Mindful resilience is the capacity to remain actively aware, creatively productive, constantly learning, happy and effective in life and at work, even when faced with pressure, stress, and tension from both within our mind and from our external environment.
If you’ve gone on meditation and mindfulness retreats yourself, you’ll know the wonderful feeling of being inspired to take mindfulness back to the real world. Fast forward to the moment you touch down at home, back to your usual routine, and you find the state of mind you attained on your retreat, hijacked from you.
Sustaining mindfulness isn't challenging for you alone. This challenge inspired Toby from Toby Ouvry Meditation to come up with a well-rounded and resilient mindfulness training to enable people to develop mindful resilience as a way of life through mindfulness and meditation practices.
Below is a list of what Toby believes, from practical experiences, are key practices to developing mindful resilience:
The capacity to relax into tension and other forms of stress
Inevitably, life throws us stressful situations that puts our bodies in states of tension and stress. In order for your mind to be resilient under the pressures of these unavoidable circumstances, it helps to understand how to relax into these tensions and other forms of stress.
Learning to relax into tension prevents these negative emotions from hindering effective functioning. Experiment with different ways and activities that help you feel relaxed when you're feeling stressed, whether it be by spending a minute or two doing breathing exercises, journaling or engaging in yoga.
It also helps knowing how to redirect your stress so that you are actually making use of it. For example, if you are feeling angry, try redirecting more energy towards positive action and speech, rather than wallowing in negative thoughts and allowing it to become destructive.
The ability to create and sustain a positive inner dialogue with yourself
Within our own minds, we have inner conversations going on all the time. In being mindful, it's important that that dialogue is positive and productive wherever possible for a sustainable peace of mind, increased resilience, and enhanced creativity.
It’s equally as important to know how to deal with the negative and difficult aspects of self-talk when it arises. Remember, however, that this takes time and practice. When you notice negative self-talk happening, take a moment to replace those negative thoughts with positive ones. For example, when you find yourself thinking “I can’t do this”, you could instead, ask yourself, “What can I do to make this easier?”. Doing this helps you to challenge these negative thoughts in order to rise above them.
A commitment to appreciating both the good and challenging in your life
A practitioner of mindful resilience commits to both noticing and dwelling upon the good in your life whilst also learning how to appreciate and genuinely value learning and growth facilitated by the challenges.
Focus
To be resilient, you need to train your mind to be strong, to be able to focus and concentrate, both when the object of mindful concentration is just one thing and also when the situation demands that you be aware of multiple factors at the same time. This means being aware of the different types of focus, and knowing how to apply them appropriately.
Being truly comfortable with silence, uncertainty, and open spaces
Developing the capacity to relax into the deep and regenerative experience of stillness and silence when practicing meditation is one of the most enjoyable aspects of mindfulness and meditation.
We can learn a thing or two from our mindfulness and meditation practices to apply in our daily life. That is, to bring this ability to relax into the open spaces of uncertainty, unpredictability, and unknowing that come up time and time again in our everyday lives. Getting comfortable with, and being aware of uncertainty, unpredictability and unknowing, helps us learn from them and take the opportunities they have to offer whenever they may occur to us in life.
This article is adapted from a blog post originally written by Toby Ouvry.
You can find out more about his 1:1 coaching, training for organizations and public mindfulness classes by clicking on the links!
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