Resilience

I’m reading a book called Wintering by Katherine May, and it’s beautiful for so many reasons, including how it speaks to the experience of yoga nidra without talking about the practice at all. One of the stories it tells is about a woman who woke up feeling so sick and scared she called out “help me, I’m dying”. She reached for the door handle and everything went black as she fell into a coma. She remembers having this extraordinary dream, where she felt as though she was falling through darkness but somehow there was this singing that caught her, carried her and saved her (she realised that the source of the song was one of her ancestors).

The author said she thought the time this woman spent suspended in that dream state, being sung into safety, has echoed through the rest of her life, how it made her more conscious of achieving what she can while she’s here, and at the same time that it removed her fear of death.

It got me thinking about how our practice builds resilience. When I say resilience, I don’t mean the ability to push through or withstand difficult things, I mean the ability to stay with your Self when life gets hard.

Our practice leads us to experiences, both during the practice and also in our lives, that shape our worldview. Maybe you have seen, or felt viscerally, or sensed, even just for a second, your innate beauty that is the truth of who you are. Maybe you have experienced how your inner beauty reflects (and really isn’t separate from) the infinite beauty that exists in nature. Maybe you have noticed that as you continue to practice, your life keeps getting more and more beautiful. Whatever your experience, that knowing, that beauty is infinite, changes you and it echoes throughout the rest of your life.

Resilience comes from remembering and trusting the knowing that your practice reveals. The next time you meet darkness in your life, you meet it in a different way. Maybe you notice that darkness has arrived to show you what you have already healed, or to show you what is not truly yours to do and to turn you in a different direction. Maybe you fall into darkness and open to it in a way that allows it to reveal even more beauty.