6 Steps to Resilience - How to find more peace & joy, more of the time

I had a conversation with the Universe the other day, it went like this:

Me: Hi Universe, what’s up?

Universe:

Me: …Err…OK! So, I was wondering if life was going to get any easier…? Like, maybe you could give us all a break and make things simpler, gentler, and generally more like eating ice-cream and pooping rainbows…?

Universe: NO

Me: OK. Thanks, then. Good talk. See you around, I guess. You know, literally! Because you’re everywhere! Ha ha… ha…

Universe:

Me: *mumbling* … pretentious dick…

Universe: I HEARD THAT

Me: *quietly terrified*

Based on this first-person research, I feel confident that resilience is going to keep being a necessary quality to develop for the foreseeable future.

Joking aside, I have been developing a model I’ve called ‘6 steps to Resilience.’ I’ve found it really simple to remember and use, and incredibly helpful. The people I have shared it with have loved its simplicity too. These steps are a map of experience that can help us to recognise where we are in our emotional landscape, and then to navigate to a more positive state. They help us own where we are, then move to somewhere more resourced, empowered and joyful than where we might be right now.

If you would like a simple tool for helping you and/or your clients (if you are a therapist, facilitator, or coach) to find a more resilient state, more of the time, then keep reading. In terms of mood and emotions, this map can help you find your way from surviving to thriving! (OK, that phrase is a little cheesy, but it is true!)

Don’t try and learn martial arts in the middle of a fight

I have been exploring resilience, primarily through the lens of embodiment, for many years. A lot of people were talking, writing and teaching about it during the pandemic, understandably. Resilience is often the thing that people focus on in a crisis.

It’s not the wrong thing, to focus on resilience in a period of crisis, but all my experience suggests that, as an old saying tells us,

“It’s no good digging a well when you are already thirsty.”

Meaning that you have to build resilience before you have a crisis and need it. All too often people wait until they are stressed up to their eyeballs before trying to learn something like meditation, and are then surprised they find it hard to concentrate. It is like trying to learn martial arts when you are already being beaten up: the person hitting you is unlikely to pause long enough for you to refine your technique.

But I also think that there is a longer-term impact of the pandemic as an extended period of stress rather than the more typical short-term crisis. Sadly, dealing with these more extended periods of stress and distress seems to become more relevant and necessary all the time. I think we would all be well-served by having easily applicable methods for building resilience in ourselves and with each other, right now, and I can only see it becoming ever more relevant in the years to come.

I am going to explore the pandemic a bit, but I will do my best not to use the word ‘unprecedented’ so as to avoid exacerbating the unprecedented use of the word ‘unprecedented’ over the last few years.

“Oof! That’s going to leave a mark on your psyche!”

I have noticed in myself a way that the pandemic, with all of its unique circumstances, led to certain patterns in my psychology becoming magnified. This will likely be true for many of us as we all have patterns of behaviour that we enact more or less consciously, in the face of difficulty. My suspicion is that, not only may some of those patterns have been deepened, but that many people may have got a bit stuck.

In the UK, we were in and out of lock-downs, there was a great deal of uncertainty for most of 2 years about many aspects of life: what was legal and illegal, what the government response would be, the effectiveness of testing and treatment for a potentially lethal disease, managing and tracking the health of vulnerable family members from a distance, dealing with all kinds of loss and stress on a daily basis, and for many people the future of their jobs felt deeply uncertain. That’s a lot, and it is far from a complete list. 2 years with that degree of instability is likely to leave a mark on our psyche’s.

The habit I noticed in myself is one of ‘hunkering down’ – a kind of stoic density while I wait for the storm to pass.

This is a familiar pattern, my go-to in the face of stress much of the time, but what I realised recently was the degree to which that ‘hunkering down’ has become my default. Rather than retreating to that state when stressed, I think I have developed more of a tendency to hang out there, or nearby perhaps, and then occasionally venture out. Like any stress pattern, it can serve us reasonably well for a short period, it’s not a terrible response! But it is not a healthy long-term behaviour.

What’s your ‘stress pattern’?

Patterns of stress and distress

People vary in these patterns but most of us will have a habitual tendency towards one kind of behaviour or another as a way of managing difficulty. These patterns were usually laid down as emotional survival patterns during childhood and can serve us very well in some ways. Like I say, they can be useful, short-term, if we hold them with awareness - but they are usually to some degree dysfunctional, and we’d do well not to hang out in them too much.

This isn’t about giving ourselves a hard time or some kind of personal development perfectionism, it is about cultivating a high degree of fluidity, healthy relational connection, and joy. These ‘stress patterns’ rarely encourage those traits, and tend to be characterised by stuck-ness, isolation or over-dependence, and either negative emotion and distress, or a complete suppression of emotion.

There is a reality that these patterns are deeply ingrained and while, with awareness and learning, we can soften the edges of them, most of us are still going to get caught in unhealthy expressions of them sometimes. When we do, we are not helpless though, there are tools and techniques that can help us take action and create positive change.

The amazing way connecting with your body can change your mind

There are some great techniques from various fields to help us manage our state in the moment. The classic one from the world of embodiment is commonly referred to as ‘centring’ (or ‘centering’ in the US). While you can build a deep practice with centring, creating a kind of highly resourced state which you invest in over time and can re-connect to in moments of need, that takes a lot of practice over many years. After almost 20 years teaching embodiment, I also suspect that there are deeper somatic capacities that get built through the practices that embodiment draws on – like performance and martial arts – which the most expert exponents connect to through centring, but whether they can be built entirely through centring practice, I don’t know.

These days, I tend to think of centring as a really great gateway practice, and a very useful short-cut for a kind of ‘stress first-aid.’

It is an excellent intervention in the moment, when you notice yourself getting ‘tight’ and need to find a more fluid, calm space from which to act in a moment of difficulty.

In case you haven’t come across centring before, here are a couple of recordings, because describing it is all very well, but as with anything embodied, experiencing it for yourself is better. So pause for a minute now, or come back to it later if you prefer and listen to one of these and see how it feels. There’s a shorter and longer version of the simple one I developed, ‘Breathe, Ground, Centre,’ plus a recording of me talking you through a lovely one George Leonard used to teach with the acronym ‘GRACE.’

I find recordings work better for people than videos as then you are tuning in to your own state and feeling into your own experience (rather than looking at me), plus you can have them on your phone and listen to them any time.

These techniques, even just learning and practcing by yourself can be incredibly valuable. But like I say, I think of them as ‘First Aid,’ not so much of a longer-term solution.

If you want to build longer-term resilience, read on…

What’s the difference between fear and excitement?

What I have been finding useful for building more long-term resilience is the ‘6 steps’ model that I developed. It grew out of my realisation that I had got kind-of stuck. There is a reality that many enjoyable experiences, or potentially enjoyable experiences, involve a certain amount of pressure or stress. There’s an old saying that…

“Fear is excitement without the breath!”

If I am having a nice day out, I will likely have to deal with a certain amount of preparation or travel logistics. If I am going to do something new or challenging, to have an adventure, develop a new friendship, or stretch out of my comfort-zone – which can lead to the most joyful and connecting experiences – then I am likely to experience a certain amount of uncertainty and nervousness. The best things often involve a certain amount of discomfort.

What I had noticed recently was the way that, like I say, I had been hanging out in, or nearby, that ‘hunkering down’ state more than is healthy for me. I would find myself in a mildly stressful or nervousness-inducing situation and notice a way that I moved fairly swiftly into just getting through it. That “just getting through it” is actually pretty good if the situation you are in is horrible, but if it is mildly stressful with moments that could be beautiful, then the chances I am going to notice the beauty are very low! My over-active survival mentality can prevent me from enjoying my life.

I think some version of this is what many people will experience if they have been through, or are going through, a period of high stress or distress. Considering the society-level, indeed global, disruption and distress caused by the pandemic, which has then been closely followed with all kinds of other world circumstances which most of us will find to some degree upsetting, I suspect many of us are operating in some sub-optimal patterns. Once again, this is not to be overly self-critical, we are all doing our best in, to varying degrees, difficult circumstances, but it is helpful to acknowledge where we are.

Acknowledging where we are - the act of bringing awareness to ourselves and our environment - is not just a matter of curiosity though, it may be the most powerful and transformative thing you can do.

The single most transformative force, available in every moment

One of the most fundamental principles of any learning or healing process is awareness. As Paul Linden, PhD (developer of Being In Movement® mindbody education, and founder of the Columbus Center for Movement Studies) once put it:

“Awareness creates choice.”

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you have little or no chance of changing it. If you look at Emotional Intelligence (EI) as a field, the vast majority of theorists agree that awareness is the foundation-stone of EI. In a way, Gestalt Psychology goes even further with an idea called ‘the paradoxical nature of change.’ This idea states that as soon as you become aware of something, it begins to change. So not only does awareness create the potential for you to take action to deliberately learn, unlearn, or otherwise change your behaviour, but by shining the light of awareness on something, it starts to evolve.

To be clear though, before you get all excited and think you can vaguely ponder something while scrolling though social media and it will magically change just because you, sort of, thought about it; in my experience, the kind of awareness that creates real change is deep, full, conscious awareness where you bring your whole self to the process.

As Wendy Palmer, the Founder of Leadership Embodiment described it:

‘This is not the “A-ha” of a purely cognitive realisation, it is the deep “Oh” when you realise something with your whole body.’

(I paraphrase, but I definitely got this distinction from Wendy!)

This is the kind of awareness we need to learn and then bring, to create lasting, deep change in the way that I think Gestalt talks about. But any awareness needs to start somewhere, and even small, nascent awareness can create small changes. Sometimes these are the nudges we need to find the ground in ourselves out of which we can grow greater changes.

So, back to my ‘hunkering down’…

I don’t want to ‘just manage’ my way through life

I was out on a team day with my colleagues at FizzPopBANG and we were doing a ropes course – you know one of those things where you are clambering about on rope-bridges and stuff, high up in the trees! I’m OK with heights and enjoyed the zip-lines much more that I’d thought (I don’t like roller-coasters or other high-speed rides and things) but the bits where the stuff you walked on moved around a lot was not my bag at all. There were 4 sections to the course and by the end of the 2nd one, I realised there wasn’t so much of the stuff I really didn’t like as it had seemed on the first section (or there were choices on your path and I could avoid it). I wanted to do the whole thing, but I could feel that I’d got a bit stuck in just ‘getting through.’

Photo by Stephanie Ecate - that is not an actual picture of me doing it!

It was that ‘hunkering down’ thing, and while the whole experience is designed to be challenging in various ways – for most people, anyway! – there was also joy available if I could come back out of my shell. I paid attention to my state, started to loosen up a bit, raised my gaze to notice more of what was around me and started to quietly explore the question of what it would be like if I could do more than just endure the experience. Enduring it was OK, it is better than being stressed and upset, but if I was going to keep going then I was also pretty sure I could find more joy than just dogged endurance would allow.

I did find more joy in it as I went along, both in my own experience, and in connecting more with my friends and colleagues than that ‘hunkering down’ would have enabled. But it also got me thinking about how much of the time I might be just ‘getting through’ things or spending time ‘hunkered down.’ It reminded me of a wonderful quote from the poet Mary Oliver:

“Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

I suspect we can all get stuck in that place a bit sometimes but I do sense in myself a greater tendency towards some version of ‘just managing’ since the pandemic. Like I say, I suspect I am not the only one. So, how do we get unstuck?

Shifting your emotional centre of gravity: more satisfied, joyful and at peace, more of the time

Because I am a learn-a-holic and love to map human experience, I started playing with a kind of map, to help me navigate away from ‘hunkering down’ and back towards breathing a little more, perhaps even daring to approach joy! Having been experimenting with it myself, I shared it with my wife, Miche Tetley, who is a wonderful and highly skilled navigator of the human spirit - a very experienced Psychotherapist amongst other things - the other day. We polished it together and I thought it might be a useful map for others. My early explorations with people suggest that’s true. There may be other similar maps or models, but I haven’t come across anything quite like it before, so it seemed like a useful contribution.

The idea of it is that there are 6 steps, starting at just barely surviving our experience and moving towards fully embracing and finding joy in it. Make no mistake, there will be things in our lives that we can survive and no more, where even that survival state and experience is a thing to be thankful for. This isn’t intended to be an ungrounded ‘you manifest your own reality’ piece which, while there is great power in owning our creative potential, all too often risks denying people’s experience or slipping into spiritual or emotional bypassing (where we seek to avoid dealing with the thing and ‘bypass’ it, which doesn’t work. Pretending our difficulties don’t exist rarely creates any lasting change).

What the ‘6 steps’ supports, that I think is really useful, is that if I can move even one step up from where I am, then my life will be better – less hunkered down and more happy. Sometimes I may take one step and find that gets me out of a hole (perhaps, somewhat of my own creation), and I can suddenly take several more steps. But any movement is progress, in any given moment. Sometimes our emotional state can develop a kind of ‘centre of gravity’ and we habitually wander back towards familiar territory. If that centre of gravity is joyful wonderment, then great! But if it is not, and you’d like it to be more positive, even if it is not that bad but could be better, then this map could help you navigate towards more enjoyment of life, more of the time.

I think this shift in emotional centre of gravity is essential to resilience, because if you spend most of your time hanging out in some form of discomfort or distress, or even nearby that territory, then you are always closer to struggle than satisfaction. I’m not trying to pretend we can all be grinning loons all of the time (and I’m not sure that would be a good thing anyway! Life is made rich by contrasts). I do believe we could all benefit from being more satisfied, joyful and at peace more of the time, not least of all because from that place we have a greater chance of being kinder to each other and more resourced to take positive action in the world. Our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren may depend to a significant degree on our capacity to find resilience in the face of hardship. I don’t know how to solve the world’s great problems, I don’t have any easy answers, but we will all be better equipped to do our small bit to contribute to the greater good if we are less stuck in struggle and worry at an individual level. If you are fighting to keep your head above water then you are unlikely to help others who are drowning.

To go beyond the ‘first aid’ of the centring I shared above, and to grow the kind of awareness that is transformative, first we need to create a little breathing room…

Creating some breathing space around your pain

Do you remember at the beginning when I said ‘It’s no good digging a well when you are already thirsty’? Resilience is something to work on before you need it and shifting your emotional centre of gravity so you are habitually in a more positive state could be one way to do that.

Resilience, even more so in the moment, also requires us to be able to separate ourselves from the experience. As long as I am wholly identified with the experience, I will struggle to change my relationship to it. If “I am frightened,” then it is a consuming experience of who and what I am, if “I am feeling frightened” then it is a feeling and it could change, it is no longer the whole of my experiential world. The step that often then becomes possible in exploring our emotional states with others, like in therapy, is “I notice that I am feeling frightened.” I am still owning the emotion, but I have space from it, I can observe it as a part of my experience, and that means that there are parts of me that can act, at least in spite of it, and perhaps even free from it. This is part of what the ‘6 Steps’ enables us to do: by mapping where we are on the ‘Steps’ we can create some congnitive space and perspective around our experience. The map might not be the territory but it can help us work out how to find a path from where we are to where we want to be.

To be clear, this is different from disowning the experience, that creates a different kind of distance. I most commonly see this occur through a linguistic habit that seems to have become increasingly culturally common in the last 10 years: “You know when you feel frightened.” On the face of it, this seems to be someone describing their own experience, but relating it to a shared human experience. I think that is partly why this linguistic framing has become common in the media. But, if I speak as the person saying it, it is not YOU that feels frightened, it is ME that I am talking about. The difference here is that instead of owning the experience but creating space (as I do by describing my emotions or noticing where I am on the map of the ‘6 Steps’), this creates distance. It is no-longer my emotion or experience, in some way, it is “Yours.” That doesn’t make me less affected by it, but does reduce my capacity to influence it.

There’s a whole other piece, potentially, on owning emotions! I don’t want to get lost down that rabbit-hole for now. But it’s a clarification around the constructive rather than unconstructive ways that we can create space around our emotional experience. Now, let’s get into exploring the 6 Steps to Resilience…

Making a map to Happy-Town!

The ‘6 steps’ are a map of experience that can help us to recognise where we are at in our emotional landscape, and then to navigate to a more positive state. They help us own where we are, then move to somewhere more resourced, empowered and, hopefully joyful than where we might be in any given moment. Let’s dive in and explore what they are…

The 6 steps are:

1. Survive

2. Endure

3. Accept

4. Respect

5. Co-create

6. Hug or Hooray!

You might have noticed that they make a natty little acronym: SEARCH. That isn’t just because I am an annoying, self-satisfied consultant-type! I have seen plenty of models shoe-horned into making an acronym or every principle starting with the same letter for no good reason beyond it being sort of ‘neat.’ I put these into an acronym because it makes it easier to remember them which makes it more useable: it’s a mnemonic that hopefully makes it easier to remember the steps in the flow of your day-to-day life. A tool like this is only as useful as it is accessible because you need to be able to grab it and use it even when stressed and struggling, so I’d recommend putting a little time into memorising the steps and the funky acronym should make that easier. Now here’s the juicy stuff you’ve been waiting for!

Step 1 : Survive

“This can’t be happening”

As I said earlier in this article, sometimes, just surviving an experience is a win, relative to how painful or difficult the experience is. But at the heart of this state is a kind of denial. On some level, from this place, I am finding my circumstances so challenging that I want to reject them completely. I want to deny their reality. Like I say, this might be as good as it gets at times, but even in extreme circumstances, there may come a point where we can move beyond denial, and if we can, then we will have greater capacity to find agency and act. That action may be what enables us to escape a bad situation, or at least work to mitigate the pain and difficulty of the moment, but sometimes all we can manage is to fight to keep our head above water.

I’m aware that how I have spoken about it there can make it sound like this only occurs in the most extreme of terrible situations, but the reality is that traumatic experience is in the eye of the beholder. What is unpleasant for one person might feel like a threat to survival for another, depending on our personal history, neurological wiring, existing state of stress or distress, and sensitivities. Sometimes we also get stuck. If we experience something that we find so painful or distressing that we emotionally shut down (a quiet kind of denial where I close myself off emotionally so that I can survive the experience without becoming even more distressed) then, unless I find a way or have help to recover, then I may stay shut down in that way. It can become my normal habit to just about put up with life, constantly keeping it at arm’s length: to some degree a trapped observer in my own head. Again, that can sound extreme, but many of us use various compulsive behaviours (shopping, scrolling online, drinking alcohol, eating, drugs, sex) to fend off the full intimacy of life. One possible source of that is being to some degree stuck in this survival place, maybe not obviously now, but some part of us that perhaps never quite recovered from a painful experience. This is a pattern that is not only recognised in modern psychology but was recognised in indigenous cultures, going back thousands of years and sometimes referred to as ‘Soul Loss.’

I’m going to focus in this article on applying these steps to in-the-moment experience, so, god-willing, the moments where we need to relate to this first step will be very few and far between but it is important to have it in our awareness. I also wanted to offer the context that we can relate these steps to our history and the ways that parts of us may, over time, have got stuck. Those parts might need our help sometimes too, if we are to return fully to ourselves and claim greater wholeness (which is the old meaning of the word ‘healing’).

Step 2 : Endure

“I don’t want this to be happening”

In the personal example I have woven through this piece, having got through the pandemic and then noticing ways that it might still be living in me, I think this is where I got stuck. That ‘hunkering down’ I have mentioned is my version of this ‘Endure’ step, but different people will have different ways that they enact this step. The heart of it is about getting through the experience, whatever it is. There is no room here for enjoyment, in fact, awareness itself is on some level deliberately closed down, so any potential gifts from the experience are inevitably lost. If you just want to get through it, then tunnel vision is a constructive tool to help you push on through while minimising the impact of the time spent in the experience.

If you are living through an extremely painful experience, then Enduring it might be an incredible feat. Just not being in denial about it may be progress! But while not actually in denial here about the reality of what is happening, this state of ‘Enduring’ is one where I actively reject what is happening. That can be a useful survival strategy in the midst of something horrible, or even something difficult or unpleasant, especially if we will be living with it long-term, but it is no way to live our lives. Again, I am minded of that wonderful Mary Oliver quote:

“Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life.”

If I have got stuck here (as I think I had, to some degree, or at least, stuck hanging out nearby) then it becomes very hard to enjoy anything. Certainly, anything with any degree of stress or pressure is going to have little chance of becoming exciting and will probably be firmly placed in the ‘too hard box.’ I’ll put up with it but I’m not going to enjoy it.

Step 3 : Accept

“This is happening”

This is the turning point. When we accept that the thing is happening, then we can really engage with it. We may still engage with it to change it or take action to change our relationship to it, but we can get hold of the thing.

I have a saying. It isn’t particularly profound but it is true:

“You can’t leave Spain if you ain’t in Spain.”

It is literally physically true, but more usefully perhaps, it is also an immutable law of psychological change.

If you want to change something, you have to get present with it first. That doesn’t mean you have to wallow, or engage in 70’s-style epic catharsis, wailing to the moon and beating your breast. You do need to come into contact with the thing in some way – in yourself - even if it is historical.

As long as you deny or wholly reject an experience, you can’t change it. This is true in the moment – if you are on some level ‘checked out’ of the experience you won’t have the wherewithal and skill to see opportunities and act on them, you simply lack agency. It is also true historically in terms of healing – we have to come into presence with the lost pieces of ourselves in order to find a way to bring them home. We have to re-find our agency relative to a painful experience so we can move on from it, rather than it haunting us in the shadows of our psyche and continuing to be a thing which defines us.

That’s all on the heavier side of things again, I guess, the deeper end of the pool so to speak, but simply in the moment: acceptance is a step forwards from rejection.

In my experience on the ropes-course, when I noticed I had slipped into ‘hunkering down’ and just enduring the experience, the first step out was to go from ‘I don’t want this to be happening’ to ‘this is happening.’ It is a reltively small - and therefore mangeable - step, but has a big impact on my capacity to shift my perspective further. Straight away, I started to breathe easier, I relaxed, and before I knew it I was talking more to people, noticing when others were nervous and might appreciate some encouragement, and spotting some of the potential for joy. “This is happening… and look, there are beautiful great big trees all around!” The trees had always been there, but they had been bit-part supporting actors in the drama of my psyche, now they could move from background to foreground and become a gateway for enjoyment.

Step 4 : Respect

“What is happening?”

One step on from accepting what is, is an opportunity to look at it with fresh eyes. That is the Latin root of the word ‘Respect,’ it means to ‘Look again.’ To respect someone or something, is to look at it again, letting go of your preconceptions to see them, or it, with new eyes. In this way we set them (or it) and ourselves free. I think this is the starting point for love. As the old saying goes,

“If you love someone, set them free.”

That is as true for self-love as for love of others. Our assumptions and preconceptions can be the greatest traps for ourselves, others and our experiences. When I have talked in earlier sections about ‘getting stuck’ in many ways that is about being so entrenched in a single view of the world the we can’t escape it. That is not purely cognitive – not just in our heads – we can get stuck in our physiological state, in how we ‘hold’ an experience in our bodies, and that is a form of somatic preconception. Respect is not just an idea, it is an embodied act. We have to teach ourselves to look again.

If we are stuck, then, in the ‘Survive’ or ‘Endure’ stages, we can’t do this. It is not an available choice when we are inhabiting those territories. The ‘Accept’ step is the gateway that opens the door for us to look again. I am not going to look again at an experience that I am actively denying or rejecting.

Once we find our way to this place of Respect, we access a whole new level of possibility. Like the trees were for me on the ropes course, those possibilities were, perhaps, always there but until we are able to ‘look again’ we cannot spot them. If we manage to take this step then what was an unpleasant experience may at least become an interesting one. It may hold wonderful gifts or learning for us, or perhaps be enjoyable, at least in retrospect, but if we are lucky and open to it, even in the moment. Respect opens us to new possibilities.

Step 5 : Co-create

“What gifts can I find here?”

This is where we move from being the recipient of an experience, to being a full, active participant in it. ‘It’ is no longer ‘happening to me.’ I am involved in a process of emergence where I am co-creating my experience with the world around me. I am not deluding myself into believing I am a god, but I am not wholly subject to the world either. There is an aliveness in this shift, a full living of my life that helps me to find the golden moments of wonder and magic in even an ordinary day.

One of the techniques I teach in Wise Fool School, that I learned from psychologist and expert on Hawai’ian Huna, Serge Kahili King, is ‘Blanket Blessing.’ This is a practice of walking or otherwise moving through the world (I used to practice it on the bus!) and deeply appreciating everything you see, naming and celebrating its’ strengths. When I am fully in the ‘Co-create’ state, I find it easy. The world is full of everyday magic. When I am open to it, poetry can help me find my way here. There is a way my favourite poets manage to conjure or magnify the potential for beauty, wonder, and joy in the world. Even if it is woven through with melancholy, it is still beautiful.

Other kinds of art can do this too – music, images, film and TV, sculpture, storytelling – all kinds of things. Listening to one of my favourite podcasts often invites me back towards this state (it’s called The Wonder Dome, if you want to check it out).

Essentially this is about appreciation and gratitude as an active, rather than passive, process. It is not just about being grateful for what falls in our lap, it is about seeking out the gifts in our experience, which is as much about the stories we tell and the meaning we make out of our experiences as it is about what comes our way.

Acceptance helps us to engage with what is; Respect can help us look again and see new facets of what might be; Co-creation enables us to see how we can be full participants in the process of becoming - how we can play together with the world and make something wonderful together.

Step 6 : Hug or Hooray!

“What can I love here?”

In a way this is the ‘advanced class’ of Respect! Where in Co-create we are actively creative in making the most of what we meet in life’s journey, here we haven’t relinquished that creative capacity but we don’t need it. From this place I find it in myself to love things exactly as they are, no polishing or meaning-making needed by me. That’s why I settled on ‘Hug’ as the label here, because at this step I can completely embrace what is happening and draw it close to my heart. I’m able to completely welcome the experience, no conditions or adjustments.

Some experiences spontaneously draw this response out of us, but they are relatively rare, and if you have a traumatic history then it may not seem possible at all. From that place of somatically rooted trauma, the world is just too dangerous a place to ever relax enough to unconditionally embrace experience. You may get to this place one day if you have that kind of painful history, but it is going to take a lot of support and healing. That doesn’t mean you’ll never experience it without that healing, I don’t want to wish that on you if you are living with this history, but it may make it even more rare or fleeting a thing. I want acknowledge how far from your daily experience this may feel if you are living with the legacy of trauma in any of its forms. Sometimes it is just for a few months or a year, but trauma, for some people, lives in our soma for years or may even be intergenerational, socio-cultural or inherited, and I don’t want to paint a rose-tinted or insensitive portrait of human experience in this article, especially as I am talking about resilience.

The other word I’ve used here as an alternative is “Hooray!” I’ve led with ‘Hug’ as not all moments are celebratory, even if we can find the place from which we can love them, but some experiences will be. The ‘Hooray!’ is more of the total surrender into joy and celebration which is equally unguarded but has a different flavour than ‘Hug.’

This last step might sound like it is only attainable if the circumstances allow for it, and therefore not in our gift to choose, but I think we can choose this too. The state of unguarded-ness that this step entails requires us to feel totally safe. Some of that is circumstantial, but if you are strong enough (and there are many different kinds of strength) then you need have no fear. That lack of fear, I think, can enable the sense of freedom and openness that can help us find our way to this step, this state or quality of engagement with our lives, more often. One form of spiritual strength, which I think helps us move in this direction, is non-attachment. If I am genuinely not attached to things being a particular way, then circumstances and other peoples’ behaviour have less power over me: I become more powerful. This is just one example, but I wanted to illustrate how strength and power come in many forms.

I am no master of this. I am very much a work in progress with all of what I have described here! In some ways, the more I explore it, the more I feel I have to learn, but that is ever the way with the path through life, I think. The best things to explore, the best kinds of learning are not defined, linear journeys we ‘tick-off’ and are done with. The best kinds of learning are paths of mastery that spiral more slowly upwards as we grow in both skill and awareness.

Noneltheless, as I said at the beginning, I am finding this map useful to bring awareness, to notice where I am, and then see if I can move even one step better, and maybe even 2 or 3 steps. There is a kind of momentum I can find sometimes that means I can move a long way quickly once I notice where I am.

There is something I learned, which I associate with this last step, though I think it may help with all of them. It is the dot-to-dot instructions of how to love.

The Hawai’ian secret to loving life

I have often wondered in my life, how to love someone if you don’t like them. I mean that in the old Christian sense of the thing, which is the main spiritual tradition I grew up with: “Love thy neighbour,” as Christ taught. You’ll find versions of this principle in pretty much every spiritual tradition. But how do I do it? The idea might be a nice one, but HOW? And that is just as true for loving an experience, if it is not an experience that I am spontaneously inclined to find boundless joy in. How can I love it, even a little more?

The answer I have found most useful came from the Hawai’ian tradition. In native Hawai’ian language, I was taught that all words have multiple layers of meaning: the spirituality and philosophy is structured into the language if you know how to decode it.

The Hawai’ian word for “Hello” is also the same as the word for “Goodbye,” and rather beautifully, that word also means “Love.” The word is Aloha.

I’d always thought it was beautiful that you could welcome people and send them on their way with love. But even though I knew about the many layers of meaning, it wasn’t until I was massaging a client (back when I practiced Hawai’ian Temple Style massage) that I was pondering Aloha spirit and realised you can turn it around. Just as “Hello” and “Goodbye” mean Love, Love could also mean “Hello and Goodbye.” The dot-to-dot instructions for how to engage in a loving attitude, even when you don’t like someone or something, is to keep saying “Hello and goodbye,” in every moment. Not literally, out loud, but on the inside. Just like Respect, this is an act of letting go of our preconceptions, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, and even thoughts and feelings. We let them come but we don’t hang on to them, and in letting all of that go we are able to see the emergent truth of the person or experience completely in the present moment. This is also a kind of non-attachment practice, so there is the potential that as we find a more loving attitude towards others, our experiences, and the world, we will also become more powerful.

A loving attitude makes us stronger

There is an innate beauty, a kind of spiritual purity about that fully-present-moment awareness. And, as I mentioned in Respect, there is also a way that in relationship we set people free. Most of us perceive ourselves through a fog of our own assumptions and beliefs so if someone else came along and really witnessed us free of all of that, the way they see us might help us to free ourselves a little more too. What more loving act could we offer to each other than to set each other free? Hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye – in every moment.

In saying all of that, it is one of those things that is simple, I think, but not at all easy! To bring it back to the primary subject of this article, if we want to experience the last step, of ‘Hug’ where we can fully embrace our experience, then practicing Aloha spirit may help us attune to the state more readily. It will likely still be rare, but the most precious things usually are. The resilience that such moments can give us, even by remembering the beauty and grace of the moment months or even years later, can be incredibly nourishing.

How to bounce back better

Resilience means ‘to leap back’ and is often seen as bouncing back from difficulty. We are all going to have times when we struggle. The idea with these steps is to help us map the territory between wherever we are, and some better place. It is a structured map for how to bounce back. Where we get to doesn’t need to be perfect, sometimes life will be hard and we can’t entirely get away from that, but we can find our way to ‘better’ one step at a time.

Whether you use these for yourself or with others: to be persoanlly more resilient as an awareness and navigational tool; or to help you shift your emotional ‘centre of gravity’ after an extended period of difficulty or distress as I have talked about following the pandemic; or as a map to share with your clients as a therapist, counsellor, coach, or facilitator, I hope you find this map useful. Like I’ve said, I am finding it helpful and the simplicity of the model, combined with the depth of where it can take you, seems to speak to people when I share it.

Let me know how you get on and get in touch if you would like to explore this work more – for facilitators, coaches and therapists, for individuals, or for building resilience in organisations.

I wish you joy, grace and wonder in all your adventures.

Aloha for now!