This is a practice of resilience and it's incredibly important these days when we are feeling the overwhelm of the world and all that is happening around us to develop a practice of resilience.
Something that pulls us back into wellness in ourself,
Into health,
Into something that feels stable and sustainable.
We begin to lose resilience when we take our attention outward and develop our sense of self through what is happening in the outside world where resilience is actually a pulling back in,
A remembering of who you are and the capacity to bring your focus back to what matters.
Resilience is learning,
It's learning and strengthening yourself through practice.
It's experiencing missteps or disappointment and being able to acknowledge those and actually be with those emotions.
It's not like skirting around,
It's not a state of avoidance,
Right?
It's an allowance of what is happening and what you're experiencing to exist.
That is where resilience starts to build,
It's where it builds in the system,
In our heart,
In our nervous system,
In our cells and we develop strength from that.
It's something that takes effort and the effort is actually coming back and then there's a surrendering,
There's like a letting go,
A softening.
So it's not the effort that holds you in resilience,
It's actually the effort that brings you back and relaxes you.
Resilience creates grace in the system,
Right?
It creates a loving place for your attention.
When our attention is moving outward on things and in the world that feel destabilizing and constantly jarring,
It starts to,
You know,
Almost weaponize our attention in a way that is destructive for ourselves.
And so what we want to be able to do is bring our attention back in a way that is loving and builds strength in the system.
So when you're ready,
Place yourself in a seated position with your spine tall and support under the pelvis and take a full breath in and a long breath out.
And so begins the journey of watching your attention and that's simply the experience is watching,
Right?
We're not in a place of discipline.
We're not in a place of judgment.
We're simply from a loving place bringing our attention to our attention and we can use the vehicle of breath to help build focus in the system.
Right?
And it might just be a single inhale and exhale and start to follow that oceanic wave of breath in whatever form it's naturally moving through you.
Not in a way that you're trying to dominate over your system,
Right?
You're allowing the breath to inform you.
And then once you develop that relationship,
Once you start to soften into the breath,
Then take it a little bit deeper into your body.
And notice what happens with the expansion of the inhale and the surrender of the exhale.
And when you're met with the silence between my voice,
It's just space for you to experience more of your attention.
Use my voice as a gentle nudge back to yourself.
There's a level of focus that is required,
But it's not control.
It's focus,
Right?
So you can soften.
And now soften the bridge of your eyes,
The band that crosses across your eyes.
And notice how that experience affects your focus.
And relax the bridge of the nose.
And that trickles down into the jaw and the palate of your mouth.
And the whole mask of the face,
That place in which you focus so hard,
It's like that all softens.
And it's almost like there's a different version of you.
Your truer self that arises when the mask of the face softens.
And allow that to trickle down into your heart.
Into the whole cavity of the heart space.
So that some of that heaviness in which you've been feeling or experiencing in life,
Whether it's your life or indirectly through the world,
Is some of that gets to relax.
And that's where resilience starts to grow.
Where the tending to the inner space builds resilience.
The strength you need is only in the devotion to surrendering,
To softening into yourself.
And there you find yourself in a softer,
More capable space.
And take a full breath in.
