Emotional resilience is the ability to cope with life’s challenges, bounce back from adversity and maintain overall well-being and happiness. Developing resilience requires conscious effort, self-awareness and cultivating positive habits.
So, how can we build emotional resilience? How can we remain joyful and strong in tough times? To begin with, let us understand what emotion is — emotion is energy in motion. While we cannot control thoughts, we can control emotions. We can choose positive emotions like optimism, courage, love, forgiveness, peace, joy and bliss. All these will create PEP, Positive Energy Power. On the other hand, we can let NEP take charge of our life. NEP is Negative Energy Poison and includes toxic emotions like fear, worry, stress, anxiety, regret, guilt, shame, anger, hate, jealousy and vengefulness.
It is entirely up to us to make this choice. If we live with positive emotions, we will build resilience and strength, be joyful, but if we let our mind create toxic thoughts, we will create a recipe for disaster. We must remember that emotions create thoughts, thoughts create feelings, feelings create actions, actions create habits, habits create character, and character creates destiny. Therefore, make a conscious choice to choose positive emotions. Choose love over hate, courage over fear, forgiveness over vengefulness, peace over stress, joy over anger. It is these emotions that become the raw material of our thought factory, the mind.
But what is the mind? It is nothing but a bundle of thoughts. The MIND creates Misery, Ignorance, Negativity, Desires. If we are stuck with the mind, misery we will find. If we want emotional resilience, we will have to kill the mind, still the mind. We will have to move from the mind state to a state of consciousness, a state where the intellect shines and helps us to discriminate. Then, we will be able to choose positive thoughts and make heaven out of hell.
A wonderful habit we can inculcate is to learn to respond, not react. So remember this simple acronym — RDR: Respond, Don’t React. What we do is RDX – React, Destroy, eXplode. When we react, we end up being miserable and agitated. We cannot control other people’s actions or words or our own circumstances at times, but we can control how we respond to them.
To foster joy and strength, we must learn to live with faith, hope and trust. Belief in a higher power is key to becoming stronger and resilient. Practicing gratitude can help us count our blessings rather than focus on problems. Connecting with nature, learning from nature is another way to build resilience. The willow tree is a beautiful example of fortitude and strength. Sound and strong relationships can also help us to be happy in trying times because of the support they offer.
While all these can be instrumental in building emotional resilience, the ultimate way to joy, peace, bliss is through spirituality. Spirituality is the science of the spirit. Being spiritual is not about renunciation or living like a hermit. It is about realizing the truth of who we are are, the truth about this world. We realize that this life is only a drama, and whatever trauma unfolds in our life is because of our own Karma. We realize that death is not the end, but a bend to transcend. Acceptance and surrender, likewise, can help us build resilience. If we accept what we can’t change and surrender to the Divine Will, we will be able to be happier and more peaceful.
If we realize the ultimate truth that we are not who we seem to be, we are the Soul, the Atman, Divine manifestations, this awakening or Enlightenment will lead us to a life of true and eternal happiness, a happiness far beyond pleasure or any kind of joy experienced by the common person!
Article by AiR – Atman in Ravi: Happiness Ambassador, Author, Spiritual Mentor and Philanthropist
