content of our stories doesn’t generate the feelings we desire to have. We feel limited by our past, our culture, and our world. We sometimes feel trapped in the stories that others have written for us, and therefore never fully occupy our roles. We can feel powerless to change our stories, even when we are inundated by evidence of others who have done just that. And perhaps one of the biggest challenges to composing a new chapter is that we feel like we deserve the story we have, or worse, we don’t deserve to change it.
How firmly we are rooted in our stories shapes our interaction with our world. Are they chapters or is the book already closed? Are they fixed, or are we writing the story of our lives by living?
Our stories do not live in isolation. They are overlaid and overlapping with the stories of those around us and even those that are far away. All of our connections influence and are influenced by the story we weave. It’s easy to forget this, and to view our story with tunnel vision, as if we are singular and alone. Weaving resilience into our story requires a continual expansion of our perception, a stretching of our understanding. Crafting a story in which we are resilient obliges us to be in constant revision, reviewing our past vignettes for overlooked errors, misplaced desires, poor syntax and missed opportunities, but also feeling into the present, reacquainting ourselves to who we are now, and not getting lost in old definitions or antiquated images. A resilient story demands compassionate vigilance, an unending willingness to be who we are in any given moment, reviewing it’s efficacy, then deciding if it’s how we want to be in the future. It asks us to be aware of how our narrative impacts others, and to make adjustments in our character, when necessary, so that we are playing our role in tandem with the bigger picture.
The last step to crafting a story of resilience is understanding how to move forward. Where do we want our story to lead us, how do we want it to impact our lives, what makes it meaningful, who do we want to be? You see, we don’t have control of anything, really, except for who we are and how we show up. To cultivate a resilient story, we must establish a story that reflects our resilience. We must choose to spend our moments generating the details of the person that accurately reflects our desires, rather than wasting chapter after chapter in descriptions of the person we wish we weren’t. To be resilient is to be the hero in your own story, to see our hardships and obstacles as steps on the path rather than the entire book. To write a resilient story, we must trust that the story is never done, and we are shaping, forming, sculpting our tales in every moment, bringing our skills and mistakes, our joys and sorrows, our successes and our failures with us. And though we may never answer the questions of why we are alive, we can trust that the act of living is enough, and always more than we realize.
Join me in exploring the path & practice of resilience- check out our monthly live classes & the Yoga of Resilience Podcast (season 2 coming soon).