Honoring Hardships and Suffering Less by Mindfully Building Resilience

During this 5-day you will develop more compassion for yourself and your hardships, while learning how to suffer less by building resiliency skills. This course will guide you toward new ways of interacting with others in a more authentic way. You will explore the ways in which your thinking, emotions, and behaviors influence your hardships and your suffering and learn techniques for shifting towards a more resilient mindset. You’ll discover how shifting to mindful awareness impacts your social interactions, attention, and focus and helps you live a more energized life. Lastly, I’ll introduce you to tools to help you discover your purpose and meaning in live and how a growth mindset is essential for building your ability to bounce back from difficulty and adversity. This course, which includes educational sessions, breathing practices, guided meditations, and journaling practices, will help you develop confidence and guide you toward accessing your true, courageous, authentic self.

Leçon 1: Bringing Compassion and Kindness to our Hardships

Today we’ll bring mindful curiosity about exploring how having more compassion for ourselves in our hardships helps us to suffer less. We’ll also investigate the multidimensional aspects of resilience and focus attention on the domains of cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Leçon 2: Social Engagement as an Inroad for Building Resilience

In our last session, I encouraged you to explore a recent hardship or challenge, bring some compassion to it and then identify your response in the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains so you could get a better handle on your style of responding during hardships. Today we’re going take the information you discovered about your style of responding and overlay that onto developing more social connectedness. We’ll explore ways in which becoming more self-aware during interactions can help us make more meaningful connections. When we develop more meaningful connections, we are less likely to feel isolated during difficult times, so we suffer less!

Leçon 3: Using Mindfulness to increase Focus and Attention

Today we’ll build on the concept of mindful self-awareness by bringing mindfulness on board to increase our attention and focus. Developing the ability to sustain focus and attention is essential on our journey to becoming more adaptable in changing times and environments. This sustained focus and attention is also helpful for us to be able to gain enjoyment from activities by allowing us to become fully immersed. This is also known as our flow state and helps our bodies and minds to feel less stressed.

Leçon 4: Finding your Purpose and Building a Growth Mindset

Now that you know how to use mindfulness to increase awareness, focus and attention, you have the skills you need to explore the purpose and meaning in your life. As Victor Frankl said, “Those who have a ‘why” to live can bear with almost any ‘how’. We’ll begin to explore some “How-to” strategies to help you explore this. We’ll also investigate how a growth mindset, rather than a fixed mindset, helps us to build resiliency skills.

Leçon 5: Bringing it all Together

In today’s session, I’ll summarize the key points of the course and discuss the ways that psychological flexibility is key to enhancing our ability to acknowledge our hardships and treat ourselves with compassion while being able to build resiliency skills that help us to suffer less. It is said that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. We’ll revisit the hardship from day 1 and use guided visualization to transform your response.