Three Simple Ways to Find Calm and Nourish Resilience

Three Simple Ways to Find Calm and Nourish Resilience

Tame anxious thoughts, strengthen emotional agility and cultivate compassion and connection with mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is a gesture of kindness toward yourself, your family, and your community. Taking time for intentional rest, learning to build emotional agility, and connecting with your undefended heart are the skills that mindfulness practice teaches us. 

In order to give one, a gentle jump start let us tap into the field of mindfulness. These simple tips will help you navigate every day-challenges, tame worry and anxiety, tune into your surroundings with greater awareness and compassion, and allow you to tap into a deep well of resilience for yourself and for those around you. 

1. Give yourself some breathing room (This is essential.)

Let us look at the three-minute breathing space meditation. You can use this meditation to develop your ability to ground yourself whenever difficult events or emotions arise. This practice allows us to return to present-moment awareness, and to fully find ourselves at any moment, regardless of what we happen to be occupied with at the time. When we give ourselves room to be still and breathe, we can approach difficulty with more equanimity and compassion for ourselves and others.

2. Investigate your emotions.

Emotions deserve and are worthy of our attention, respect, and care. Getting familiar with how emotions feel in our body as well as our mind can help us respond to our emotions skillfully, rather than reacting mindlessly. When we allow our emotional lives to inform us, rather than control us, we give ourselves space to ask the very important question: “What is needed right now?”

3. Connect with compassion for yourself and others.

In response to painful experiences, most of us would probably like to respond with compassion, but we may not have the tools to put our intention into practice. And it is not easy. The starting point is getting in touch with our empathy and shared humanity. When we allow ourselves to actually touch with our hearts the pain of what is difficult the fear, the anger, the hurt that arises is a natural tenderness. What we want to practice is allowing ourselves to get really close to that human experience, to tend to it.

Do practice resilience by making use of the three minute-meditation. That is the way forward in all the possible dimensions of being together in calmness.

**** Written for Meridian Counseling by Trishna Patnaik, a BSc (in Life Sciences) and MBA (in Marketing) by qualification but an artist by choice. A self-taught artist based in Mumbai, Trishna has been practicing art for over 14 years. After she had a professional stint in various reputed corporates, she realized that she wanted to do something more meaningful. She found her true calling in her passion that is painting. Trishna is now a full-time professional painter pursuing her passion to create and explore to the fullest. She says, “It’s a road less traveled but a journey that I look forward to every day.” Trishna also conducts painting workshops across Mumbai and other metropolitan cities of India. Trishna is an art therapist and healer. She works with clients on a one on one basis in Mumbai. Trishna fancies the art of creative writing and is dappling her hands in that too, to soak in the experience and have an engagement with readers, wanderers, and thinkers.