A tiny shift that will increase your resilience.
We often have this idea that resilience is simply the ability to keep going when things get shitty. That we’re resilient if we don’t break.
I think that this year, being the absolute Charlie-Foxtrot that it has been, has shown us as a society that we can take a lot. I also think that most of us, because we’re human, have had periods of time in our lives where we realise that we can take a lot. Not because we want to, but because, sometimes life is like that.
Resilience isn’t about not-breaking. Humans are incredibly, beautifully adaptable, and we can endure an awful lot of hardship before breaking.
Resilience is more about *how* we don’t break.
Resilience is actually about having a deep and unwavering connection to yourself, so that even in times that feel impossible, or overwhelming, you know that you can get through. It’s about having a different perspective, seeing setbacks as temporary, and being able to trust yourself. Basically, resilience is a state that can be determined best based on how you *feel*.
One of the things that can feel so overwhelming about the idea of developing resilience is that it feels like more stuff to do: more practices to implement, more supplements or herbs to take, more things to think about, more areas to *check* ourselves. I get exhausted thinking about it. It’s like the world we live in is so focused on self-improvement and optimization that our to-do lists get longer and longer, even if those lists are things that are supposed to help.
The following newsletter will explain why it can feel overwhelming. It’ll also help you to drop some of that burden. Let’s call this a short-course in letting go of something you might not even know you’re carrying.
Read on, to learn why most writings on resilience don’t quite hit the mark.
Next week I’m going to explore a completely different way to approach resilience, starting from deep within ourselves. If this topic interests you, keep a look-out because Rosalee and I will be opening enrollment for our course, Building Resilience (which is a much deeper exploration of this), in the next few weeks.
with love,
Rebecca
Contents:
1. Why have so many approaches to resilience missed the mark?
2. One small thing you can do to change how you feel right now.
3. Herbs that can help.
1. Why have so many approaches to resilience missed the mark?
What is resilience?
Resilience is a quality that we all have the capability to cultivate, and it has to do with our ability to remain centered, and return to center, during periods of adversity.
It is best described in analogy, and the analogy I like best is that of a sailboat.
Sailboats have a few different functions that make them able to navigate the waters they sail on. There’s the sail itself, which gives it the ability to capture the wind, and use it to propel it forward. There is the rudder, which gives the ability to steer the boat, while its being propelled forward by the wind. And there is the keel— the deep and heavy part of the bottom of the boat that keeps the boat from capsizing if the wind or waves are too heavy.
All of these parts of the boat are necessary for it to keep moving in the direction you want it to move in. You might not notice how necessary they are if you’re just taking a quick jaunt on a small lake with perfect weather and a slight breeze, but if the environment changes, and becomes more difficult— say the wind picks up, or the lake becomes an ocean, or the waves become big— then you would start to notice very quickly if you didn’t have adequate ability to handle these difficulties. The boat would bob around, moving wherever the waves tossed it, without sails. It would move only in the direction that the wind pushed it without a rudder. And it would get blown over at the slightest breeze without a deep keel.
Resilience in us, is like having sails, a rudder, and a deep keel on a boat. Instead of feeling tossed about by the wind and the waves, we instead feel capable. Sometimes, we might even feel like this is us at our best, because we finally get to use these aspects of ourselves that are never that necessary when the waters are calm and the breeze is light.
Many of us, in lacking resilience, feel as though the tiniest little thing can knock us over. We are driven to despair, to feeling completely overwhelmed, or even powerless in the face of the massiveness of life’s winds and waves. Especially now, when the world… well, for lack of better words, is a shitshow.
We all want the capacity to feel resilient when life gets stressful.
But when searching out how to develop resilience, I have noticed that there is a consistent issue with everything I’ve ever read on the topic.
You know how above, I mentioned that when we have resilience, it actually feels good to be challenged by the waves and the wind, because we get to really use our own skills?
Well, not all of us have the same skills. Or, to stick with the analogy, not all of our boats, or our seas, are the same.
Why is resilience often taught in a way that is inaccessible to many of us?
If you’ve been reading my newsletters for a while, you’ve probably, at some point, read about industrialised society’s Choleric, or fire-imbalance. If you haven’t, you can read about it more in depth HERE and HERE, but I’ll try (haha) to give a short explanation here, too:
Fiery, or choleric, personality traits, are those that tend to be more direct, driven, focused, and goal-oriented. People who have a lot of fire, or choler, in their personality also naturally step in to take charge when there is a group of people, because they need to ACT. So in a situation where an earth person would want to think more to find the BEST (taking the long-term into account) way to proceed, and an air person would want to throw out lots of ideas, and a water person would want to reach consensus, the fire person would rather act, and adjust course as they go, than sit around trying to decide what to do. You have to understand that sitting around deciding what to do feels as excruciating to a choleric as being forced into action before being ready feels to a phlegmatic (water) or melancholic (earth). Because of this, Cholerics tend to be in charge in a lot of places, because they’re the ones who step in. Not because they’re more qualified, but because action is so important and easy to them.
Cholerics prize efficiency, directness, confidence, drive, goal-orientation, fierceness. So when looking to populate the spaces that they are now in charge of, they will look for people with the qualities that they prize (which means, more cholerics). Cholerics are also, by nature, the least empathetic of the rest of the temperaments. So where a phlegmatic would naturally look around to see who else is there, the cholerics would assume that anyone else would speak up if they had something to say, not even REALISING that speaking up is, in itself, a choleric trait. So the cholerics would have been looking for people to communicate in the choleric way, to express that the choleric way wasn’t good for everyone. See why this gets tricky?
Over time, and GENERATIONS of this, cholerics have built a world that works really well for them, assuming that it is the best, most efficient world for everyone, because they don’t even see that there are other ways of being in the world. To give a real-life example of this, I was discussing society with my [super choleric] husband, and said something along the lines of ‘I’d love to see what a society would look like if it was built by another temperament, just as an experiment. What would, for example, a phlegmatic society look like’. He said ‘but there’d be no point in that because it’d be so inefficient, we’d never progress or get anything done’. And I said ‘what makes you think that the only point of a society should be efficiency?’ and he looked a bit mind-blown for a second, and then said ‘oh shit’.
This is why it is so hard to fathom what something else would look like: because we have all bought into efficiency and productivity as being the real goals for life.
Even those of us who aren’t cholerics, because we live in a society that is built by, and run by cholerics, also see choleric behaviours and characteristics as ideal, and as a result, we try to make ourselves more choleric, in order to fit in.
(It’s not that cholerics are bad, by the way, it’s that we all started to give credence to this model that choler is the ‘best’ trait (see above about buying into efficiency and productivity as the goals in life), and so those of us who aren’t super choleric feel somehow… choler-deficient.)
The world has been run by and for cholerics for SO long now, that the world feels quite hostile to those of us who don’t have a lot of choler. But at the same time, we ALL prize choler as a trait. It’s the world we developed our worldview in, without any stories, heroes, or framework for any of the other character traits. As a result, most of us see ourselves only in relationship to our choler, not for the rest of the spectrum of character traits outside of choleric traits.
Imagine, on the other hand, if our society had space for all the other character traits out there. If drive and efficiency and productivity weren’t the most important, but were recognised as things that are fiery. But that water, air, and earth all had places that were just as important: that play was important and empathy was important and the ability to think long-term was important. That we recognised our own natural pace, and processing speed, and skills as being valid in their own right, not valid in reference to, or in absence of Fire.
How would that feel different?
How would that change our feelings of self-worth?
How would it change how we felt about ourselves at the end of a day, if it wasn’t measured solely by how productive we were, but maybe by how good a conversation we had with a friend, or how much fun we had, or how we rested very well?
What does all of this have to do with resilience?
Resilience is usually approached from a Choleric perspective. It is talked about in terms of how much stress we can tolerate, and how we want to build resilience in order to be better Cholerics, or to tolerate a Fiery world more easily. The ways that we are taught to build resilience are choleric methods of resilience building. And more importantly, the solution to lacking resilience is simply seen as developing more Fire.
For those of us who aren’t naturally fiery to begin with, all of this talk of resilience can actually feel more stressful! Like it’s putting pressure on us to be more fiery when we’re already exhausted from forcing ourselves to be Cholerics. To make matters worse, because this is the only picture of resilience we learn about, when we can’t make these resilience-building methods work, we feel even worse, even more broken somehow.
In short:
-The world is run by cholerics, and is agreed upon by cholerics to be fast, efficient and good, and that anyone who can keep up with this world is a ‘winner’ and that anyone who can’t keep up is deficient.
-Those of us who are not choleric to begin with tend to feel exhausted by, and worn down by this choleric world that isn’t constructed for us to begin with. Things that are much easier for cholerics, for example, include: running errands, job interviews, exams, public speaking, networking *shudders*.
-Those of us who are exhausted by choleric society are exhausted, not because there is something wrong with us, but because we do not fit in a world that wasn’t built for us, because we weren’t taken into consideration (and weren’t really a part of the building process to begin with).
-Now, the cholerics, seeing us, exhausted and floundering, are like ‘hmm they’re exhausted, I think they need to be more resilient. Maybe they haven’t tried Wim Hof breathing or adaptogens’.
-Cholerics try to help by teaching us how to have more energy, and higher stress tolerance, in order to be able to handle the rigors of a choleric society.
-We try to become more Cholericly resilient, which in turn further denies our own true natures, which feels even more exhausting. We keep up for a few weeks, and feel good about ourselves because we’re doing the things. It catches up eventually and we crash. Cue self-esteem plummet.
Sound familiar?
Well, I have good news for you, because it’s NOT you, and it’s NOT that you’re broken or doing things wrong. It’s just that nobody (including yourself) has thought to look at who you are through a different lens. Not a choleric lens, but a whole-human, all-elements are valid lens.
So how do we approach resilience in a helpful way?
To approach resilience in a way that feels achievable to everyone, we need to start with some really basic, but often overlooked concepts:
-We are all different.
-We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. -We all have our own areas of privilege, and areas where we have to work harder than others to achieve the same things.
To approach resilience in a way that can help all of us, we need to do away with a lot of the old model. Do away with the idea that resilience has certain markers that can be measured by our Fiery productivity, and that it can be increased by simply increasing our Fiery energy.
Instead, we need to start looking at resilience from the baseline of who we truly are, and find ways to nourish, nurture and develop our natural strengths. THIS is what gives us a strong baseline to come back to, time and again, when stressful times hit.
To sum up:
Choleric approaches to resilience make it sound as if we are FIRE DEFICIENT, and that all we need is more fire. And perhaps a planner and to-do list.
Except, most of us have spent so long burning through our own resources to try and generate more fire, that the LAST thing we need is more fire. Our energy will come back, naturally, if we learn to accept and cultivate all of the other aspects of ourselves that are the source of our own energy. More fire is not the answer. The actual answer is… more of… whoever you are.
2. One small thing you can do to change how you feel right now.
Repeat after me:
It’s not me, it’s the society I live in.
Most of us blame ourselves for not fitting right. We think that we’re not driven enough, or don’t have enough energy. We think that there is something wrong with US.
Do you know what happens inside your body when your basic premise is ‘there’s something wrong with me’? It creates a cascade of hormonal responses that are stress-related. You start scanning yourself constantly to try and find the behaviours or things that don’t ‘fit’. It doesn’t just hurt us emotionally, it hurts us physically, because those stress hormones mean that you’re directing energy that could be used for healing, digesting, and resting, into finding and changing what’s wrong.
When ‘there is something wrong with me’ is the premise, it’s like…
Ok you know Cinderella’s sisters? Yeah the two mean ones. Remember when that dude came around with the ridiculously impractical shoe, and they wanted to fit in it so that they could marry the prince? The shoe didn’t fit, and the dude moved on to find someone else (Cinders), end of story. Imagine if the story was different, though. Imagine that somehow that slipper was the only shoe they had ever seen or heard of, and the prize wasn’t a boring prince, but was societal acceptance and feeling worthy and valid. Imagine if they were told that they HAD TO fit that shoe, because it was the right shoe for everyone, and that if they didn’t fit, then there was something wrong with them.
This is what we are all doing to ourselves, to try and fit into this shoe, er, society:
It is so silly, and so simple, and yet, it is what we do.
Why? Because our brains are clever, and have cognitive biases where they only scan the environment for things that fit into the current worldview already (there’s a longer explanation for this that genuinely can be proven and described in neuroscience terms). For generations, we’ve been seeing people wearing these shoes, and being loved and accepted for fitting. The people who naturally fit into these shoes walk so elegantly! We want to walk elegantly in them too!
There are two basic assumptions that we never develop, that I’d love for us to all start developing:
1. There are other shoes.
2. We are more lovable when we wear shoes that fit. Or go barefoot, whatever.
To re-connect this [brilliant, right?] analogy back to the Choleric world and resilience: we learn resilience to try and fit better into the shoes, when a real picture of resilience looks like learning to walk better, more gracefully, more playfully, more connected-ly, in our *own* shoes.
So, the first, and most important thing that you can do, to completely change your relationship to resilience is throw out this ridiculous glass shoe (honestly who the hell wears glass shoes?!), and…
Go shoe shopping.
(Can I tell you how happy it made me to type that?)
What does shoe-shopping look like?
Look around you, in your own life and the people you know IRL, and also on the internet (though beware of Insta-marketing and ‘perfect’ lives, because that’s another glass slipper). Find people who live lives on their own terms and seem to be thriving. Find shoes that are completely differently shaped to the glass slipper (choleric, fiery life), and start to explore how you could feel if you were not trying to fit into something that wasn’t shaped for you, but instead got to fully express who you are, and help to change the shape of the world.
And then, after shoe-shopping for a bit... come back and answer these questions. If you'd like to feel accountable, feel free to type out the answers to me. I might not be able to respond to everyone, but I promise I'll read them and be cheering you on :).
Questions to explore your own shoes:
-If efficiency was not the driving force in my life, and my priorities were all completely valid, then my driving force would be:
(Eg: beauty. Pleasure. Friendship. Food. Nourshment. Solitude. Family. Etc.)
-If for some magical reason the world changed tomorrow and I didn’t need to worry about finances and we all had a basic living wage covered, I would spend my days doing…
(Eg: hiking, drawing, writing bad literature, writing good literature, playing with children, training dogs, etc) <— note, this isn’t a question of career or productivity, and is more about things that light you up inside.
-My secret, non-choleric resume of non-productive but weird and cool skills includes…
(I’ll go first: I look good in all hats, bar none. I have incredibly dexterous toes. I am good at analogies (see above). And I can mimic the posture, walk and movement patterns of almost anybody.)
-On a personal level, I am really, really naturally good at… (write as many as possible)
(Ask a friend or a few friends, or make a public FB post about it if you don’t know. Some examples include: thinking things through in really great depth. Being deeply empathetic. Connecting with ANYONE. Walking into parties and making friends. Organising data. Style and aesthetics. Cooking. Maths. Seeing things from all sides. Identifying trees.)
Total brave-move bonus: Make a public post about what you are good at. Declare it with no qualifiers, no apologies, just stating it and being proud. Tag me so that I can cry tears of proud and loving joy.
Can you see how some of these things are not valuable by societal standards, but are still actually valuable?
-Ask some of your friends or loved ones to answer these questions too, and see what their answers are-- it can often feel easier to see the value in other peoples' "useless" traits than our own. But after seeing the value in others, try to then apply it back to yourself.
-How can you incorporate these things into your life more, even if its, for now, simply knowing that THESE are things that give you nourishment, and these are things that are an expression of who you are.
3. Herbs to help
Years ago I had a book. I can’t even remember the title, but inside there was an essay by Osho, that affected me so deeply that I still think about it. It was entitled “Rebellion not Revolution. I have long since given away the book, and couldn’t find the exact essay on the internet, but I did find these quotes, that sort of give the gist of it:
“Revolution is an organized effort to change the society forcibly, violently. But the trouble is, you cannot change the society through violence, because it is violence that is the very life current of the society. That’s why all the revolutions have failed. And there is no possibility of any revolution succeeding, ever."
“Rebellion is individual, nonviolent, peaceful. It is out of love. Rebellion is not against something, but for something. Revolution is against something, but not for something. Revolution is so much engaged in being against, it forgets for what all this fuss is being made. It is anger. But anger cannot create a better society. Rebellion is not oriented against the society, but is oriented toward a new man, a new humanity."
“Revolution is fighting with the past.
Rebellion is meditating for the future.”
I know we’re talking about resilience here, so you’d expect a bunch of adaptogens to be thrown at you (they help to raise your stress tolerance and increase energy levels). But, I think you’re getting by now that this isn’t a normal email about resilience.
So I’m not talking about adaptogens.
I’m going to talk about herbs for rebellion.
Rebellion arises from deep within, and isn’t centered around THE THING, whatever that thing is. We can go back to the shoe analogy, because I like shoes:
Imagine if we all started resisting glass slippers. Resistance looks like a subtle (or intense) layer of tension that is ANTI-glass slipper. When looking for new shoes from a place of resistance, the glass slippers are still centered: what I want is NOT GLASS. Not a slipper. Not a shoe that is too small. Regardless of the deeper intention (something new that fits), while resistance is running the show, the glass slipper stays at the center of the picture.
We resist for many reasons and I’m not disparaging it: I think that resistance helps to shift the flow of tides; resistance starts to create change; and resistance can be necessary to make a shift to feeling empowered. But if one is able to shift from resistance to rebellion, then it frees up a lot of energy (you’re not pushing back against something that has a lot of momentum— resistance is exhausting), and also, quite honestly, it feels good. Hopeful. Sometimes even exciting. Not only that, but because rebellion comes from a place deep inside all of us, there’s something deeply authentic and true about our own rebellions, however they look. Because rebellion leads you to find YOUR shoe, without the glass slipper being any part of the narrative that leads you there.
So when I think about rebellion, I think about realigning focus, away from the glass slipper, and back into the self (for what its worth, this ‘self’ can be an individual, but it can also be a community, a culture, an ecosystem. Think of how, for example, plants will just take over a concrete structure. They don’t push *against* the structure, they just grow, and the structure is consumed by wildness.)
Herbs for rebellion:
Rosa spp. // Rose
I have a 3/4 finished monograph on rose, that I’ve been writing for years, that I can never get quite right because it’s ROSE, and sometimes it feels impossible to fully describe something that you know so well, and feel so close to.
But, the basic concept in the monograph, that weaves its way through every section is this:
Rose is the medicine of rebellion.
It is the medicine of rebellion because it teaches us about softening to our own heart medicine, and about boundaries, all at the same time. It is rebellion medicine because it springs up where it wants to, pushing through cracked earth, to rise like fists pushing through dried up stream beds not with force but by growing softly. It is rebellion because it is common as muck and yet if you’ve stood downwind from a patch of wild roses on a hot summer day, and inhaled, you’d think that there was nothing more beautiful than common, annoyingly ubiquitous, untamed, tiny little pink flowers unfurling towards the sun.
It is rebellion medicine because of what it starts inside us: where it touches our own hardened areas of resistance, and the areas we’ve contorted ourselves to try and fit into shoes or societies alike. You contract an area of yourself for long enough and it loses blood flow, and then our neurons stop wiring to connect that place to the rest of our bodies— use it or lose it. Just as it doesn’t force its way through the earth, it doesn’t force its way through us either. It… touches us, and we soften willingly. It touches these scarred, solid places deep inside us where we are convinced that we are not enough, or that it’s too much, or that behind the wall is a horrific version of imperfection that we couldn’t possibly face, and it starts to soften willingly in response. Not because its being pushed, but because I truly believe that nothing can stand in resistance to something that feels so much like unconditional love and acceptance.
The rebellion is created from a thousand soft hearts beating individually at their own pace, pushing through their own patches of dried up earth, not with force, but by being.
Take it as:
Tea. Infusion. Essential oil. Tincture. Elixir. Bath. Oxymel. Hydrosol. Try it all. Douse yourself in roses.
Damiana // Turnera diffusa
Damiana’s pleasure medicine is rebellion medicine, because it, like rose, helps to soften our hard places.
Courage is an interesting word. Derived from the Latin ‘coraticum’ which translates to ‘heart’, it is used in modern life to mean bravery, when in fact it is so much more. You see the word ‘corage’ refers to the heart as being our innermost feelings— our innermost, truest selves. And courage is the quality of mind that allows one to meet danger without fear. So really, courage is, in a way, the ability to meet the world with your innermost self.
For so many, modern life is an overstimulating, threatening place. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t experienced trauma, often significant, and I don’t know a single person who isn’t driven to retreat deep inside themselves at some point or another, in response to the reminders that life throws at us.
Damiana is courage medicine, drawing us out, into our bodies, into inhabiting ourselves, so that we can meet the world head-on. More fully. With our whole hearts.
It takes courage, in this day and age, to come out to the surface, to let our nerve endings touch the world and to be touched in return. It takes courage to express ourselves fully. And it takes courage to allow ourselves to feel pleasure, to deserve pleasure, especially if it’s trauma that has driven us away from the surface in the first place.
All of this, return to self, return to feeling, is the ultimate rebellion. Taking the authority out of other peoples’ hands and putting it back into our own sense of interoception, and re-learning to navigate the world from a place of embodied feeling.
Take is as:
Infused oil, tincture, elixir, tea, infused honey, bath.