By Dr. Steven Johnson
Resilience has become an urgent need in our present times! Resilience encompasses our capacity for vitality, regeneration, emotional balance, and a state of coherence between our heart and mind. This coherence corresponds to a more dynamic regulation and balance of our physical, soul, and spiritual self.
Our body and soul endure constant challenges through exposure to toxic chemicals and poisons in our physical environment and by the contradictions, untruths, and lack of virtue in our social environment. The search for meaning and a fulfilling life can quickly seem clouded and unclear. If we are not careful, this can quickly bring us into a state of despair, anxiety, and worry.
In addition, healthy relationships at work, at home, and with extended family and friends are increasingly challenged. The surge of technology in our daily life over-stimulates our nervous system and heightens our awareness of information more than our minds and bodies can digest, causing overstimulation and imbalance in our nervous system and inner mood of soul.
Because so many people feel overwhelmed, they slowly lose their sense of resilience and capacity to bounce back. As a result, there is increasing use of sedating substances such as prescription drugs, alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs in order to cope. This often clouds good judgment and prevents people from getting to the root cause of their symptoms and problems. Many of us stay stuck.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the “good” that modern life provides, including aspects of technology that can make us more aware of good deeds and beauty in the world that we want to support. Also, we can communicate with diverse groups of people much more easily via technology all over the world. So many human beings with wonderful attitudes and hearts are rising up to meet the challenges of our times with fascinating and creative initiatives. There truly is an abundance of beauty to witness in our world. Recognizing this fact is also part of maintaining resilience.
If we make a special effort to create healthy habits, all of us have the potential to create resilience in the face of a demanding world, as well as to improve the state of our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Ultimately, this is about love; love for ourselves and each other, a love that gives birth to a faith that life is sacred, and a hope that the people and the world can become something greater.
Today, modern medicine and psychology professions have become based on materialistic science. This has taught us a lot about mental and physical illness and human behaviors. But modern scientific approaches are only part of the picture. The sources of faith, love, and hope lie in a sphere of “invisible” forces, which weave a sense of meaning and morality into the human experience. Without them, we lose the will to live and love others and ourselves. It is through these forces of faith, reverence, love, and hope that the emergence of our higher moral self, healthy soul, and physical body depend. They are, in essence, forces of resilience we need to heal the ailments of our body and soul, and to navigate the stressors and complications of leadership and social challenges.
The sources of Faith, Love, and Hope are a “force,” and they form a bedrock foundation for creating resilience in our lives. This force is based on the “logos” or the creative word. The logos is a universal experience every human being shares in common, no matter their culture or socio-economic background. Let us briefly explore the logos force behind these three words and see if we can see their power to support health and resilience.
Faith Body: Through knowledge, we gain faith. As religion and ancestral tradition are increasingly rejected as sources of knowledge, what do we place our faith in? Faith or reverence in a higher wisdom gives life meaning and fulfillment beyond material gain. All of us can experience the force that lies behind faith as a common human experience or “logos experience.” Some might say faith is just something we, as human beings, create to make us feel better about what we don’t understand scientifically, thereby tossing their ancestral heritage on the trash heap, so to speak.
What matters is not whether we want to have faith; rather, what is important is that the life forces expressed in the word Faith are available to our soul or consciousness. Without the sacredness of faith to tell us there is something greater to believe in than what we see in the world around us, we can observe how our soul atrophies. We feel an increasing sense of fear, nervousness, and anxiety, and we lose our sense of reverence, meaning, and purpose. This affects our motivation that we can achieve “goodness” in the world for ourselves and others. Our faith body enlivens our feeling for life and awakens our moral conscience. It supports us in our life journey to experience a greater purpose to our existence than just our desires, likes, and dislikes. Also, it supports our feeling that our deeds do matter in life. Our enlivened feeling for life is stimulated through our faith body. Without faith, we increasingly wander through the ocean of life without an anchor. Anxiety, nervousness, and depression become epidemic. Many of us can observe that this process has already started in our present time and that an underlying loss of connection or understanding of our history has already begun to create a generalized anxiety and worry as a common human experience. A healthy relationship with our faith body helps us to meet and transform the past into a renewing force for the future.
Love Body: This is also a vital “logos force” found in the depths of our being. Anyone who cannot overcome egotism and develop an inner warmth of love towards themselves and the world also withers within themselves and more easily feels mentally and physically ill. When we truly feel love, we generate and feel a deep inner warmth that keeps us vital and resilient. Without love, a generalized loss of interest in the world and others can set in. To find our inner benevolent force of love is essential for life. It needs to be more powerful than the forces of greed and personal desire, or else the salutogenic forces that keep us resilient start to shrivel. Nothing can live to its fullest potential without receiving love in some form. Without love, people can literally go into deep depression and actually die from lack of love. There is a documented medical syndrome called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (also known as broken heart syndrome), where a strong loss or emotional event can cause sudden heart failure in a person.
Our love body is part of our very vitality and life body. In anthroposophy, we call this our “etheric” force, and it’s at the root of self-healing. This is the very force that gives birth to life, the inner sense of resilience, and the powers of regeneration that heal us from trauma, wounds, and illness. When our faith body is enveloped by our love body, then in the core of our middle body, we sense a force of warmth, love, and resilience. Love brings us into the present and into an awareness of the moment in ways that open up new forces of strength to overcome life challenges.
Hope Body: If we can say our faith body speaks most strongly to our soul mood and our love body to our vitality, we can say that the logos of our hope body speaks directly to our physical body. Without hope, our “will” is paralyzed. We need to know that there is a tomorrow after today, and we need to know that something we create or build today will be there tomorrow. Otherwise, why do anything? Why make a beautiful sweater if no one will wear it? Why make a good chair if no one will sit in it? Why give advice if no one will listen? Nothing fosters an illness in our body more than hopelessness. Hope holds our physical body together and gives us a reason to wake up each day. We need to know that the seeds we sow in the soil or within our own life will grow and bear fruit. The hope that something new, truthful, beautiful, and good can be created in the future gives us confidence to move forward in life. From an anthroposophic perspective, faith works deeply into our consciousness or astral body, love into our vital forces or etheric body, and hope into our will forces and physical body in order to change the future.
Like anything in life, there are no quick solutions. Just because you succeed one day does not mean it won’t be harder the next day. Resilience is a road to self-knowledge. It is a way of life you choose to practice because you want a more fulfilling and healthier life for yourself and others.
“Knowing” and “doing” are not the same things. It is the practice of these ideals and exercises that will create true insight, wisdom, and, ultimately, resilience of body, soul, and spirit. Resilience, like the health of your body and mind, represents a coherence between your heart and mind, and further coherence between your thoughts, feelings, and actions. As you practice resilience, you will find it becomes easier and quicker to create a coherent state of mind in the moments of everyday life. We have observed time and time again that when people achieve coherence and are present in the moment, they are better able to recognize and act on the needs of others. Their social milieu improves. A sense of beauty and fulfillment appears before them more often. They feel more confident and resilient, and others recognize this and gravitate toward them.
In conclusion, this verse by William Bento speaks to the social potential of Faith, Love, and Hope as archetypes in our life. We hope this has been a helpful introduction to a new approach to strengthen your own resilience and health as you go forward in modern life. There are many further steps to consider, which you can read in the full course currently being developed (see below).
There is Friendship
“Among men and women who dare to open their hearts’ secrets to one another, there lives the Hope and promise of friendship. In the deepening silence they will bear, with Love, the knowing of what one has and has not done. And in this understanding, friendship shall bring to each of them the light of the Spirit Sun. Faith in this experience of true friendship will be the foundation of the World to come.”
-William Bento (July 27th 2004, revised November 11th, 2010)
This introduction to resilience shares some of the philosophy of the U-resilience course by Dr. Steven Johnson. He hopes this will become available through workshops and training opportunities in the coming year. The course is built on the work of Rudolf Steiner, Heart-Math, Neuroplasticity, Otto Sharmer’s U-theory, and insights from Eurythmy. Workshops and teacher trainings are being developed in hopes of being offered more widely in 2024.