Joyous Resilience: A path to individual healing and collective thriving in an inequitable world

INTRODUCTION

This story is set in our deeply complex, perplexing, wondrously beautiful and terrifying world. Not every character in this story is set up to succeed as easily as another. Yet inside each person are three great forces: the power to feel deeply protected, the power to feel lovingly nurtured, and the power to be joyously free to thrive. These powers unleash a magic called resilience: the ability to live with a deep sense of inner joy, to flourish despite great stressors, and to reshape the very forces that threaten our lives in order to create a whole new world. At the heart of this book resides this core truth. Resilience matters. Joy matters. In the increasingly difficult times we live in, our thriving matters—now more than ever. Our life and well-being are our greatest wealth. Learning to nurture, grow, and sustain our aliveness is perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves and pass down to our children.

We are at a moment in history when our ability to flourish reverberates beyond our own lives. Toward the end of writing this book, I, like billions across the world, found myself quarantined and sheltering in place in an act of social solidarity to help slow down the coronavirus pandemic. In the months since this pandemic reshaped every aspect of our daily lives, it also brought into stark, glaring focus the massive inequities and gaps in community care in the United States and across the world. External stressors became so forceful, making it abundantly clear that if we don’t learn how to care for ourselves and work toward a different reality, our species may not survive. Even as the world grinds to a halt and provides the earth with much needed respite, and even as some heave a sigh of relief at being able to work from home, slow down, spend time with loved ones, or shift from constant business, many, many more are overcome with the stressors of being out of work, unable to pay bills, fearful of being evicted, already homeless and at great risk, without health insurance, stuck at home and unable to work because of a lack of childcare, or forced to work a job that might put them and their loved ones at great physical risk just to retain access to basic food and shelter. In such times, we have to become adamant about practicing exquisite self-care, but the bandwidth to access this inner resilience is in itself a privilege only available to some. This is why we must also be fiercely committed to changing the systems that threaten and erode the resilience of our communities. How do we go about this?

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED

With so much information available on the most effective ways to build resilience—ranging from general tips for better mental health, such as meditation, exercise, time in nature, and online hygiene, to the latest statistics and strategies that neuroscience can offer—what keeps people from implementing all this well-meaning advice? Or if you practice these techniques and still find yourself exhausted, irritable, unhappy, anxious, or dissatisfied, do you ever wonder what is missing? I did. Joy did not just fall into my lap during my years of doing healing work. Its appearance in my life was inextricably connected to a deeper, more harmonious relationship with my internal dialogue and my emotions. Accessing joy required me to attune to my own feelings and needs, and to soothe and nurture myself amid fear, anxiety, grief, and distress. It necessitated pushing back against and transforming self-imposed and societal limitations, so I could be myself and do the work I loved. It meant giving myself the permission, and acquiring the skills, to protect my body, heart, and time with firm boundaries. Joy needed my wholehearted attention to blossom. It demanded less listening to what the world said was broken, missing, wrong about me, and what success should look like, and more discovering and validating what my inner voice had to say. I realized that if I wanted joy to come beyond the high days and holy days—the special occasions and celebrations—then I had to make it a practice. I had to choose joy at the center of my life. And choosing joy meant choosing first and foremost to become excellent at learning to truly and unconditionally love myself. I had to learn a joyous resilience—the magical, powerful force that emanates from an inner locus of nurturance, protection, and emotional attunement. Resilience is the inoculation against stress and trauma, allowing us to reestablish contact with an inner joy so we can thrive. Whereas trauma is a grievous breakdown in safety and connection that erodes our ability to feel joy and thrive, resilience is the ability to withstand, stand back up from, and transform the effects of life’s stressors and traumas into greater strength, compassion, and wisdom.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

We are becoming increasingly aware that although the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it also has one of the most stressed out, sick, depressed, scared, violent, isolated, and polarized populations. Learning how to be resilient, to say nothing of accessing joy, is increasingly harder in our current sociopolitical climate, where the daily pressures of work, family, health, and finances are rising alongside environmental, economic, political, and human rights disasters. And the unavoidable truth is that access to resilience-building is not equally available to everyone, nor is our world set up to support everyone thriving. The impacts of trauma, stress, and oppression are disproportionately borne by marginalized groups, including Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQI, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled, and lower-income populations. Most self-help or psychology books that discuss resilience in a stressful world are based on the Western mental health mindset. Therefore, they attribute each individual’s suffering to their own psyche or to their family history. These books often only give a cursory glance (if that) to the larger issues of race, class, gender, environment, sociocultural pressures, and institutional and systemic oppression affecting people. These stress factors often overlap, requiring an intersectional approach (we will examine this approach more closely in chapter five). Such an analysis of sociopolitical factors is normally left to social justice or political books, which in turn can suffer from their own blind spot: a relentless focus outward without pointing to the inner changes that activists and regular citizens need to make in order to withstand stress, stay healthy, avoid burnout, and be resilient in their journey to transform our world. From what I’ve seen, the truth lies between these two extremes of inward and outward focus. It’s true that resilience can only be built when we focus on the essential internal shift toward becoming our own best allies, protectors, and nurturers. It’s also true that we must explore and ultimately confront the intersectional obstacles that block our access to this resilience. This book creates a bridge between these two approaches. It is meant to speak directly to the broad dilemmas and stressors people are facing in our time and act as a galvanizing call at this vital moment of both personal and social awakening to take larger action wherever we can. It presents our personal healing journey as an opportunity to leverage our political, civic, and humanitarian power, deepening the skills we need to collectively thrive and create joy.

MY PERSPECTIVE

I am a Pakistani American woman, raised in Pakistan and now living and working in the United States as a clinician serving diverse communities. As a woman of color, an immigrant, and a Pakistani of Muslim heritage I have at times found myself at the nexus of those most affected by sociopolitical issues. On the other hand, as a US citizen, a cisgender woman, and an able-bodied person with a graduate degree that enabled me to move into a middle-class socioeconomic status, I have in no small part flourished due to access to these privileges. Both sides of that coin have fueled a commitment to my own thriving and being part of the efforts to create a world where everyone thrives. For more than fifteen years and thirty thousand-plus hours, I have had the extraordinary privilege of doing my own healing work and sitting with folks committed to their own transformation and resilience-building as we deeply engaged with a crucial question: what does it take to feel joy and thrive amid the stress, trauma, and difficulty of our world? The answers offered in this book go far beyond a nice idea or a great theory on paper. They are the sum of decades of lived experience, my own and my clients’, as we engaged in this deep, embodied investigation. The material in this book is the foundation I saw us return to over years that were filled with the normal highs and lows of life. This is what carried us through loss, illness, heartbreak, raising children, facing aging and changing bodies, financial stressors, job transitions, deeply troubling political climates, threats to our access to legal rights, rising environmental disasters, unfulfilled longings, unexpected crises, and grieving our loved ones. Conversely, it was the fount from which laughter, delight, pleasure, wonder, awe, and deep peace first bubbled up in brief spurts and then flowed freely until it became an ever-present pool to return to at our center.

It was what gave us the courage to face over and over again the intergenerational shadows, demons, and fears that had held us back and kept us captive, so we could speak and act where we and our ancestors had once been forced silent. It was also the source of so much glorious creation—books written, babies born, businesses launched, degrees attained, art inspired, and wisdom shared in the world. Finally, it was what allowed us to have tough conversations at home and tougher ones out in the world—about systemic racism, about police brutality, about the reality of climate change, and the pervasive inequities and breaches of justice crushing the life out of millions in our world. And in the process, to not give in to despair. Instead, working the path offered in this book allowed us to have the sustained resilience necessary for the long haul of life and the arc of history. Providing us with the ability to retain joy despite it all, to stay connected to our aliveness, and to work toward an equitable world.

This is an extraordinary privilege. It is also the gift of this journey of becoming our most joyously resilient self. Please know that there is not one exercise in this book, not one difficult learning or nudge to stretch further than you have before, that I have not experienced myself. I say this to share that I and so many others on this path are with you in this. There is not and never has been anything wrong or lesser about you or me that prevents us from being able to access our joy. And it is an extraordinary and worthy journey to embark on taking the steps to learn how.

THIS BO0K IS FOR YOU IF . . .

1. You have been feeling sad, depressed, anxious, irritable, or unhappy as you ride an emotional roller coaster that you long to get off of but don’t know how.
2. You sometimes wonder if your emotional distress might be related to collective trauma, oppression, and the state of our world.
3. You find that resentment, criticism, and self-judgment poison your days.
4. You’ve been drowning in the day-to-day routine of your life; you’ve lost track of what matters to you and wonder if this is all there is.
5. You want to cultivate a loving inner voice as a necessary flotation device, and you also see that measures such as a living wage, universal health care, and access to childcare might be the real life-savers.
6. You tamp down your plans and dreams due to fear, doubt, and procrastination, or you see a legacy of dreams deferred in your family across generations due to oppression.
7. You feel too guilty or scared to say no because you think that’s selfish, or you belong to a gender, race, culture, religion, class, or marginalized group for whom saying no has had severe consequences.
8. You’ve been feeling lonely, unloved, or broken, like there’s a hole inside you that needs to be filled.
9. “Self-love” smacks of selfishness to you, and yet you know you desperately need it. ɐ You want to experience deeper joy and more satisfaction in your life without guilt.
10. You are exhilarated by the idea of seeing diverse bodies lit up with their own aliveness.
11. You want to find the love of your life and are open to the possibility that you might be that one.
12. You are a layperson, clinician, healer, advocate, teacher, or counselor who wants a path to building joyous resilience that also provides important first steps toward collective healing and thriving.

I wrote this book for you. For me. For all of us.

THE ROAD AHEAD

This book is divided into three parts, each focused on a different core concept. The first section discusses the Cycle of Suffering and explains how the three roles of Vulnerable Self, Persecutor, and Neglector keep people trapped in victimhood, unable to take advantage of the resources that cultivate resilience. It also looks at historical and current forms of oppression that exact a tremendous toll on marginalized communities, severely impairing their ability to thrive on every level—systemic, community, familial, and individual. The second section walks us through building an inner Circle of Resilience by cultivating four alternate core roles—the Nurturer, the Protector, the Resilient Self, and the Soul Self—that shift our inner state from helplessness to a joyful resilience. These aspects of ourselves are who we truly are underneath all the drama and misery that the Cycle of Suffering causes. Together we will learn to access and strengthen these parts that are the true foundation for feeling joy. The third section focuses on the playful, practical, and purposeful work of building joyful resilience skills in four categories: foundational, relational, creative, and political. Joy, like anything else worthwhile, takes effort, practice, and deliberate cultivation. This is how we ensure that our shift into wellness is lasting and that we feel power, agency, and hope amid long-standing oppression. In this way we can become a lifelong force for reshaping our global culture into one that has everyone’s resilience and wellness at its center.

Throughout the book you will find real-life examples, experiential reflections, and relevant research to make the work applicable and accessible.

HELPFUL REMINDERS BEFORE WE BEGIN

The path and practices offered in this book come out of a body-centered psychotherapy. What this means is that the exercises offered are meant to guide you into a felt sense of the breathing patterns, sensations, and emotions that help you experience your own being. Although learning through a book can feel like a top-down experience—the mind is learning something, and then the body is supposed to follow—I have attempted to create exercises that allow you to take the information offered and translate it into experience through a bottom-up approach (i.e., let’s try it out through the body, and that will inform your understanding). In the end, the premise of this book is that change doesn’t happen through insight alone; it requires a felt, embodied experience. As we get in touch with our sensations and then with our emotions and the content of our individual and communal lives that have shaped us in helpful or painful ways, we might feel discomfort or difficulty accessing or being with these states.

As we will learn in the first part of this book, much of our suffering has come through an avoidance of our felt experience, often because the condition in which it first occurred did not provide the support we needed to endure experiences that were terrifying and upending. Instead, we coped the best we could by using survival strategies we are hardwired for as humans: our reflex to fight, flee, freeze, or appease. These strategies might once have been the best of the few limited options at hand, but then we use them time and time again, solidifying them into habits and even our sense of our own personality. Thus, a child who is suffering physical or emotional abuse might respond by freezing and withdrawing into themselves, as the best way to survive an angry and violent household. If the abuse occurs over a long period of time, the initial freezing and withdrawal might start to look like more permanent states, where the child is now quiet as a rule and frequently goes into their own world of dissociative daydreaming. Such a child might have a hard time focusing at school and is likely to be emotionally distant from people both outside and within the home. A child in this situation needs help from a professional or from a community, culture, or spiritual tradition to acknowledge the violence; identify and feel the emotions of anger, fear, shame, or grief that accompanied it; and set healthy boundaries that keep the child safe. Without access to these resources, the unprocessed emotions and the survival behaviors that accompany them eventually result in the child becoming an adult who might believe they are a loner, a person who doesn’t feel much, or has a hard time in relationship. This personality is actually just the shell of survival mechanisms covering a long-standing trauma. In this book, we begin by identifying these shells that we have grown to cover and protect our vulnerable hearts. We honor them and our younger selves for having created this armor out of a desire to survive. We also realize that in order to be truly alive, to be free of the reenactment of past pain, and to create a present that matches our deepest desires, we have to transform the pain these shells have been holding and shift from a shell of a self into a whole body and heart. The path and practices offered in this book are designed to help us get there.

CONNECTING TO OUR ESSENTIAL ALIVENESS

You may wonder what place joy has when it comes to healing. You might have thought that a book focused on joyful resilience might force a particular mood of happiness, lightness, or positivity on top of grievously painful histories. You might also think the idea of a joyful activism seems like an oxymoron. How can we be joyous when we’re dealing with trauma, injustice, and the realities of suffering? Whenever you read the word joy in this book, know that the sense I am using it in is most akin to aliveness. This aliveness comes from having access to and allowing all of our sensations, feelings, needs, and desires. Aliveness is what oppression and suffering cheat us out of. Aliveness to our desires—to our capacity for pleasure as well as pain, to our capacity to dream as well as to take a stand—allows our pain to flow and heal. Our resilience leads to flexibility in our being. Flexibility here doesn’t mean appeasing, pretending, or trying to be needless and wantless. Rather, it means having the ability to be with complexity, the many shades of our being, the multiplicity of our feelings, the many facets of our experience and evolution. Flexibility means we have a structure of inner and outer support that is strong enough to make us a vessel for the all-ness of who we are.

So joyful resilience and joyful activism will mean being able to be alive with our anger, our rage, our sorrow, our fight, our collapse, and our indomitable, ever-present, beating heart, our laughter amid our tears, our compassion amid our strength, our vulnerability that is a part of our indomitable spirit. We are joyful, and we are resilient, because we are alive. We are free because we feel, accept, and above all choose the responses that let us be more fully ourselves. The joyful resilience practices in this book are meant to provide a foundation of inner strength and resourcing through which we can turn toward and face the pain and suffering of our life, including that caused by cumulative, intergenerational, or collective traumas. These resources are intended to help us use loving acceptance, wisdom, and healthy boundaries as we sit with and transform our pain. It takes ongoing, depth-oriented work to engage with specific traumas and their symptoms, and to build skill sets in compassion, communication, and creative expression. Learning about oppressive systems; understanding our privilege, power, and marginalization within them; healing inside these symptoms and working to dismantle them at large are lifelong, specialized tasks. The intersectional and social justice lens offered in this book is meant as a first step for folks who are new to a healing that is politicized and who want to bridge the gap between personal healing and collective action that envisions everyone thriving.