Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity

Whether or not you think of yourself as a hero, chances are the adversity in your life has caused you to walk the hero's journey. Discover what that journey entails (illustrated by your instructor's own life) from initial call to adventure through the ordeal and rebirth, until stepping into your new truth in a world that no longer seems as ordinary as you'd once thought.

Learn how humans have nurtured a spirit of resilience for thousands of years through instinct, "deep listening," the Golden Rule, rites of passage, and faith (whether spiritual or not). Studying these practices, scientists are now confirming and promoting some of these techniques as ways to process adverse experiences and return to harmony.

Humans have always experienced periods of acute stress, and we have the nervous system to prove it. Explore how the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for the fight-flight-freeze response, and how the parasympathetic nervous system relaxes the body when the cause of stress has passed. But if the cause of stress becomes chronic, serious long-term health consequences can result.

We often think of physical resilience as our body's physical strength and fitness (the stronger we are, the quicker we'll bounce back). But that's only part of it. Learn about the additional skills needed to recover well from physical stress, illness, or injury. You'll see that building physical resilience is not just what you do, it's also how and why you do it.

We've been socialized to believe positive emotions are good and negative emotions are bad, but that is far from the truth. Our emotions are simply our individual responses to the situations we experience; we can accept, pay attention to, and learn from all of them. Explore some coping mechanisms for regulating your emotions, which some scientists see as the single most vital aspect of resilience.