What is Resilience?

The word “resilience” comes from the Latin for “to jump again.” Suffering and joy are often two sides of the same coin. Resilience can stem from hardship. When we are resilient we are better able to bounce back from challenges. And we are able to do well after the hardship. There is no resilience without difficulty.

Many of us have gone through tough times in our lives. Hard times can be tricky to navigate. Thankfully, there are tools that can build your resilience. The life skills of mindfulness and compassion can lead to resilience.

Resilience is the ability to come back from either small wear and tear or those larger struggles, such as feelings of loneliness. Resilience is not a fixed trait, meaning that we are not born with a certain amount of resilience. Instead, it is a skill that can be strengthened with knowledge and practice.

We can build resilience through the development of mindful attitudes and practices. Research has indicated that our brains function much like our muscles do: the more we use them in certain ways, the stronger and more capable of that movement they become.

In other words, the more we practice calming our minds and breaking our stress cycles by being in the present moment, the more naturally we do so. Eventually, with training and practice, our brains adapt so that this inner calm is our default state of being.

Mindfulness helps us overcome loneliness in other ways, too.

By learning to be empathetic and compassionate and learning to identify and express moments of gratitude, we make ourselves better friends not only toward ourselves, but to others. When we are in tune with our needs and desires, beliefs and values, we can begin reaching out to find like-minded others. We begin to establish community.

Finally, mindfulness can help us recognize and accept things in the world as they are. With understanding and acceptance comes the possibility to knowing what things we can change in our worlds and what we can't.

The communities we are a part of and the perspectives and attitudes we hold are two of our most valuable tools for building resilience, so we'll explore them each a bit more here.