Ashok Gupta defines resilience not as avoiding being knocked down but as how quickly you return to center. He outlines three steps: relaxing your nervous system, retraining your brain for specific triggers, and re-engaging with joy to strengthen recovery capacity.
Our friend Rocky from Snow Patrol, our friend that, you know, we were talking about resilience. If you want a visual representation of resilience, he is it. Right. So essentially in our lives, let's say we're calm and centered. Yeah. Actually, I'll bring Rocky closer so he has his own. His own shot there. There we go. So Rocky, you know, he's going through life, he's feeling fine, then all of a sudden the situation comes into his life and inevitably, like we all do, we get off our center. So we may become stressed, we may become anxious, we may feel some grief. So we come off our centre and what resilience is. Resilience isn't the fact that you've come off your centre. Yeah, that's perfectly normal. What resilience training is about is how quickly. And not that it's a race, but how soon and how effectively can you come back to your center through. If it's grief, you go through the grief cycle. If it's anger, there's understanding and reconciliation. If there's anxiety or fear, it's about acceptance of certain situations. So how quickly can you come back to your center? And this is how the three Rs are working. So general relaxing the nervous system just makes this more flexible rather than you get stuck in different situations. Retraining the brain is specific. So if something specific is bothering you, that's taking you off your center. Retraining the brain is dealing with that specific particular issue. And re. Engaging with joy once again is strengthening that nervous system that although there may be things that take us off our center, most of the time we're able to feel uplifted and positive through really being in the moment. And those three Rs then leading to that sense of resilience. So never should we feel bad that we come off our center. We all do. That's perfectly normal. It's a part of being human. And so, you know, some people say, oh, I've been meditating for 10 years and I still got angry at that person. You know, it's perfectly fine. We are all works in progress. We're all works in progress, all of us. And that telling ourselves off or thinking, oh, I shouldn't have done that, that just makes things worse. You know, it's instead, okay, I accept myself that I responded or reacted in that way. That's perfectly okay. And now what tools shall I take to help bring me back to my center?
