Are you moving gracefully, or suffering with every bump along the way?

Hello beautiful beings, I hope that you are feeling nourished, strong, and ready for the summer months! Energetically, the past few weeks have been interesting, and conversations keep coming back to the same theme: Resilience. 

I have explored the energy and ideas around resilience for years, having worked within the addiction field, witnessing how some people are able to learn to move with life a little more gracefully, instead of feeling tossed around by it, or pushed down. And it feels as though Resilience is at the heart of this. A quick Google provides this definition: Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. Being resilient does not mean a person doesn't experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. Resilience involves the ability to work through emotional pain and suffering.

One of my favourite examples of embodied resilience comes from Jamie Wheal, who uses the example of mountain biking downhill. The idea is that if your bike has great shocks, you can navigate the bumps, ruts, and obstacles with relative grace. If your shocks are too stiff or worn down, you feel every bump and jolt along the way, which causes you to slow down, and potentially overthink, to avoid possible pain or discomfort.

I was watching the new Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary series on Netflix, and he talks about his father's drinking issues and abuse at home. He shares that this environment broke his brother, but made him. It motivated him to lean in (or go faster down the track, because he had better shocks), instead of pull away, or follow the same unhealthy patterns.

Resilience is not a bypassing of feeling, or a denial of what has occurred. But the ability to work through it. In real time.

What if you could face difficulties with the courage to work through them in real time, instead of avoiding them out of fear?

What if you could navigate hardship or the unknown, with confidence and trust in yourself, allowing you to follow your intuition along the way?

What if you were able to reframe the pain and suffering so that instead of re-experiencing the shock, you could see it as the past, and something to learn from?

I know that this is a complex topic, but our minds like to over-complicate anything that holds layers of fear or pain within them. We can often over-complicate the healing process, karmic cycles, and learn in difficult ways. I also believe that by facing the over-complication, we can strip back the layers of fear we've added to try to buffer the way, but which weigh us down, and create filters that slow our intuition and processing.

Over the coming days, I would encourage you to ponder what true resilience could look like and feel like for you. And meditate on the following:

• Which feelings, emotions, beliefs create the most friction/discomfort, and throw me off my game?
• Instead of being thrown off, is it possible to create a moment of time/space, to regain perspective, and carry on?
• When have I not felt resilient in the past? Am I still caught in that moment, instead of living in the present?
• Where/how could experiences from the past Make me, instead of Break me? What needs to shift in my perspective in order to allow this?

Remember that everything is about perspective. Your experience of life is created through the ways in which you respond to it. And when you can respond instead of react, you show yourself that you are able to keep moving, with more grace. Imagine a life where you can be more in flow, moving with life, surfing the waves of change and experience, and allow your life to unfold in this way. 

Feel free to share what this brings up for you. I would love to witness your musings, questions, and epiphanies!

-Jennifer <3

P.S. Our upcoming 5-week online program, Turn your Wounds into Wisdom will address aspects of this in depth. Please join us if you feel called!