My recent trip to India taught me a lot about my own patterns and conditioned beliefs around strength and resilience.
Mainly, I noticed I was pushing myself where it was totally unnecessary, always trying to do the more local thing. Walk and bike in crazy traffic? Totally fine, if local elders are doing it I can too. Stay somewhere with a lot of noise and it’s not as clean as I want it to be? I should be able to handle at least this much!
On top of that, India has so many wondrous activities, places, foods, treatments, classes, workshops and tours and I wanted to do them all.
Well, my body that is infinitely more intelligent than my mind and much more aligned with my soul said it was enough.
So I’m actually writing this from bed from being ill in various ways for almost 3 weeks.
I realized doing all of these things was very, very subtly feeding my ego and was more about that then actually feeling good, aligned, connected, and doing what I really want to do.
And underlying was a desire to build physical resilience, to put myself in tough situations in case “shit hit the fan.”
Talk about conditioned survival mode.
As I thought about why, I realized there’s a societal obsession with toughness, and perhaps also the adventure that comes with it. We also have classic action TV and movies that focus on literal physical toughness and pushing yourself to those limits, but also perhaps more subtlety the American dream type stories about rags to riches.
But the quiet hours of fevers and bedrest once again directed me to look within and find something different - spiritual resilience.
So what is spiritual resilience? A few qualities would be:
- not wavering from your path even if you’re afraid or it’s not what others want you to do
- not compromising your values to someone else's
- for the sake of your path and values, making difficult choices
- saying what you really want to say and doing what you really want to do
I know these sound vague. But it’s because what spiritual resilience looks like externally depends entirely on the individual.
Spiritual resilience can look like pushing through rough conditions. It can also look like removing yourself from the situation and changing the environment.
Spiritual resilience can look like doing more, or it can look like doing less.
Spiritual resilience can look like fulfilling someone else's request, or it can look like saying no and making space for yourself.
Spiritual resilience can absolutely look emotionally or physically weak.
And I say this because it’s usually the opposite of what society idolizes, such as physical and emotional “toughness”, that is actually the more spiritually resilient choice - because it strips down the walls that the ego has built up.
The most important thing is knowing your personal path and conditioning, and what spiritual resilience looks like for you. Discerning between your ego’s will from your souls truth.
Breaking down these walls and creating spiritual resilience is what gives you both internal freedom and happiness, and external autonomy.
To your becoming,
Ai