Emotional resilience: we need it if we’re going to fully engage with life. In the wise words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
To truly lean into life necessitates enduring emotional difficulty. To work hard on a high-risk project means tolerating the possibility that our effort may end up wasted. To fall in love with someone who inspires and attracts us deeply, we risk experiencing heartbreaking rejection. To dream our biggest dreams, we have to face the fact that those dreams are not a reality, and they may never become a reality.
Where most of us are at, we don’t have the skills to handle huge feelings of rejection and disappointment. As we feel them when we’re not ready, they might trigger us, causing us to lash out, or wound us in ways that take an unreasonably long time to heal. At the same time, if we avoid anything that feels intimidating or potentially disappointing, we’re not going to grow, and we’ll never live a life that feels fulfilling.
How do we find the balance? I like to use the analogy of strength training / weightlifting. If you were to go to the gym, and on your first day you tried to bench press 300 pounds, you’d probably drop the weight on yourself and end up pretty injured. The injury would take some time to recover from, and it would be a while before you end up in the gym again, if you ever do try again at all. Tragically many people are carrying injuries from a heartbreak that they weren’t ready to handle. Either the injury is still unhealed, or they’re holding onto a lingering hesitation to get back in the emotional gym.
Healthy strength training doesn’t exceed your limits like that. Rather, it involves finding out what your limits are through gentle exploration, and then intentionally biting off what you can chew, increasing the weight over time as your strength grows. You design a curriculum for yourself that takes into account what you can handle. It sometimes incorporates rest days or rest weeks where you lift well below your max weight or don’t lift at all. Other days, you intentionally push yourself, repeatedly lifting close to your max. Occasionally, you even try to lift your max weight to really test how far you’ve come and where you’re at. When you truly find that your max has increased, you usually feel an unparalleled sense of accomplishment, not to mention the fulfillment and self-trust that come from repeatedly showing up at the gym on schedule.
Unfortunately, intimate relationships with others involve a lot more chaos and uncertainty than weight-labeled plates at the gym. We can’t easily design a regimented training schedule in the realm of intimacy. However, the strength training concepts still apply. What are the emotional challenges that we face in intimate relationships? When we have sex, we often develop strong attachments that leave us fearing loss or change of the relationship. When we have a relationship with a popular partner who has high self-esteem, we fear being replaced by the many others who are drawn to them. The more we desire someone, the more we’ll feel let down if we lose the relationship with them. Other relationship challenges can relate to finances, parenting, or non-monogamy. In every case, we’ll grow best if we can try to match our challenges to our current capacity for emotional resilience, while we also look toward growing our capacity.
Tools For Resilience
In developing our curriculum and nurturing the growth of our emotional resilience, we can borrow a lot from the realm of spiritual practice. Take mindfulness meditation as an example, in which the goal is to train the mind to continually direct attention to a focus object like the breath or bodily sensations. When starting out with mindfulness meditation, it’s a good idea to practice in a low-stimulus environment: somewhere quiet, peaceful, and devoid of external distractions. As you develop the ability to intentionally focus your attention, you’ll be ready to practice in more challenging environments, such as near a noisy playground, or at home with family / roommates moving around and making sounds. Eventually, the skill will become accessible as you’re engaging with life directly. In the middle of a conversation, you’ll be able to notice that your mind is wandering and to refocus on the speaker. At work, you’ll be able to catch yourself thinking about dinner while you’re trying to be productive and gently redirect your attention back to the task at hand.
In addition to meditation, breath work can be another useful tool for developing in-the-moment emotional resilience. Distinct from mindfulness meditation, which may use the unmodified breath as a focus of awareness, breath work involves intentionally breathing in specific patterns of depth, pace, and location, to effect a given psychological shift. We can learn to use the breath to wake ourselves up when we’re feeling drowsy, pump ourselves up when we’re feeling hesitant, or soothe ourselves when we’re feeling triggered. We can find comfort and trust in ourselves as we commit to this simple form of self-care when we need it. Of course, breath work takes the same sort of training regime as meditation, starting from a place of quiet intentional practice, then gradually applying it in more and more challenging situations. For a while, I’ve said that riding my motorcycle fast is my most challenging place to practice breathwork 😅
My Own Practice
Not only do I use the tools of spiritual practice to develop my emotional resilience, but that resilience also supports my spiritual goals. I aspire to seek god through love and compassion. To be open to love requires being vulnerable to heartbreak. To be compassionate takes the willingness to encounter sorrow and to be present with it. Emotional resilience supports the courage to remain vulnerable, because you learn to trust yourself to pass through emotional difficulty and come out with a bigger heart on the other side, even if that growth takes some time for rest and recovery.
During these past two years, my heart has been broken more times than in the 31 prior years I’d been alive. It’s been one hell of a time learning to ride these waves of heartbreak, sometimes with the support of friends and lovers and sometimes on my own. Now having played a number of roles in different relationship dynamics, I have the experience to understand so many perspectives. I’ve been both the low-desire partner and the high-desire partner; the jealous lover, the hinge, and the incoming threat; the excluded third wheel and the privileged member of a couple. At this point, equanimity is becoming more and more accessible, as each position and perspective becomes relatable. I can find the capacity within myself to empathize with everyone involved in a situation, even the ones who are doing or saying things that I feel hurt by.
When I sat for the ayahuasca ceremony that I’ve previously mentioned, one of my intentions was to seek an understanding of “power”. For years, I’ve pondered the trifecta of “love, power, and wisdom”. I’m sorry to forget the source of this aphorism, but it’s been with me for over a decade. I’ll paraphrase it: “Power and love without wisdom are misguided. Love and wisdom without power are ineffective. Power and wisdom without love are dangerous and destructive. To live a good life takes all three.”
Though I didn’t find many direct answers during the ayahuasca ceremony, it set me on this path where I’m starting to learn the lessons I was looking for. Studying with the Somatica Institute and experiencing numerous relationships has led to this understanding: Power is what happens when you feel the full force of your emotions and they flow through you to motivate consequential words and actions. Wisdom informs our words and actions to lead to the intended outcomes. Love aligns our intentions with the care that we need to give ourselves and others, so that we may find wellbeing in the present and growth in the future.
Emotional resilience is key in the development of all of love, power, and wisdom. On my journey, it has been most important in the development of power. For most of my life, I would shrink in difficult situations. When emotions got intense, I would sacrifice power, numbing my emotion and not letting it out. The outcome was safe - I’d never do or say anything inflammatory, easily fading into the background, never resulting in a damaged relationship. Through emotional strength training, I’ve been developing the resilience to handle my strong emotions with care, without repressing them. As I learn to balance in the emotions, I can trust myself to hold the intensity without erupting, while also maintaining the motivation to act and speak influentially.
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About the Author
I’m a Sex & Relationship Coach trained in the Somatica method. Come work with me to learn and practice skills that help you with dating and building new intimate relationships, spicing up your erotic connections, and deepening the connection you have with your existing lovers or partners.
If you'd like to work with me, feel free to contact me with questions or book a 30 minute consultation call.
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