What does spiritual resilience mean?
…One of the best skills you can learn in life is to become emotionally and spiritually resilient…
You may have lost a loved one, gotten fired from your job or someone broke your heart. Life has its setbacks and misfortunes. It is inevitable and a part of a rich and meaningful life. Adversity IS going to happen sooner or later, how are you going to deal with it?
Resilience is the ability to pick yourself up and get back on track after you have faced adversity. To be resilient is a combination of being strong, tough, and flexible. To have a positive mindset and focus on adaptability and growth. Being resilient is seeing challenges as opportunities to grow.
You can be resilient in one part of your life but not another. It’s a continuum. However, we are not born with this trait, it is not an innate ability. It is something we need to build and develop over time.
By creating a toolbox filled with various practices, mindset shifts, and healthy habits, we can develop and master this trait. The necessary tools will make you better equipped to handle yourself and whatever life throws at you.
We need to learn how we pick ourselves up, and the thought process behind it, and shed awareness to our behaviors, thought patterns, and habits during and after a challenging event. These methods are scientifically proven to work and they can be used in all situations of our lives.
I am not a licensed therapist or healthcare provider. If you have undergone severe trauma, are in any type of grief or sadness, or have severe depression. Please contact a licensed therapist so you get proper guidance and care.
How to Build Resilience and Mental Toughness?
- Acceptance is key
Allow and Accept Your Emotions and Situations arising
When we have undergone trauma, rejections, setbacks, or failure. The first step towards building spiritual resilience is to acknowledge the inevitable difficulties, struggles, and hardships of life, without any judgment. Staying strong and optimistic during tough times is hard. It requires us to first feel and recognize our emotional state, embracing and acknowledging the feelings and thoughts emerging, and accepting them fully without trying to control or put judgment on them.
Accepting and Allowing Your Emotions
When harsh emotions appear due to adversity or challenges in life, it is crucial for us to accept the emotions. Whether it is sadness, anger, disappointment, or heartbreak, accept them fully and allow them to arise in you with complete understanding and non-judgment. This will, with time, expand your window of tolerance and reduce the fear of feeling emotions on the negative spectrum.
By allowing yourself to feel these emotions with an open heart, you change the way you relate to them and the desire to numb or escape subsides, with practice, entirely.
Acceptance diminishes the tendency to engage in negative self-evaluation that often accompanies a negative mood, it reduces the intensity of negative thinking patterns, leading to the gradual dissipation of negative emotions.
Here are some things you can do:
- Create space for your feelings
- Allow yourself to feel hurt, sad, frustrated, and disappointed but do not dwell on the negative emotions
- Remind yourself that those feelings are temporary and will dissipate eventually
- Fully experiencing and accepting thoughts as simply thoughts, without trying to alter or take meaning from them. The negative interpretations of your thoughts may leave you in a negative thought loop
- Do not try to numb, repress, or escape the feelings with for example medications, drugs, or alcohol.
Accepting and Allowing Situations Arising in Life
Something that most of us humans do on an everyday basis is evaluation. We evaluate our surroundings, the people we encounter, ourselves, and the situations we find ourselves in. It is in our nature. We evaluate and compare to the standards we have set for ourselves and the world around us. If the person or situation does not meet our standards we label it as bad and do not like it.
When we are faced with a challenging situation, like you missed your flight, it is easy to put judgment on it and compare the situation to your inner standards and labelings. If you consider the situation as bad you will feel bad, period. What you can do instead is think of every situation as neither good nor bad, the situation just is. Do not label it, do not put any judgment on it, just accept the situation as it is and deal with it accordingly. You never know if the situation will turn out to be of great benefit to you. As Dr. Srikumar Rao says, “Good thing, Bad thing, Who knows”.
2. Recognize your negative thought patterns
Many times when we find ourselves in challenging situations our minds can go haywire. We need to become aware of these mind traps that may bring us further down the rabbit hole of despair. Negative thought patterns or cognitive distortions as well as our inner critic may cloud our judgment and hinder us from bouncing back from adversity.
Here are some examples of negative thought processes:
- Overgeneralization
Overgeneralizing means that if you experience one negative event, you presume that all events thereafter will be negative as well.
- Catastrophizing
Catastrophizing is when you assume the worst when faced with the unknown. Eg. You do not hear from your husband in time and you presume he is in a car crash or cheating on you.
- Discounting the positive
When we “discount the positive” we solely focus on the negative and exclude the positive. If something positive happens it is dismissed as a stroke of luck. It never boils down to hard work, competence, or willpower. Credit is never taken, it is rejected.
- Should “Statements”
When we reason with “I should have ” or “this ought to”, it is most often adopted with a negative view of life and the situations occurring in life.
Our Inner Critic
We all have a little voice in our head commenting on everything that we see and experience. The problems arise when this inner critic is hindering us from reaching our goals or when it is beating us down, making us feel sad and unmotivated. An important part of resilience is to learn how to talk to your inner critic and prove it wrong. Remind yourself of all the success you have achieved so far.
Please make a list of all your achievements and repeat them regularly
3. Harness Self-Awareness
When it comes to personal development and growth, self-awareness is a key factor if you want to change, grow, and become a better version of yourself. The more aware we are of ourselves and our behaviors the more resilient we become.
Through self-awareness, we gain a deeper understanding of how feelings contribute to our actions. Rather than escaping our emotions through outer stimuli or blaming the world for our misfortunes, we dare to look within and question our emotions, thoughts, and behavioral patterns.
Self-awareness is an important aspect for us to gain so we eventually acknowledge our mistakes and take responsibility for our actions. You don’t change behavior unless you increase your awareness of it.
4. Shift Your Mindset
An inherent behavior that we humans have, is that we focus on the small negative things in an event instead of seeing the bigger picture. This behavior stems from ancient times when we needed to look for the negatives to be able to survive. Through something called neuroplasticity, we can mold and rewire our brains to instead see the positives in every situation in life.
- Gratitude
Before bed or/and when you wake up in the morning, name and FEEL three things you are grateful for
- Focus on what you have
Write down three things that you have in life that you appreciate
- Write three things you like
About your job, relationships, yourself
- Focus on what you can change in life instead of on what you can’t change
This will empower you to make the necessary changes and it will dwindle your focus on the things that are out of your control.
- Journal about traumatic events
Writing about difficult events and feelings can help you release and process the event in a wholesome way. Look at what you have learned about yourself and what you learned about the situation. This is called post-traumatic growth. We can become stronger, and better and grow from major life crises.
- Write 3 to 5 things that went well today
Focus on the small things that went well during your day. Small positive events make us feel more gratitude and joy in life.
All these practices should be practiced daily for 21 days to make a habit of the new thought processes. A pro tip is to put notes up on your wall or by your desk, where you ask yourself the above questions. Do not forget to FEEL the emotions that come with it.
5. Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a form of Buddhist meditation where you practice bringing full awareness to the present moment without any judgment. The practice entails focusing on your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and the surrounding environment.
Mindfulness is a very helpful tool for dealing with strong emotions such as anger, jealousy, or sadness. It allows you to sit with the intensity of the emotion, embody the emotion, and fully experience it. By practicing this meditation daily or using it whenever heavier emotions arise, you build courage, self-confidence, and the ability to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
By sitting in emotional discomfort you expand your window of tolerance and grow emotional resilience.
6. Locus of control
Locus of control refers to the amount of control a person considers that they have over their life. A person with an internal locus of control believes that they have a strong influence on their own life and that they have the ability to change what is in their control. A person with an external locus of control believes that life happens to them, they are a victim of circumstance, and their failures are caused by external forces, like other people or random chance and not themselves. They do not take responsibility for themselves and their life.
Resilience is accepting what you can’t change and focusing your energy and attention on what you can change. You are not helpless. You do have control of many aspects of your life.
7. Step out of your comfort zone
To effectively handle difficult situations and hardships that come our way, we must step out of our comfort zone to become more resilient. When faced with a stressful situation, our body’s fight or flight response is triggered as the amygdala is flooded with blood. This response can be mastered by exposing ourselves to mild stressors, such as taking on new challenges and stepping out of our comfort zone. With practice, we can learn how to suppress the activation of the amygdala and our emotional response. This allows us to gain control over our body’s natural response and better handle ourselves through adversity. If we fail to remain composed, the amygdala overpowers the prefrontal cortex and the emotional center, resulting in us making irrational decisions.
What to think of when you challenge yourself to suppress the fight or flight response:
Take small steps
Take one challenge at a time and increase the amount of difficulty slowly. When you finish one challenge successfully you will gain confidence and grow. Next time you take on a bigger challenge and when you succeed with that you will gain more confidence and grow.
Remember to push yourself, achievements come with tremendous work and hardship. Try to go beyond your limits for every challenge. Pro tip, it can be extremely uncomfortable when your body sets off the alarm, so remember to stay put and keep going! After the fight or flight response is triggered and you are in extreme discomfort it often takes a couple of minutes and your body calms down.
Practice, practice, practice. It takes time to rewire your brain and it takes time to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Take on 30-day challenges to build resilience:
- Water Fasting
- Cold showers
- Meditate outside in the snow
- Boot Camp Training
Get yourself out there and pick yourself up if you fail!
8. Set a goal
Set a goal and try to reach it no matter what. Do not let your emotions interfere with your success. If you do not feel like doing it today, do it even harder. This is how you overcome resistance, grow, and become a stronger, better version of yourself. And you are one step closer to reaching your goal.
By having a goal and working towards it you gain confidence and you can start counting on yourself by always showing up and doing the hard work.
9. Self-Care
One of the most IMPORTANT steps in building resilience is self-care and recovery! Taking care of yourself and nurturing yourself is crucial to be able to pick yourself up after difficulty.
Self-care should be practiced daily so you have the necessary strength to deal with everyday life.
Examples of self-care:
- Walking in Nature
- Jogging
- Exercise
- Yoga
- Meditation
- Sleep/Nap
- Reading
- Massage
10. Connect with others
Having a support network of loving friends and family members gives you the strength, love, and care that we all need to conquer our challenges. Research shows that people who have social support, live longer, have better coping strategies, and have less immobilizing perceptions of threats. Having someone to talk to when adversity strikes can also give you new ideas and perspectives on how to handle the problem at hand.
If you do not have supportive family and friends. Support networks online, a community of worship, volunteering, or any form of connection with other people, give you the same results and a sense of belonging.
Last but not least, having a good sense of humor about life makes it so much easier to live and prosper. Laughter is the best medicine.
Conclusion
Building your emotional and spiritual resilience is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Imagine a life where you are so accustomed to facing challenges that nothing bothers you anymore. You will move through life with a calm sense of ease and with a mind at peace.
How do you build your Resilience and gain mental strength? Please share your tips in the comments. Thank you for reading!
Melissa
‘Should have’ statements always get me and you’re right they always have a negative feeling connected! I’m realizing now I need to work on this! <3
spirit.expanding
I am happy my article was helpful to you ❤️ Much Love ❤️
Hayleigh
This is a great article, becoming more open to spirituality is something I’m working on atm xx
Jais
I appreciate how you emphasize the importance of spiritual resilience as a way to navigate life’s challenges. It reminds me that developing inner strength isn’t about avoiding difficulties, but rather growing through them.
spirit.expanding
Exactly.. We strengthen our soul through hardships. Thank you for your comment ❤️
Vaishali
Love all the ideas shared! Thanks!!
spirit.expanding
I am glad you liked them ❤️
Dipak
Wonderful article, I thinks it’s a good read today.
spirit.expanding
Thank you Dipak ❤️ I appreciate it ❤️
Susan
Thought provoking. Thank you.
spirit.expanding
Thank you Susan ❤
Sheenia Denae | Live Love & Blossom
I am building mental strength by learning not to take like too seriously. Great tips!
spirit.expanding
Indeed! This is a great way to build mental strength, not taking challenges and life too seriously. Thank you for pointing this out ❤️
Corrinne
This was really helpful. I need to work on my mindset, inner critic and accepting my thoughts as “just thoughts”. Amazing post. Thank you.
spirit.expanding
Thank you Corrinne! It is not easy to detach from our thoughts, they can be so real and sometimes painful. I as well need to work on my mindset. Work in progress 😉 Much love ❤️
Elaina
this is really interesting, and lots of things that we can easily implement into our daily life. Our perspective on life is everything! great post 🙂
Spirit.expanding
Thank you Elaina! I am happy you appreciated my post ❤️
The Leadership Mission
Fantastic article, thank you for writing this!
Jordan
This was a helpful article!
Spirit.expanding
Thank you Jordan ❤
Domii
Such a powerful reminder! Building emotional and spiritual resilience truly transforms how we approach life. When we’re equipped to handle challenges with ease, it’s like we unlock a deeper sense of peace and strength. You shared some great tips in your article. Definitely something to strive for!
Spirit.expanding
Thank you for your support Domi. I appreciate it ♥
Lauren
This is so valuable to keep close by! Has amazing ideas and points to read and remember! Thanks for sharing!
Latifah
These are same great tips I will try to put to use. My big thing now is identifying negative patterns and trying to stop them as soon as they show up, but this can be quite challenging, as I tend to get in my head
Spirit.expanding
Thank you for sharing Latifah 💕 Negative thought patterns are very challenging and take time to change and overcome. Good luck on your path 💕
Larissa B
The part about accepting your emotions really resonated with me. That’s the bit that seems the most difficult for me to do. I can understand them, I can rationalise them, but I keep trying to control them. Reading this has been a great reminder to allow them to exist without judgement.
Also a great insight about the locus of control, I was not aware of that. Thank you for sharing all this knowledge and advice, great post! 🙂
Eileen Burns
Lots of great tips for mental resilience what I would add is for more spiritual resilience it is important to cultivate more deeper spiritual connection to the spirit, the soul which can help build much great deeper soul connection and soul power