Why spirituality is key to resilience
Spirituality is key to resilience
Photo by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash
Hi, friend. It’s Sherold Barr, and today I’m going to talk about spiritual resilience. Spirituality is a key component of resilience.
I’ve been doing research the last few weeks, and I’ve found an abundance of literature sightings about this subject. So today, I want to share a little bit about that.
But first, I want to share with you my own experience, what I did to be resilient and continue to be resilient. I was in a near fatal car wreck six years ago in Baja, Mexico, and I had five surgeries in 15 days, a near-death experience at the third surgery with a voice that asked me a question in between worlds. It was dark and unconscious. It was as if the words were communicated telepathically.
The voice said, “You get to choose how you go through this experience. What will you choose?”
I immediately thought, I don’t want to be a victim, so I’ll choose the high road. And to me, the high road meant to use love and gratitude to heal.
That’s what I did. I’m writing a memoir about my experience surviving and how I’ve grown my resilience through three major unimaginable traumas, how it’s led to spiritual awakenings. And I wouldn’t trade any of what I’ve gone through, the suffering, all of that, for what I have learned.
I feel like it’s my responsibility to share with you what I did so that it might help you become resilient.
Resilience is something you can build, and it builds over a lifetime.
So by the time you get to be an older citizen, you have experience, you’ve been through hardship. Now, the world has changed. We’re living in a complete new paradigm shift and we’re experiencing the angst and the uncertainty in every aspect of our lives.
We need to become resilient so we can rely on ourselves when the going gets tough, and help our friends and family.
I want to share with what I found that naturally led me to resilience and spirituality:
I’ve experienced three major traumas, and in each one, there was a spiritual awakening.
I’ve studied the art of inquiry in Byron Katie’s Institute, and had completed 700 hours of training out of 800. I just lacked volunteering on the helpline for 100 hours.
After they took me off ventilators for seven days, one of my first thoughts was I don’t need these certifications. I’m done with that.
It was like I’d realized I felt like I wasn’t a good enough until I was certified. Inquiry is a remarkable process. I find it to be the only process that will help alleviate suffering.
It doesn’t do it for me to paste a nice thought on top of what’s happening and walk around with this toxic positivity stuff. Nope. You got to go down and really ask some deep questions and find what’s really true.
One of the first things I did was to surrender. It was a natural experience, because I realized… I woke up from being unconscious after the accident and I didn’t see anyone.
I realized I was in an ambulance and things were not good. I was scared but before I passed out, once surrendered, I said,
“I’m in your hands, God.”
There’s nothing I can do here. And that’s how life is. I accepted what had happened and was powerless and now in the Boss’ hands.
We think we can control everything outside of us, but we can’t.
You can only control how you think about that. That’s why the boss gave us free will. We have a choice, always. Always got a choice how you think about hardship, adversity.
You can struggle and suffer, you can grieve, you can do it cleanly or you can do it in a dirty fashion. That’s an easy way to say it.
I surrendered, but I was very afraid. I woke up again when the ambulance arrived at this hospital in Constitución in Baja. I looked at the men with white shirts and tried to read their faces to see if this accident was going to be bad for me.
But I again surrendered. I couldn’t do anything about it, so I surrendered.
After I had a surgery, things got worse there. I needed another surgery right away, but there was a freak rain storm one of those nights, washed the road out to La Paz in two places.
The ambulance couldn’t leave until 24 hours later at 2 AM. I was aware of this problem out there and the roads were clear, but I was unconscious until we went over bumps.
I was aware I was in an ambulance and I did the same thing, “I’m in your hands, God, I’m in your hands. I surrender.”
That really got me through a lot. And then I prayed. I called on prayer, because when you get down to your knees, this is life or death. I don’t know about you, but that’s it. I prayed.
I became spiritual person now as a result of the last 17 years from these traumas, because of these awakenings. You don’t have to have a trauma to have an awakening, but I happened to do that, so I’m speaking from that experience.
Everything I say here today is really my experience. I have experienced being in the place of the true Self, which is incredible.
That’s the Buddha place, because after the near death experience, my ego, my left hemisphere was just offline. I was elevated energetically from having the near death experience. It’s like being touched by an angel. You’re at a much higher level of energy and after that experience, I was no longer afraid of dying. The experience was so vivid and the fear was gone.
I knew this was a spiritual event for me, I knew this had a lot of meaning for me. I was looking for the meaning, and that’s what I do. After having a few of these, I’m kind of on to what’s going on and I can begin to see things that I wouldn’t have see before. That’s how I did it. And what I find most gratifying is that I’m doing this research and there are four, five components of resilience.
You can build resilience. There’s five major components. I’m going to go into teaching these components.
I’ve found after all of this hardship and adversity is my truth.
I’m not afraid to die now, and that’s true of near death’ers. Somehow, this whole experience takes that away. I was afraid of dying my whole life.
The near-death experience changed who I am as a person.
For example, yesterday, we flew into Atlanta. I was with my almost 96-year-old mom. As we checked in at the curb outside the Atlanta Airport with Delta, there was a man in a motorized chair. His wife had to return the car, and after she left, he was nervous.
I could see that he was an older gentleman. I had time. John left to take our car back. I said, “I’m here for you. I’m standing here with you. I’m going to take care of you. How can I help you?”
He didn’t have the keys to his chair. She had them. So he was very concerned and upset. I just stood there and stayed there with him until she got back. I actually called her because he couldn’t seem to know how to dial his cell phone. I think he was so anxious.
At the time, I felt like that’s what I’m here for to help others. It changed me like that. I’m here to teach and share. And so now, I want to share with you some of this research I found. There was a lot of research on spirituality as a component of resilience.
I believe life is a spiritual practice. I’m going to be teaching from that place, because that’s kind of the place I’ve been. If it’s worked for me, I think it’ll work for you. This particular piece of research I’m going be talking about was well constructed piece of research.
It was aimed at older people. The ages in this research study were 50-year-olds to 90-year-olds. The mean age was 70.
What they found is that spirituality is important to a large percentage of older adult population, and it serves as a key factor of resilience.
I’m going to share the key findings. And there’s more themes that emerge, but some of the key findings were that
Spirituality is a pathway to resilience and ultimately led all the subjects in these studies to well-being and spiritual growth.
That’s exactly what happened for me. I can testify. I feel like I’m ministering here.
Key areas of spiritual resilience were:
Relationships were rooted in spirituality.
A belief structure and a complimentary worldview. Worldview, a wonderful term that can convey differences in people’s beliefs and philosophies.
For example, I have a completely different worldview than my family. My goal is to stay in the field of love to reach them and they send it back to us, because that’s all that matters. We don’t need to disagree about our beliefs. That’s what’s going on with the world out there.
Spiritual coping was another one. I’d say I’ve been in that place. A commitment to spiritual values and practice. To meditation, journaling, and then an openness to spiritual growth and transformation, because you can’t help be changed depending on Spirituality is a vital component of resilience that leads to wellbeing, and it sustains a sense of peace. This is what helped me.
Spiritual resilience is a tool I used to help me recover.
And even today, it helps me to live. Everybody has a different opinion about that, that’s your choice.
But this is what the research showed. That’s what I followed, and it’s perfect for me. These five themes emerged. Participants noted the importance of relationships with members of their social support group system significant in navigating adversity and hardship. Reliance on God is essential, not only for hardships, but with daily life.
I find it nourishing, so I’m going to use “God.” I also use “the Boss,” because God is the Boss. [laughter]
A firm and foundational belief structure or worldview rooted in belief that something greater than self is out there for understanding hardship in the context of a larger and a divinely directed process.
I completely believe that now after what I’ve been through and what I’ve witnessed. There’s a bigger plan going on because there’s been unbelievable miracles in my life. It’s incredible.
These people had faith that they could survive whatever bad thing was happening, and trust that it was meant to be.
I believe that and a belief that everything would work out and they’d survive whatever happened. And I had that belief in the hospital. I didn’t know how I’d end up, whether I could walk or whatever. I just had that belief.
Participants in the process said that continual resilience … This is so important. Listen up. The process grew stronger as they navigated hardship. Each hardship enabled them to deepen their trust in a larger process, and to shift. I wholeheartedly go with that.
Here’s two more key points:
Coping emerged as a central domain of spirituality in participants’ narratives and stories navigating hardships. It helped them make meaning of adversity as a source of comfort and emotional nourishment.
Being open to opportunities for spiritual growth and transformation was another key point of spirituality that emerged as significant to how participants navigated adversity.
I’d love to hear from you if you have anything you want to add about using spirituality to heal, to help you be resilient.
Please, share. It would mean a lot to me if you liked this video, please send it to your friends, subscribe to my Youtube channel.
Thank you for being here and watching.
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