Three Doors to Resilience

From Sandy Davis' newsletter:

In order to generate lots of “zillience,” I recommend that you have at your disposal three different ways to “come back to your senses.” That way, no matter what challenges you face, you will have not one, but a choice of three different steadying practices on which to lean. You can rely on any one, two, or all three to sustain your personal energy in a state of zesty coherence.

The Front Door

The first zillience-generating practice I recommend to everyone is a daily centering practice. This is the most straightforward way for you to slow down and calm yourself. When you take time do whatever centering practice works best for you, you intentionally let everything around you fall away so that you can create an inner place of centered stillness.

With practice, you teach yourself to turn off the incessant “chatter” in your mind for short periods of time so that you can just “be.” In doing so, you can gain a huge amount of control over your ongoing emotional states. Using techniques as simple (and infinitely portable) as deep breathing, you can open up new choices about how to handle upsetting circumstances effectively and gracefully.

In a sense, your centering practice is the “front door” to re-energizing yourself. It’s the closest and easiest door to walk through, and it arguably provides the most “bang for the buck.” You can do most centering practices anytime and anywhere. Even better, doing them needn’t cost you a penny. After you spend time in the state of intentional inner stillness that you become skilled at creating for yourself, your mind and spirit will normally feel well refreshed and re-energized.

The Side Door

The second zillience-generating daily practice I recommend to everyone is regular aerobic (i.e., vigorous) physical exercise. By exerting yourself physically either every day or every other day, you can strengthen your heart, revitalize every cell in your body, and, over time, you can develop great physical stamina. An abundance of scientific research has established that regular exercise also serves to strengthen your immune system, prevent all sorts of life-threatening diseases (including various forms of cancer), generate new neurons in your brain, contribute to your emotional stability, help you control your body weight, forestall the onset of dementia (including Alzheimer’s Disease) and, when all is said and done, lengthen your life measurably.

You can think of exercising as a “side door” to re-energizing yourself and building up your zillience. It’s a door that may be a bit less obvious than the “front door.” For many, choosing to walk (or run or cycle or swim) through this door it is more of a challenge. Strenuous exercise requires significantly more physical effort than centering practices that focus on stillness.

As a way to “come back to center,” however, physical exercise can be just as effective as doing a “pure” centering practice. When you are moving continuously and are at one with the cadence of your stride, the rhythm of your stroke, and/or the meditative quality of your repetitive movements, you can experience the paradox of being physically in full motion while simultaneously being totally focused and still inside. Athletes refer to this delicious state as “being in the flow.” Attaining this state is a second reliable way to “come back to your senses” and dwell in a restorative place of centered stillness.

Exercise offers an additional benefit for those of us who sometimes feel stuck and/or depressed. Just as it is impossible to keep your eyes open when you sneeze heartily, when you are physically moving through space by dint of your own willful exertion, it’s impossible to feel stuck. For the duration of your exercise session, “stuckness” falls away, and you benefit from experiencing the opposite of being stuck. You have an irrefutable experience of “being in motion.” This experience is “priceless” because positive (physical) experiences trump negative (mental) thoughts.

The Back Door

If centering practices are the front door to developing more zillience, and regular vigorous exercise is the side door, the “back door” can take the form of a daily creative practice.

I define a creative daily practice as an intentional creative activity that normally falls outside of the domain of whatever it is you do for a living. You want your creative practice to be a genuinely refreshing and re-vitalizing counterpoint to everything else that you are obligated to do. You want it to provide you with a surefire way to re-connect you to your deepest passions. You also want it to be focused on developing something new, whether it be a new personal experience, a gratifying new result, or even an enjoyable new identity fragment such as: “I’m an artist.”

When you zero in on an activity that meets these criteria and then give yourself permission to purse some aspect of it every day for an average of at least 15 minutes, you will begin to systematically develop your own creativity in ways that cannot otherwise be done. You will also likely rediscover how inspiring it is to become entranced repeatedly by an enjoyable activity that tantalizes you to grow and be more at one with your own authentic self. This, in turn, can lead to your reconnecting with the joy of expressing your deepest values ever more fully and ever more creatively.

You will also likely experience the encouraging sensation of “not being dead yet.” Your creative practice can supply you with repeated compelling evidence that you are still alive, still capable of self-discovery, and still capable of learning “new tricks.” (You can teach old dogs new tricks; old dogs just have to practice with sharper attention.)

In the process of getting entranced with whatever creative practice you choose for yourself, you can become so singularly focused that you lose track of time and of all your other concerns. Just as when you are doing your centering practice or exercising vigorously, everything else can fall away, thereby paradoxically enabling you to reach a similar place of centered stillness.

By way of distinctions, note that your creative practice usually requires you to do some form of “not doing anything.” In contrast, your creative practice works only when you are actually doing something. Thus, your daily creative practice is somewhat of an inversion of your centering practice, and hence it has an inherent “back door” quality.