What is resilience?
Psychological resilience, an individual’s ability to adapt in the face of adverse conditions.1
Ecological resilience, the capacity of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations.1
Community resilience, the adaptive capacities of communities and societies to manage change and adversities over time.1
Why is it important?
Resilience is essential to living well in light of the inherent impermanence of existence. Life is precarious by nature, everything is in constant flux, shifting and changing. By cultivating our own resilience, we acknowledge the truth of the dynamism of life and we align ourselves to it so that we can bend with the changes instead of standing rigidly and being broken by change.
When we are resilient, we are adaptable. When something in our internal or external world shifts, we have the means to adapt: to change with the changes.
Weather changes, climate shifts, now quite drastically, so resilience becomes ever more important to cultivate.
How to cultivate resilience?
Basically, don’t be too stuck in a rut of rigidly clinging to the way things are right now, or wanting them to be otherwise.
Mentally, acknowledging and recognizing the inherent dynamism of all the world. Everything is changing, there is nothing static, therefore to hold to a fixed state or habit or way of being with any rigidity is a recipe for suffering, when that temporary state inevitable shifts into something else.
If we buy a beautiful teapot, we buy it, knowing that it is of the nature to break. It is fragile and breakable by nature, so if it breaks,
Likewise, we are each of the nature to die. If we hold on and build our lives as if they went on forever, this will cause great pain when we are then forced to let go by the very nature of things.
Instead, we can recognize this impermanence, or ephemerality from the start, and appreciate the short time we have with ourselves, our loved ones, and useful and beautiful objects that serve us along the way.
Mingyur Rinpoche illustrates this so beautifully: holding an object gently in your open palm, where it sits there gently, being used in a relaxed way, versus clenching it with a tight grasp, not letting it go. But it will still slip away and only leave our hand hurting from such a tight grip :)