Finding Resilience ($)

Resilience is the wisdom to recognize the value of failure and commitment.

“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” —Nelson Mandela, political leader and philanthropist

Resilience

What you gain from reward is not strength, it’s support, and support creates vulnerability. Rewards also create boundaries, and we need boundaries to create safety and a sense of direction. But boundaries are a liability when we need to change or change direction.

We build strength from adversity. Adversity arises in situations that strip us of our needs. Being strong amounts to either being able to recover one’s needs, or being able to defend one’s needs, or not having needs.

Insulating yourself in a rewarded position creates weakness, especially rewards you can’t control. These rewards could be material, like money and crops, or emotional, like prestige and authority. If these rewards come from within yourself, then you are strong. If they depend on the opinions of others, then you’re weak.

Vulnerability is not weakness, but it’s close to it. It’s a potential weakness. Vulnerability means you depend on support. You can use this to your advantage by working to overcome it, and it can be an asset if it helps you empathize with another person’s needs, but you want to be invulnerable at your core. Be vulnerable to new understanding.

You gain strength by learning to protect what satisfies your needs and by sustaining yourself in challenging situations. If you are not challenged, you will not build resilience, and lessons in wisdom will threaten you.

Rewards

No matter how noble or visionary, we all seek rewards or are satisfied with them. This is the pretext of evolution, that rewards direct change, and despite rewards often being misleading, the future is defined by them.

We might elevate ourselves by seeking the higher rather than the greater reward. But rewards are set more by those who offer them, and less by those who seek them. As a result, the overall benefits are those that meet the goals of power, and not the higher goals of justice, morality, or truth.

The smarter among us seek smarter goals, but who’s to say what smarter means? The same people who offer the rewards, that’s who. So we’re left in a situation where we either find our own rewards, which we give ourselves, or we follow the leaders. And what the leaders provide is mostly what short-term thinking desires: security, comfort, and self-satisfaction.

Most of my therapy for others and myself comprises redefining rewards. This amounts to reconsidering goals. The problem usually boils down to recognizing that each person’s needs are different and not what they’ve been told or believe. We disparage money as a reward, but money has one aspect that’s essential to health and higher consciousness: it’s conceptual.

The best rewards are those that address how we feel. We often say necessities come first, but necessities are relative, feelings are absolute. We can change them in the future, but in the present they define us. Finding rewards that satisfy your deepest feelings are as deep as we can get.

Vulnerability

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