Bouncing Back

When crises arise, some people flourish while others flounder. Here's how your practice can help you build resilience.

By Sally Kempton

For most of us, pain and suffering are so intertwined that we find it impossible to separate them. When things go wrong, we may feel like victims or assume that we're receiving karmic punishment—that we "deserve" what is happening to us. We may express our feelings or stuff them, but few of us know how to process the pain of loss or failure without getting hooked by our suffering.

A yogi, on the other hand, knows how to untie the knots that make him identify with his suffering self. (The Bhagavad Gita explicitly states that yoga is the "dissolution of union with pain.") In fact, yoga practice is meant to teach us how to untangle these inner knots. Often, you don't realize how much difference your practice has made until the day that you find yourself dealing with a crisis without going into an absolute meltdown. The kids are screaming or your officemates are panicking, and yes, there's a little bit of fear and irritation in your mind too, but there's also a witnessing awareness, an inner compassionate presence that lets you stay present with what's happening without getting sucked into the fear or the anger.

The great spiritual practitioners all offer the same basic prescriptions for undoing inner knots: Find out who you really are, do the practices that purify your murky mind, and discover how to work with everything that happens to you. Then difficulties become your teachers, and pain and loss become occasions for profound and positive transformation. As my teacher Swami Muktananda once said, a yogi is someone who can turn every circumstance to his advantage. That, it seems to me, is what it means to be resilient.

The Alchemy of Adversity

Laura Derbenwick was 24 and on the verge of entering graduate school in English literature when someone rear-ended her car at a red light on a highway entrance ramp in White Plains, New York. Laura was knocked unconscious. A few days later, she realized that something was seriously wrong with her brain.

She had a hard time concentrating on what people said to her and could not remember which color on the traffic signal means "stop" and which means "go." She fell down a lot. And when she tried to focus on printed words, the room would start to swim and her head would feel as if it were exploding from the inside. Tests showed that her IQ had dropped 40 points.

Laura's life had taken a 180-degree turn. Graduate school was impossible. She had been an extrovert; now, being with people exhausted her. Worst of all, she could no longer think coherently. "Brain injuries are mysterious," the doctors told her. "We can't guarantee recovery."

"For the first year," Laura recalls, "I kept trying to deny that there was anything wrong with me, trying to grab back the life that I'd had. The most difficult part was doing all the careful, painstaking work on retraining my brain and knowing that there was no guarantee that I'd get better. I finally accepted the fact that I'd never be an English teacher. But every other avenue I tried seemed to be a closed door too. And I was in excruciating physical pain."

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