Raw Resilience
“To be fully alive is to be continually thrown out of the nest….To be alive we must be willing to die a thousand times.”
- Pema Chodron
I am often asked how I stay so grounded on my fruitarian, alternative-lifestyle path. The honest truth is, I don’t always. I have my ups and downs, just like most people. I have put a lot of intentional focus, however, on taking responsibility for bringing myself back to center each and every time I stray. This has really paid off, because I stray less often, and when I do I am able to emotionally re-center quite rapidly now, compared with my younger, less experienced self. I have learned to get comfortable with a lot of discomfort when necessary, and I know what will re-open a narrow perspective almost immediately (more on that later!).
My fruitarian diet initiated a massive overall cleansing and detoxifying process, ultimately gifting me with a much more resilient physical body. My confidence grew, too, as I began to understand the power of the tools I now knew how to use - eat only the foods nature designed for me, and fast when not hungry. Live healthfully, and health is the inevitable result. My body is always trying to operate optimally, and now I knew what fuel it needed. I had cracked the code.
My mental and emotional bodies were being cleansed, too. I have been intimate with depression, and happily this diet played a major role in raising my emotional vibration. I began to feel very different...much lighter, more steadily energized, and closer to an easy, natural state of joy. I realized too, that I had grown weary of negative emotional moods. In my newly cleansed and unburdened state, I saw that it was actually a choice.
There was a long period of emotional adjustment after I ‘went raw,’ during which I experienced a bigger breadth of emotions - from the highest highs to the lowest lows. I didn’t have cooked comfort-foods to numb the feelings, anymore. These raw emotions often felt a bit overwhelming, on both ends of the spectrum, but I began to notice that I could level-out the highs, and my lows were becoming very short-lived. I compared it to being like a toddler, who gets wildly upset but is soon happily playing again. Emotions were moving through me now, rather than digging in and getting stuck. And after enough experience, I understood that even the lowest lows would soon pass, like a storm moving across the sky.
I have come to cherish the relative emotional resiliency I have developed, as much as the physical. I feel empowered, knowing that even when the middle of an emotional storm feels scary, it is like surfing a big wave which will bring me safely back to shore soon. This, of course, makes it easier to ride out the storms, and even to find grace and inspiration in the experience. And another bonus – after a transition period which helped me develop new emotional muscles, living in a lighter vibration on a fruit-based raw vegan diet keeps me easily feeling more positive and loving most of the time, and the dark storms come much less often these days.
I’ve thought a lot about what ‘being grounded’ means to me. Many people have assured me that they must eat lots of nuts or other fatty foods, or some cooked foods, to stay grounded. In our society, I think that being grounded is often perceived as staying in some ‘safe’ and familiar place, with familiar rules and experiences. We find ways to dull or numb any unfamiliar or especially uncomfortable emotional experience so that we can keep up the illusion that we are coping calmly with stress and disillusionment. What if, instead, we choose to see being grounded as staying present to our pure essential nature – our Self - present to our body and our experience, present to the sensations moving through us, and connected to the source energy of earth and sun, air and breath.
In fact, nature is where I go to be opened up and re-grounded. Nature feels real, and right, when everything else starts to feel distorted. Nature gets me out of my head, and out of my imagined mental stories. Nature helps me feel both my body and my spirit. Nature reconnects me with source energy. Walking barefoot on the earth, the sand, the leaves or rocks, a breeze on my skin….rain or sunshine, cool or warm, windy or still….immersing myself in nature is the best grounding balm I know for a troubled heart or an overly busy mind. Nature is BIG, and it challenges my narrow mental perspectives. The sky is so vast it feels infinite. The ocean is magnificent! A tree is incredible. A butterfly is pure magic, and flowers are little miracles. Birdsong is happy music, a thunderstorm is a symphony, snow falling is the sound of silence, the moon glows with peace, the sun warms me all the way through. All I have to do is listen with my heart for a minute, and my mind begins to release its controlling grip.
Resilience is about rising stronger after any defeat, big or small, and claiming new-found wisdom. It’s about welcoming the learning, and choosing courage over comfort. It’s about cultivating the flexibility to open up my perspective, and to choose connection over disconnection. It’s about taking the time to listen for what I really want, what I really need, who I really am. It’s about learning to tolerate risk and uncertainty, and to trust my sufficiency, my resourcefulness, and my ability to call upon self-discipline as a means of self-love. I think resilience is close cousins with faith. Faith in a benevolent universe that naturally supports my growth and development, and faith in my access to all the wisdom I need.
My transition to a fruit-based raw vegan diet brought about glorious feelings of deep connection, while simultaneously revealing deep disconnections in my life and my relationship with myself. It required me to re-evaluate all relationships, and to release some that no longer felt valuable to me. The higher I reach, or the further out on the limb I climb, the more of my old ways must be released to make room for the new. As I accessed new higher frequencies, old lower frequencies had to drop away. Non-attachment became an essential practice. The discomfort of disorientation and vulnerability gave way to surrender and acceptance, and opened the way to curiosity, wonder and awe.
Brene Brown said, “When we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses. Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. This change often brings a deep sense of loss. During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. Straddling the tension that lies between wanting to go back to the moment before we risked and fell, and being pulled forward to even greater courage is an inescapable part of rising strong. Rising demands the foundational beliefs of connection and requires wrestling with perspective, meaning, and purpose.”
I have learned to see emotion as simply energy, or an energetic wave moving through me. I try not to engage much with the thoughts that are stories I am making up in my mind about the feelings. Sometimes, I can laugh at the absurdity of my story. And then simply engage with the energy, minus the story. I get curious about the energy. I watch its movement patterns, and then I watch it dissipate and disappear or evaporate on its own. And I simply return then to my natural state of peace, calm, and loving balance.
Sovereignty is another first cousin of resilience. It is knowing that I have what I need, and that I can fall down, make mistakes, and get back up stronger and wiser. Every time. No matter what the challenge. I can welcome the learning, knowing it’s all worth it, knowing I am worth it, knowing life is worth it. As Byron Katie says, “Until you can welcome every experience, there is work to be done!”
A mantra for resilience that I love is, “May your path be the sound of your feet upon the ground, carry on” (from a song). To me this does not mean, “Chin up and soldier through the pain,” as I often felt advised as a child. To me, it is rather an invitation to celebrate the act of conscious, deep Presence, and to let the energy flow and thus move me ever forward, gently. I invite my inner journey toward greater self-actualization, and deeper connection, to be a source of great inspiration to me.
I will close with a journal-entry I wrote years ago, about resilience. It was my attempt to capture a particularly vulnerable experience of moving through big, raw emotion. I compared my experience to facing an imaginary Tidal Wave:
Red warning flag whips in the wind at the beach today: Hazardous Conditions.
The vibration is palpable to me.
Somewhere out on the deep water, danger lurks. Far away – it is still just a noticing.
My body registers a familiar dread.
I try to concentrate on the soothing rhythm of the surf at the shoreline.
Here, I love the feel of my feet connecting solidly with the sand.
Nervously I scan the horizon, looking for evidence of danger out there.
‘Don’t be scared,’ I tell myself. ‘Chin-up.’ It’s just waves and wind.
But I feel a pacing restlessness seeping into me.
And then there it is – I KNOW it with my body, I can SEE it with my mind.
My senses are on fire, and I feel the sickening coming on.
I cannot stop the wave.
Silently, I laser-focus and try to hold it back, like trying to bend a spoon with my mind.
Wishful thinking.
I start to sputter words of inarticulate frustration. Angry tears spill out.
I raise my fists, arms flailing now, and I challenge that wave with my own awesome power of destruction.
But the wave gathers the momentum of the sea, and I am tiny as it towers over me.
The water churns under me with such force that my feet are swept off the sand.
Suddenly I am sideways, then upside down.
Crazy disorientation! I am tumbling out of control.
Gripped by fear, choking on salty water, clawing for some surface oxygen.
Am I actually drowning, I wonder?
Will anyone find me, in time?
Everything is blurry, and I can’t find a buoy or guide-rope to grab.
Finally, I am somehow saved anyway - tossed up on the beach.
Sand burns in my eyes and mouth.
I am exhausted, and in awe of the ocean’s power.
My water-logged body lies still, out of immediate danger.
I am witness to my incredible smallness, my helplessness in the face of such violation.
All that feels wrong and out of place.
I flash through decades of grief and trauma, and I decide to surrender, again.
Miraculously, my feet are on firm sand once more.
I turn my face toward the sun.
Slowly, I take luxurious deep breaths of fresh clean air.
A seagull soars overhead in the calm blue sky,
And I am one with Peace.
