7/31/2021 The Seven Muscles of Resilience | Meg Salter

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The Seven Muscles of Resilience

 July 9, 2017  Meg Salter No Comments

Mindfulness practice can automatically build resilience. This adaptation from my

book Mind Your Life was originally published on Michael Taft’s site Deconstructing
Yourself , a great source of  information and inspiration on “mindfulness meditation
and awakening for modern mutants” .
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Why do different people respond to stress so differently? Part of the answer lies in our
individual resilience.

This ability to bounce back can make the

difference between normal stress that encourages
growth, and distress that renders us stuck or
overwhelmed.
CLICK TO TWEET
N
When you want to make it through your busy day, resilience matters. When you want
to take persistent action in your life toward positive change in the face of what can
seem like overwhelming odds, resilience really matters.

Resilience is the ability to recover, adapt and grow

in response to threat or challenge.
Resilience is a complex concept. Some factors that contribute to resilience, such as
strong relationships and robust physical health are, to some extent, the luck of the
draw. But resilience is also a capacity that you can actively foster. Resilient people
experience negative emotions and stress, of course, but they have learned to
navigate around and through crises. How do they do that? What capabilities have
they developed?

I propose there are seven competencies that build resilience. These competencies
are based on well accepted resilience assessment instruments (e.g. The Brief
Resilience Scale, The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale), and the research evidence
from the fields of adult development and personal change. I have found that clients
who develop these abilities are more able to respond to the stresses and navigate
the tipping-points in their lives. Because these capacities build the strength of
resilience, I think of them as the metaphoric muscles of resilience.

But what do these muscles of resilience have to do with mindfulness? I also happen
to be a 20-plus year meditator. This confluence of expertise in both psychological
development and meditation training helps me to propose the links between
mindfulness and the muscles of resilience.

Mindfulness as a Resilience Booster

What I want to suggest is that mindfulness can support growth in each of these
muscles of resilience. Mindfulness works like working out, buffing up your natural
resilience. You undertake practices that can initially feel odd or counterintuitive. You
practice in safe, low-risk ways, stimulating the recovery and growth mechanisms of
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the human mind and emotions. Meditating builds resilience muscles that are strong
enough to kick in during stressful moments in life, when you need them most.

Let’s look at each of these muscles of resilience and how mindfulness meditation can
cultivate each of them in turn.

Resilience Muscle #1: Ability to persist through obstacles or

failures
After experiencing a setback, a resilient person is able to try again. This bouncing
back is the core measure of resilience. Common sayings such as “Success consists of
getting back up just one more time than you fall down” point to our appreciation of
resilience.

Learning mindfulness involves continuous practice in persistence. Once you focus

your attention on something (the breath, a body sensation), you will be distracted.
Guaranteed! But every time you bring your attention back to the focus object, you
exercise the muscle of persistence. With practice, this returning gets easier. You learn
to interpret distraction not as a failure of attention, but as an opportunity to practice
persistence, until it becomes a powerful muscle you can rely on.

Resilience Muscle #2: Ability to stay focused under pressure

When faced with a challenge, a resilient person can stay focused on the task at
hand. We have all faced high pressure moments. We may know what to do, but if
we become swamped by our doubts, fears or physical tensions, we lose our nerve.
We don’t perform to the best of our ability. Athletes face this kind of pressure
regularly, and use the special term “choking” to refer to losing focus under pressure.

Mindfulness involves repeated acts of focus, which build the core skill of
concentration. You learn that your attention doesn’t just happen. It is a faculty you
can consciously direct, whether that is as narrow as the breath at your nostrils or as
wide as the entirety of your sensory experience. Because you cultivate a habit of
staying focused during meditation practice—when nothing significant is really at
stake—it becomes much easier to stay focused during the pressures of daily life.

Mindfulness Muscle #3: Ability to handle unpleasant feelings

When you are faced with a threat or challenge, your primal emotions kick in. But will
these emotions help or hinder you as you face the challenge? A resilient person is
able to experience even very strong emotions without them unduly driving or
distorting their behavior. They have developed emotional intelligence; the ability to
identify and manage their emotions and the emotions of others. They are able to sit
with even very strong emotions, can name them, can often to point to where in the
body these emotions are being experienced, and identify specific triggers. (ex:
When someone is critical of me, I get defensive and feel it as tension in my jaw.)

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Mindfulness helps you develop the skill of equanimity, which dials down the intensity,
but not the reality, of your feelings. You do not judge yourself for whatever feelings
you happen to be experiencing. If during a meditation session I notice defensiveness,
I allow myself to have a full experience of it; the tension in the jaw and shoulder, the
angry or blaming stories in my head. Just because I’m aware of these experiences
doesn’t mean I believe or endorse them. In fact, once off the meditation cushion, I
am freer to act in a rational, compassionate way. But knowing how to handle a little
bit of defensiveness during meditation means I’m much more capable of reacting
sanely when a car cuts me off in traffic, or a client blames me for something gone
wrong.

Resilience Muscle #4: Ability to stay connected with others

No one can be resilient all by themselves. A strong social network of friends, family, or
neighbors is an essential support when the chips are down. Unfortunately, when we
are stretched, too many of us are unwilling to express our vulnerability, or reach out
for help.

How can mindfulness, which is often (but not necessarily) practiced by yourself, help
you connect better with others? First, because you can actively cultivate habits of
connection and positive intention through compassion practices. And second,
because you become aware of all of yourself; the good, the bad and the ugly. Let’s
say I’m doing a compassion practice, and all I’m aware of is the defensive anger
coursing through my body. From one point of view, this is a distraction to my
intended object of focus. From another point of view, this is me; warts and all. I
become painstakingly aware of, and learn to accept my vulnerabilities and
weaknesses. So, in real life, I’m less embarrassed by myself. Less likely to think I can do
it all myself and more likely to ‘fess up and ask for help.

Resilience Muscle #5: Sense of self-efficacy

A resilient person thinks differently than others. They are less likely to feel helpless
because they do not perceive challenges as personal, permanent, and pervasive.
They believe that at least some control resides in themselves and therefore are more
likely to view a challenge as a chance to grow vs. an overwhelming trauma.

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George Bonnano, who studies resilience at the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab of
Columbia University’s Teacher College says, “Frame adversity as a challenge and
you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move from it and learn from it
and grow. Frame it as a threat and a potentially traumatic event becomes an
enduring problem; you become inflexible and more likely to be negatively affected.

Subtle is significant
While I admit it’s a subtle point, I believe mindfulness affects our cognitive skills of
perception in two ways; through an awareness of continuous change and through
an approach versus avoidance strategy to risk. Let’s go back to the example of me
experiencing defensiveness during meditation.

If I continue to focus on the sensations of defensiveness, I may notice that they ebb
and flow. The volume of stories in my head can stop and start, get louder or quieter.
The tension in my body can spread or contract. Sometimes, the tension may stop
altogether for a few blessed minutes. My assumptions about permanence and
change have been subtly impacted. With time, the experience of continuous
change becomes my new normal.

When I first experience this defensiveness, I may turn away from it, for example by
focusing on a soothing experience like the breath. But in time I turn learn to turn
toward the experience, exploring its nuances. I am unlearning a primal survival-
based response “turn away strategy,” based on bracing against challenge. Instead I
am developing a “turn toward strategy,” which helps me develop curiosity and
openness, a prerequisite for learning. Researchers such as Daniel Siegel and Mark
Epstein also surmise that a fundamental mechanism in mindfulness is the skill of
turning toward experience with an attitude of curiosity and learning, vs an automatic
bracing against potential threats to survival. If I can turn toward this longstanding
pattern defensiveness while meditating, surely it is much easier to catch it when I’m
about to blame someone else at work!

A short peak at Resilience Muscles #6 and #7

Remember our definition of resilience? Resilience is the ability to recover, adapt, and
grow in response to threat or challenge.”  Resilience muscles #1 – 5 help you through
the recovery phase: persist through obstacles, stay focused under pressure, handle
unpleasant feelings, stay connected to others and develop self-efficacy. Once you
have recovered, you have the opportunity to adapt and grow.

This is where the last two muscles for adaptation and growth come in. They are
based on the field of adult learning and development and personal change.  I’ll
review them briefly here, but you can also find more detail in Chapter 4 of my book
Mind Your Life. Resilience muscle #6 is the ability to look AT vs. Looking Through your
assumptions. It helps you learn to solve new problems, or solve old problems in new
ways.  Resilience muscle #7 is the process of personal change, which can be
initiated by the healthy dis-identification processes caused by meditation.

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A resilient person doesn’t just stubbornly persist through challenges. Failure can teach
them that they need to solve problems in new ways. But first they have to be aware
of their current way of solving problems. Most of us are blind to this. We operate on
automatic pilot, governed by unknown assumptions. We are not aware of our
perceptual filters. What we aren’t even aware of, we cannot take responsibility for,
let alone effectively resolve.

Let’s take another example. I wear contact lenses. Let’s imagine I have permanent
lenses that are slightly gray in color. Since I always wear them, I don’t know the lenses
are gray. I look through the gray lenses and behave accordingly, developing a
pessimistic attitude and defensive behaviors. Then one day, I notice I’m wearing
lenses. I take them off. Suddenly, the world looks different. I see that the gray was my
perception of the world, not the way the world is. I dis-identify from my lenses,
enabling me to look at my perception of gray versus through it.

Mindfulness can initiate healthy dis-identification and the process of personal

change by helping us to look at what we were formerly looking through. No matter
what you choose to focus on during mindfulness practice, you will become aware of
thoughts and feelings you didn’t even know you had. You see, often for the first time,
what you are actually thinking and feeling in real time. You now have an opportunity
—and a responsibility—not previously available to you. So, in the contact lens
example, I can begin to test my assumptions. I can act differently. I can ask others if
they see the situation the same way I do.

Conclusion
These seven muscles of resilience are one way to explain why something as simple as
mindfulness practice can be so powerful. Like the Tardis on the TV showDr. Who, it’s
bigger on the inside than the outside. Practically, these seven points can give you
confidence in your mindfulness practice.

If you are continually losing but coming back to your focus object, you are
developing persistence and focus.
If you are disturbed by unpleasant feelings, you are learning the first step of
emotional intelligence.
If you’re embarrassed by the contents of your mind and emotions, welcome to
your vulnerable side.
If you can face into interior challenges, you turn your stress response from brace-
fight-or-flight into turn-toward-and-learn.

With mindful attention, our normal stresses need not turn into distress. We can boost
our resilience, unleashing our personal flourishing.

If you enjoyed this, check out more mindfulness articles here.

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 Posted in Mindfulness
 Tagged emotional intelligence, mindfulness, resilience, stress

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How Mindfulness Can Build Resilience & Reveal Your Extraordinary

Learn to integrate awareness into your everyday life, including during exercise and
difficult conversations, or when trying to fall (and stay) asleep.

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In this rich resource, Integral Master Coach™ and meditation teacher Meg Salter
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