One of my favorite words right now is resiliency.

noun: resiliency

1. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

We’ve all had a lot of challenges and difficulties in the last few months – whether they are personal to our own lives, or the world surrounding us, I don’t think there is anyone who has not been somehow affected by some aspect of current global events. It’s easy (for me, at least!) to contract against it, curl up in a little ball, stick my head in the sand, search for more comfort & escape. It’s sometimes hard for me to even take a deep breath – a breath that I know would be so nourishing & restorative – seems unsafe to expand even that little bit into the world sometimes. But I know, from all the body & feeling explorations that I’ve done over the years, we need to expand in order to contract, and we need to contract in order to expand. That can be applied to a lot of things – as simple as the breath, muscle patterns, even emotions and feelings. If we can become aware of this flow, from one edge of discomfort to the other edge of relief, then we’re able to find a constant comfort in that process so these daily challenges become more of a flow. When we practice noticing both sides of this expansion/contraction, discomfort/comfort, we gain more range to experience more, and recover more quickly when something does overwhelm us. This is always an important tool, but especially important (even essential) right now. Slow down, step back, be gentle – when that overwhelming feeling of the state of the world or the state of your own life starts to creep in, see if you can look at it with curiosity. Curiosity helps that resiliency to recover and handle the dips down when we realize it’s just one side of our own personal ebbs & flows. Continue to move, breathe, and look outward & inward with curiosity.