For a wise woman once
told Her that Her tears
were the most
healing waters of them all
Rise Sister Rise – Rebecca Campbell
Can joy be part of resilience in challenging times? This post explores how developing resilience and a kind of joy in small moments can help us through the most difficult times.
Joy as my Word of the Year in 2018
Joy is my Word of the Year for 2018. I’m reflecting on my experience of JOY this past year in a series of posts here.
I’ve realised that each quarter of the year delivered a new lesson and experience about finding joy:
- alongside deep grief
- and resilience in challenging times (this post)
- in travel and being away from home (to come soon)
- in creative work and my calling (to come soon)
I hope you find these reflections valuable for your own journeys with joy, grief, resilience, creativity and wholehearted self-leadership. And I look forward to your thoughts and experiences too on these issues and feelings.
Joy and resilience in challenging times
In the second quarter of the year, we faced extreme challenges as a family. Circumstances that took us all into unfamiliar territory. Again and on the back of the first quarter’s experiences, I had to work out where any sense of joy and optimism sat alongside all of this.
A book helped me immensely at this time: Rick Hanson’s Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakeable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness. Practical, positive and based in neuroscience, this book focuses on 12 hard-wired inner strengths and how to cultivate them.
I read this book as an audiobook while driving and also an ebook when at home, dipping into its wisdom whenever I could. A toolkit of psychological resources and strategies, it helped me realise the resources I already had for navigating this extreme time. It also provided simple but powerful tips for changing my mind-set as I dealt with significant pain and challenge.
Resilient practices and joy
The two practices prompted by reading ‘Resilient’ that helped me most were:
- Honouring my psychological resources
- Feeling the beauty of joy in small ways as well as feeling pain
Honouring my psychological resources
Having been through a fair amount of pain, challenge and loss in my life, I’ve built up psychological resources to be more resilient and strong. We all do this. Everything we go through teaches us if we are open to the lessons.
At times, I have had to dig deep and be reflective, talk to special friends and professionals. I’ve learnt when to spend time alone, when to practice self-care and how to balance my needs with others. Tough lessons all and with more challenges stretching me, I dug deep into my learning this year and I learnt more. I am much better at contacting people and talking when I need it now rather than battling on alone.
I sought help from a psychologist to check in on my well-being and psychological resources at this time. This was positive and encouraging as someone trained and objective listened to what was happening and how I was dealing with it.
She provided valued feedback that I was doing well at this challenging time considering all that had happened and was happening. This helped me feel more self-compassionate and self-confident even as I felt overwhelmed. Perhaps not a feeling of joy, but it certainly helped me immensely. I was ready for a series of sessions if need be. But I found for this time, one session and conversation was enough to feel stronger and self-reliant, drawing on my personal resources.
Feeling beauty in small everyday joys as well as feeling pain
A big learning this year has been that it is okay to feel the beauty and joy of everyday things even as we feel immense pain.
Rick Hanson reminds us we can take an approach of gratitude:
Thankfulness is not about minimizing or denying hassles, illness, loss, or injustice. It is simply about appreciating what is also true: such as flowers and sunlight, paper clips and fresh water, the kindness of others, easy access to knowledge and wisdom, and light at the flick of a switch.
This ability to acknowledge and feel concurrent truths helped so much. One helps to balance and provide grounding for the other. I have found special joy in swimming, reading, writing, tarot work, sitting in the sun, cups of tea, coffee and connection with special friends and family at this time. These simple acts were a blessing and wisdom that helped me move through so much.
Feeling all the feelings
Sometimes we just need to acknowledge and accept that things are terrible and dark and find the points of resilience and strength that will get us through. In this way, we can discover transcendent energies we can tap into. They fuel us and help us strengthen wholeheartedly for life.
As a person with INTJ Jung/Myers-Briggs® personality type preferences, feeling is something I have worked on over time to balance my natural tendency and strength for thinking and logic. I am much better at working with both the head and the heart now. Through this time I learnt to experience feelings more deeply – sadness, anger, exhaustion, helplessness, frustration, fear, worry, pain. There were plenty of feelings moving through me.
I’m more open to going through feelings as a process step to the next stage rather than going around them. Especially through my intuitive work with Amber Adrian over time and her writings on All the Feelings, I’ve learnt to lean in and really feel my feelings. Crying and physical expression of feelings were part of this too. Amber has reminded me to ask “What next?” with feelings. In this way, we can move on and through, clearing out and moving onto the next stage of what we are dealing with and our response.
Joy and resilience
So there wasn’t so much joy in this second quarter of the year. It certainly didn’t feel joyful and at times, it was just very dark. In response to my post on joy and grief on Instagram, Cheryl Haezebroeck aka @the_intrepid_goddess shared that:
I love how a word of the year is such a learning experience because not only is the Word featured but the shadow is there too for our awareness and healing.
This is true. We can’t expect it all to be our stereotypical version of a word. Nor can we expect it to be all sunshine and light just because we choose a positive word, as lovely as that would be.
The lessons are often deeper and more long-standing involving shadow work. As I learnt with joy and grief, understanding the ability to live with paradox in challenging circumstances made all the difference. I was able to carve out small spaces of the day to manage self-care and practice resilience as I dealt with the most extreme worry.
And in the smallest moments, joy found a place in my heart and kept me hopeful, optimistic and confident that I knew what to do. These moments sustained me and kept me strong as I drew deeply on my resources to care for both myself and loved ones.
Have you experienced something like this? How have joy and other positive practices helped you with being resilient? What have dark circumstances taught you about the paradox of joy and resilience? Share your thoughts in the comments or on social media – Facebook or Instagram.
Find Your Word process + tools
First though, some information on the process and tools that can help you. If you have never worked on a Word of the Year, it’s a powerful process. Susannah Conway has a fabulous free Word of the Year ecourse available each year that I often dive into. It works really well alongside the Unravel Your Year process and free workbook that Susannah also creates and generously shares each year. I’ve been working through both processes to review my year and plan for the next one since 2014.
I credit these practices with contributing to deep realisations about where I was stuck and needed to make change. For the first few years, I found I was writing the same goals each year and not achieving them. This was mostly about writing books and making space for creativity in my life. Each year was swallowed up by work and my creative goals kept getting lost.
In 2016, I started doing things differently and began to make my transition and now at the end of 2018, I am two years in to my change journey and life is very different. It’s much more in line with the dreams and visions I had way back in 2014!
Amy Palko also offers My Word Goddess Readings with suggestions for your word for the year linked to a Goddess of the Year. Also a practice I have invested in for a few years now, it provides valuable intuitive insights and suggestions for words that might help drive your year’s energy positively.
You might also enjoy:
Joy and grief: the paradox and wisdom of finding joy alongside deep grief
Finding JOY in the everyday – reflections on my Word of the Year for 2018
Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love
Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story
Keep in touch + read the books that shaped my story
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