5 STEPS TO BUILD RESILIENCE AND EMERGE STRONGER
Unexpectedly, trauma happens. It is defined as both a deeply distressing or disturbing event, or physical injury. Currently, we are in the second month of COVID-19 “stay-at- home-order,” in the United States. As a nation, as a world, we are traumatized by this pandemic, the loss of loved ones, colleagues, jobs, and the loss of our old familiar way of living. We have no road maps for how to cope with this level of global trauma as individuals, communities, nations or our planet. We find our way as we go, sometimes through resistance, or perhaps strength and grace. Either way, we are given the opportunity to grow and build resilience — the capacity to recover quickly from sudden difficulty or trauma.
As an Integrative Medicine physician who helps patients restore health and wellness, I offer you 5 steps to build your resilience, and emerge stronger from the COVID pandemic.
Step 1: Acknowledge Your Strengths: How have you been a stable rudder through this unprecedented time? Is it in your ability to adjust through flexibility, and create new solutions in the moment? Or finding new ways of living, communicating, creative expression, exercising, finding joy, even in the darkest of times?
So many working parents have had to adjust to working from home, while home schooling their children, keeping a clean home, being a family social organizer, or caretaking. Perhaps you live alone and now have more time on your hands than you’d like. No one has escaped having to adjust to a new way of seeing life and showing up; we have been given an opportunity to recreate a better way of living as one world.
Much of the time, in the shock of an acute trauma, we look like “deer in the headlights.” The bright lights mesmerize us — fear of the unknown, what is coming at us. We may feel ungrounded, overwhelmed and incapacitated. Yet, if we shift our focus, for a moment, away from the blinding fear, we access deeper wisdom that moves us away from danger. In that moment we tap into our awareness and inner strength which mobilizes us toward the solution. This inner strength makes us resilient.
Step 2: Practice Flexibility — When you allow yourself to let go of habitual responses, you can come up with an alternative solution in the moment. When you step out of an old pattern with a fresh response, avenues open to authentic living. As we had to quarantine and stay-at-home, most of us scrambled to learn new technology, that maybe we were meaning to get to, but now our work and communication demanded it. Did you kick and scream, or gracefully learn as fast as you could? Perhaps you were the one teaching, helping others to be more proficient with the technological challenges. Either way, new technological avenues opened that now allow for more productivity and social connection. Suddenly, teachers had to take their classrooms online, while students were no longer in the physical classroom. Everyone had to adjust, especially working parents, who then had to manage the compaction of working from home and home schooling. That flexibility has led to more connected family dynamics, and versatility in living as we move forward.
Step 3: Cultivate Creativity — When faced with the sudden loss of the way we had been living, we were given the opportunity to create something new. Perhaps that creativity has been dormant for years or a lifetime. Suddenly, we realized, it’s time to explore and bring forth this creative expression. Perhaps you painted, wrote, made people laugh to help them heal, served others through making masks, started a new business, or invented a new technology that makes life more efficient. Maybe you just found creative ways to view your situation. Whether you take a concrete step or shift your perspective within, life is made easier, more productive, fulfilling, somehow improved.
Step 4: Find Courage: Facing this sudden shift in life as you knew it, in the face of a global pandemic, takes courage. Appreciate what is meaningful and invaluable: your health and wellbeing, your family, the sustainability of our communities, healthcare, businesses, education system, and the environment. Having the courage to find new solutions for the benefit of the greater whole. Solutions that will continue to evolve through our courageous unity.
Step 5: Develop Your Capability to Adjust: How are you adjusting to an on-demand lifestyle upheaval, and a constantly shifting new normal? What did you shed, that no longer serves you? Perhaps, you are letting go of being so busy that you didn’t take care of your health, spend enough time with your family and friends, meditate, relax, or relish being in nature. Now you can embrace those opportunities. Perhaps, you were often distracted by the demands of work that now seem much more manageable, in light of everything you have been juggling being at home. You may have a newfound appreciation for your home and the people you love, who in the beginning, were driving your crazy, but now you enjoy more than ever, as you’ve watched each other grow and adjust.
Take a moment and reflect, acknowledging your ability to be resilient. How have you discovered new ways of expressing your authentic self and ways of living? By taking this opportunity thrust on us by a global pandemic, we can each emerge with a greater sense of our innate capabilities, finding new solutions to outdated ways of living in relation to our health, our families, communities, the natural world and the planet. As we participated in the flattening-of-the curve, and witness environmental changes of cleaner air and water with the global reduction in gas emissions, we can emerge saying, “We did it — together!” We emerge stronger, creating a better way of living for ourselves, families, communities and the planet, because we are all in this together. Now, going forward, we can take the new awareness, capabilities and resilience to create a healthier world for us all.
