A child’s resilience is amazing. My baby JJ (16 months now, but forever my baby) fell off the bunkbed ladder. He’s an intrepid soul. And he is obsessed with climbing up the bunk bed ladder. Turn your head for a minute and up he goes. The inevitable happened and he fell off. He cried. I held him. Two minutes later he was trying to get up it again. We blocked it with the wicker laundry basket and he is MAD!

Am I so resilient? When I get knocked down how quickly do I get back up again? The answer is 1 day. I think that’s pretty good.

Yesterday was a knocked down day. It was one of those days where I left my cell phone at home, dropped the kids off at summer camp and took myself out for some retail therapy. Luckily I still had my birthday gift cards, otherwise the “retail therapy” we’d be able to afford right now would be from the clearance bin of the dollar store.

I was hiding, pure and simple. I didn’t want anybody to know where I was until I knew where I was. What am I doing here?

The night before last I spoke at an event for the third time in one week. And for the third time in one week I was incredibly well-received. Everyone said how much they loved my talk. They loved my energy, my passion. They loved what I had to say. It was so true, so relatable, so real, so funny, so needed. Still, no book sales.

I left the event and cried all the way home. Yelled all the way home. Is it worth it? Should I just give up? I’m burning the candle at both ends between the kids, the house and the business. If everyone loves what I have to say so much, why isn’t anyone buying my book?

So I spent a day removing myself as best I could from everything and everyone. After picking up the kids from camp, we went to the park. Then I took them to Fred Meyer and put them in Playland so I could sit upstairs in Starbuck’s and look out over the store. It’s a good thinking spot.

I ended my 24 hours of contemplating the question, “What am I doing here?” with some journaling. That’s my system. And it works. Here’s a step by step breakdown for how I get back up after being knocked down. I call it Resilience 101:

1. Release your emotions.

When I get knocked down, I scream and cry for awhile.

2. Enter into a period of solitude and contemplation.

I shut myself off from the world for a day (kids don’t count) to pray, think and generally not talk to anyone unless I absolutely have to. If possible, I spend some time in a church sanctuary or some kind of place (like nature) where I can feel a closer connection to the Divine. I read something spiritually edifying that is going to give me “food” for thought.

3. Share your story with a trusted friend.

At the end of my day of solitude, I get a glass of wine, call a trusted friend and just get it all off my chest (in this case it was my cousin – she was drinking a glass of wine on the other end).

4. Insist you get a good night’s sleep.

I tucked myself into bed last night at 8:30pm and slept like a baby, even with Oliver and JJ in the bed with me.

5. Let your hand be a messenger of insights – WRITE!

I woke up early this morning and wrote in my journal to process my feelings and insights from the day before.

6. Immerse yourself in some exercise and heavy breathing.

I got some exercise so that I could experience taking deep inhalations of oxygen into my body. This, to me, is definitely a form of prayer and a key component of my spiritual practice. This morning I went jogging with JJ because I obviously couldn’t leave him home by himself. (As a side note, I will say that solitude and contemplation can be done around kids. Intention is everything.)

7. Elevate your thoughts through prayer/meditation.

In the shower, I pray and thank God for the opportunity to learn and grow.

8. Note your intentions.

Still in the shower, I state my intentions for who and what I want to be in the world.

9. Contact the outside world again.

Now I am ready to face the emails which have built up from yesterday and get on with business.

10. Enter into a new, more resilient you.

That’s it. I’m done. I’m back up. I’m clearer about what it is that I’m doing here and I face the world with renewed resilience, greater strength and a deeper sense of peace. I am grateful for the experience of being knocked down because it has brought me greater understanding.

Take another look at number 1-10 above. I used the word RESILIENCE as an acronym for these 10 steps. My intention is that it will be easier to remember that way.

Look, if JJ can fall off a bunkbed ladder and be smiling 2 minutes later, ready to do it again, I can also pick myself up when I fall down. It helps that I have a process for going from down to up. Because of what happened, I have new found clarity, I’m taking a new course of action and I understand at an even greater depth what I’m doing here.

For that, I am so very grateful. Thank you to JJ too for inspiring me to be resilient and showing me what true resilience really means.

We are all blessings.

To learn, of course. To grow, of course. To transcend limitations and evolve.

What does the tree do when it is growing under shade? It grows towards the light. Does it give up? A tree knows how to grow despite the challenges. A tree understands and lives the principles of growth. For conscious beings (that means, us humans), we can be surprisingly unconscious about the principles of growth.

1. It is in our very nature to grow – physically, emotionally and spiritually.

2. There is no question of growth.

3. How we grow depends on an infinite number of environmental factors.

4. We direct the course of our growth through our choices.

Every decision is a choice between going in the direction of love or in the direction of the absence of love. Do we ever stop to consider this? Or are we so wrapped up in our external circumstances that we do not take the time to ask in which direction our decisions are taking us?

However, the caveat is that we all too often confuse love with desire or need.

Love is:

unconditional

Self-less (or unselfish)

Honest

Pure

forgiving

Unifying

Expansive

All-encompassing

Uplifting

Constant

Peaceful

In the moment

Love is a quality of presence. Put another way, “Presence” is the domain of love. Fear cannot exist in presence. Fear can only exist when the mind is preoccupied with potential future events. When one is centered in the moment, fear cannot enter, for this is not its domain.

Love draws good towards it. Love and fear are both magnets, drawing more of itself to itself.

That is why it can be such a challenge to shift thought patterns upwards. But, again, the tree does not go from seed to mighty oak in a day. There is a process to growth and the oak knows instinctively how to be patient.

Is the task to live one’s life with integrity? What is the definition of a good life? In my dream, my sister and husband were reluctant to clean up a spare room to make it useable as a bedroom for their daughters. Instead it was full of paper, old furniture and other things they didn’t use and didn’t need. But to clean it seemed such an effort to them. They left it and their daughters slept in sleeping bags on the floor. How many of us cannot face the thought of cleaning up our own lives? And at what cost to ourselves and others?

Then there was my brother in law, who was learning how to fly a helicopter so he could get home faster and see his baby more. It was a means of getting from AtoB quickly and efficiently because he worked so hard and so late, but did not want to miss out on seeing his child grow. What tools do we have in our lives that can aid us in getting from ego to Spirit quickly and efficiently? Do we pray? Do we say an affirmation? What is our spiritual “helicopter” to take us from a focus on our biology and humanity to a connection with Spirit and our hearts?

Next, I was sitting talking to a stranger and I started to open my mouth and say something negative about my mother in law when I noticed her son sitting next to me. I felt immediately terrible at the thought of hurting her son with my cruel words and so I stopped myself. How often do we refrain from speaking badly about another? How do we know what kind of effect, either direct or indirect, such talk has? Can we see ourselves in each and every other person in our lives? What is so different about another that merits our defamation? Do they not have a soul? A Golden Angel? Guides that love them? A lineage in earthly terms full of complexities beyond our wildest imaginations? And so much more we ALL hold in common. Can we stop ourselves and realize how much we are hurting ourselves when we seek to hurt another (even if we are doing so “behind their back”)?

Then there was a communal aspect of my dream and an oven that had complicated buttons and did not get turned on properly by the person next to me in line. There was a man naked from the waste down doing stretching exercises and joining in the conversation without a second thought to his nakedness. It was an apartment complex of sorts. And a gathering, a sharing, a being together, each in our own uniqueness. Can we accept each other for who we are? Can we come together in the Spirit of nonjudgement? Can we look at another who is coompletely exposed (in a metaphorical sense) and still listen to what they have to say?

And the oven! It was a communal effort to figure it out, a group attempt to help one another toward the ultimate goal of cooking a meal to eat. Can we support each other in our individual endeavors to sustain ourselves? Each of us is “cooking” something different, but the “oven” of life is the same for us all and we need to help eachother figure it out beacuse it can appear quite a complicated beast. Some of us have a better understanding than others of its many “button” and what they all mean. That’s just because we’be been here longer and had more practice in “figuring it out.”

Next, there were some neighbors helping eachother out with babysitting. A mother needed some time to homeschool her two older children so the baby went next door. There is not one of us on this planet who does not need help at some point or another. Asking for help and giving help are both gifts. In my dream, this neighborly helping of one another was perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t the one family help the other? The overall feeling was one of mutual support. In helping another, we help ourselves. When we help another, we help sustain the community as a whole and that, indeed, helps to sustain our own position within that very community. Service is our natural state of Being.

My dream was about the Spirit of Community, about helping and supporting one another. It was about being conscious of what we say and what we do. It was about how we connect to Spirit by how we behave and conduct ourselves in the midst of our human experience and our interactions with all. God is there for us and it doesn’t take isolation in a monestary to find God (although that may be an appropriate path for some in any given lifetime). The path to God is so very much in our interactions and in our relationships. God is revealed when judgement is set aside, when we accept people (including ourselves) as we are. When we clean up our own ”houses” to make room for more love. When we share with others knowledge that we have to help make it easier for another. When we help a neighbor. When we catch our negative thoughts and do not speak them.