As we continue into 2025 with the world becoming more complex and precarious with each day, now more than ever we need resilience. But what does this mean? Well, resilience is really about the process and outcome of dealing with life’s setbacks. How we ‘bounce back’ if you like.

It may help you to think of ‘resilience’ as four different types:

Physical Resilience: The ability of the body to face challenges, maintain stamina and recover within a reasonable time. Naturally, our physical resilience diminishes as we age.

Emotional Resilience: The ability to regulate your emotions in the face of challenging and stressful events.

Mental Resilience: The ability to handle crises and deal with challenges in your life.

Social Resilience: The ability of society and the social systems within them to recover from challenges. For example, political, social and economic challenges.

The practice of meditation is to notice how all things in life are essentially fluctuating and moving from one thing to the next. Think of an ocean wave. It begins, it peaks and then it breaks and dissipates before the cycle beings again. How well we ride the various waves on the ocean depends, in part on our resilience, particularly when we are hit with a big wave and life as we know it begins to dissolve like “salt in weakened broth” as Poet Naomi Shihab Nye once wrote

Whenever we meditate, we build resilience because Meditation teaches us to see things as they are, to understand that life fluctuates. That the waves come and go but beneath the ever-flowing current is a deeper more grounded quality within us that does not analyse, wish, prefer or criticise what is going on. It simply holds space to explore the spectrum of emotions, the heartbreak, the blissfulness and everything in between for that is the pain and beauty of what it means to be human.

It is here, in this space without force or intention, we turn towards difficulty. With a consistent Meditation practice, we dive into our own innate quality of wholeness, our inner systems nature to want balance and we cultivate that, allowing what needs to be felt to come through.

Naturally, if you are drawing on resilience, life is probably not plain sailing (or it could be the opposite). Yet, what once may have been a wipe out wave, just doesn’t hit with the same force. Sure, you’ll feel life crap but you know you are okay. You know you will get through it. You know you’ll take the pain, transcend it and turn it to power.

You’ll be OK.

With love, light and a little Ayama Magic

Nikki x