Have you noticed an unusual intensity surrounding you these days? Do you feel more anxious, overwhelmed, and tired a lot of the time? Do you find it difficult to hold your focus or keep on top of your ever- lengthening to do lists? Our world is changing faster than most of us can keep up with. ‘Joyful Resiliency’ is a way of responding to these changes by changing how we think, live, and how we can bounce back quickly from a deeper place of grounded stability, nourishing our inner soul garden. This helps us to focus on being more embodied by grounding ourselves, joyfully, into our bodies, learning new habits to keep it clear and protected as we do so.
Thriving joyfully is about going beyond just surviving. We are living in a time of great change and it can feel like we are going crazy, just trying to keep up with a sane pace in life. Finding balance in this whirlwind of what we may unconsciously project as the ‘fearful unknown’ is an art. It takes a very conscious and focused approach to become aware of what we truly need to do to hold our own personal stability on mental, emotional, physical, financial and even spiritual or soul levels.
When things get really bad and you feel out of control, that is the time to STOP. Take a step back and take a good look at where you are going, and where the world is going. You might say – well there isn’t much I can do about changing the world, so I’ll just focus on what I can do, day to day, to just stay on top of things. But how can you focus on anything, if everything continues to keep pulling at you in a hundred different directions?
Our bodies are organized in an energetic polarity like a battery. The right side of our body holds a positive charge and flows energy out through our right arm as an ‘action’ or ‘doing’ aspect of ourselves. The left side of our body is the more ‘receiving’ or ‘being’ side of ourselves.
This is similar to the ancient Chinese understanding of our body’s energy – the left side is the Yin or feminine side, and the right side is the Yang or more masculine side. When we are out of balance, doing too much action, our Yang side is overactive and the Yin or feminine aspect is undernourished. We need to find time to let down, relax the deep tensions in our body to just ‘be’, receive energy, and nurture our soul back into wholeness.
If you cannot find ways to balance the two poles of your own body’s energy system, your body may simply break down and find a way to balance itself by getting sick, forcing you to take time out.
These days, it is more important than ever to become more physical in our bodies, more connected to our muscles and physical strength, and our own balanced energetic activity. To be grounded and calm in our bodies we need to understand how to feel and embody the inside of ourselves more deliberately. We need to consciously learn practices that support the containment and holding of focus and calm in our minds, in order to handle the increasing intensity and information overload that is coming at us from the outside. An emotionally strong and grounded body supports a strong and grounded mind.
And we also need to purposely choose to do things differently. This involves developing new and healthier boundaries for ourselves (to pull out of the trend to ignore or deny what we truly need to maintain our own inner equilibrium) by doing less, letting go of more, saying ‘no’ more often.
Techniques for Regaining Inner Balance
There are a variety of methods to help clear, reset, and regulate your body and balance it on a daily basis that can be easily learned. These include simple awareness, breathing, or meditation practices, as well as focused Bioenergetics (body/mind connection exercises that reconnect and calm you), to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), to practising energy balancing exercises that consciously regulate and re-balance the body’s energy systems. Now is the time to commit to a daily practice that enhances your sense of wholeness, along with prioritizing improvements in your physical strength, flexibility, and stamina. It is essential that you begin to integrate some of these practices if you wish to hold your inner balance in these crazy times!
Self-Help Strategies
In regards to lifestyle changes for restoring balance, you could choose to watch TV only three times a week, for example, and spend those other times reading, playing with your kids or pets, doing art or a craft, listening to music, or being outside in Nature. You can decide to watch, hear, or read less ‘news’ in order to de-escalate the stimulation of fear or anger responses in unconscious levels in your body. Or commit to a full ‘down’ day, one day a week, and choose to do absolutely nothing! Let the day be whatever you want it to be, without any plans, doing only whatever gives you joy! Consciously making space to cultivate the deeper feelings of joy in your body enhances your immunity, nourishes your inner soul garden, and enlivens your vitality.
The world is changing very quickly and to become more resilient we need to be proactive and adaptive, learning how to be more fluid within ourselves. By choosing to change, change is not forced on you in less prepared or uncomfortable ways and you will be able to be more flexible in how to bounce back from the unexpected. This is how you can protect yourself. We all need to learn new ways to understand how to handle the intensity of our world’s growing changes. This is what Joyful Resilience is all about – to become more adaptable and flexible, consciously choosing a life that encourages more connection with the earth, the ground, within ourselves as well as with each other, supporting a more balanced lifestyle. The Earth and your body, is calling you back Home!
