Cultivating A Resilient Spirit – Rev. Darrel Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
Resilience is something we are all capable of, however, our capacity for resilience is constantly changing. Life is constantly changing, so our capacity to be resilient requires us to constantly change as well. Resilience doesn’t look a certain way, rather it is a quality or ability. Resilience requires awareness, willingness and practice. Join us this Sunday to discover how to cultivate an even more resilient spirit regardless of what is or isn’t happening in your life right now. At the end of Sunday’s service, may hopefulness, possibility and connection to life be restored!
SUMMARY
In this transcript, Rev. Darrell Jones discusses the concept of cultivating a resilient spirit based on the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” by Brene Brown. He explains that resilience is something we are all capable of and engage in every day, but our capacity for resilience fluctuates based on various factors. Resilience requires awareness, willingness, and the courage to practice things that support our resilience. Rev. Jones emphasizes the importance of recognizing and leaning into discomfort, as numbing our emotions can lead to a loss of joy. He also discusses the qualities of resilient people, such as being resourceful, seeking help, holding the belief that they can manage their feelings and cope with challenges, having social support, and being connected with others. Rev. Jones highlights the role of spirituality in resilience and the need to balance sacred moments with secular living. He encourages the practice of critical thinking and letting go of numbing behaviors. Rev. Jones concludes by emphasizing the importance of cultivating resilience through regular spiritual practices and being open to guidance and help.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:04):
One of my favorite songs of all time. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Cultivating and resilient spirits. You’re going to give me five when I need it, right? I got a lot to unload today. Okay, so this month we’ve been focusing on the book, the Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown. Whether you’ve read it or not, it’s all good, but there’s lots of wisdom that she offers in this book that we’re going to unpack today. And actually the title of the talk comes from the third Guidepost in the book, cultivating a Resilient Spirit. And the basic idea of what this talk is about today is that resilience is something that we’re all capable of, and it’s actually something that we are all engaging in every single day. We are always being resilient. However, our capacity to be resilient, our capacity is constantly going up and down based upon all sorts of variables and variables and our external life and in our internal life, life is constantly changing.
(01:18):
So our capacity to be resilient requires us to constantly be in a space of change, and resilience doesn’t look a certain way. It’s more of a quality or an ability that we foster. Resilience requires awareness, willingness, and the courage to practice the things that support our resilience, the courage to practice the things that support our resilience. So today, my intention is that we all walk away from this service even more resilient in spirit, regardless of what is happening or isn’t happening in your personal life right now. And at the end of today’s service may hopefulness possibility and connection to life be restored, remembered, or reconnected. I want to read the excerpt again that Connie offered and always I like to share. If you are reading the book and you’re trying to find that quote, you’re not going to find it because it’s not an actual paragraph.
(02:29):
Rarely do I find an author says succinctly, one powerful thing. There’s so many powerful things they say. So I make up my own paragraph, and that’s what I did here. So it’s from the chapter that I’m focused on, but the first quote is towards the end, and then I bring in something from the front. So take this in. Once again, we lose our tolerance for discomfort. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. We could just unpack that some of you’re already nodding your head. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. So this idea, people often say that if you numb and we’re going to talk about numbing a little bit, when you numb something that you don’t want to experience, it’s usually an emotion, right? It’s an experience of pain, of sadness, of anger, of frustration, of disappointment, and we don’t want to experience it because nobody likes it.
(03:29):
I don’t like it. I’m not standing up here saying, oh, I love discomfort. Let me embrace all the discomfort of my life. I can’t stand it and I numb it too. But the truth of the matter is, is that our capacity to experience life, if we numb anything, then we numb everything. So if we lose our tolerance to experience discomfort in our world, we are losing the capacity to really experience joy, and that’s all that she’s saying. She goes on to say, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability, it teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude, and grace. I’m also learning that the uncomfortable and scary leaning requires both spirit and resilience, which we’re going to get into today. We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear anyone experiencing any doubt and fear in their life right now, okay, that’s normal.
(04:31):
I’m not trying to tell you and sell you a bill of goods that if you drink this little special concoction, you’re not going to experience doubt and fear anymore. But what I am here to inspire you with is that if you cultivate connection to your spirit, it can move you through around and hold that doubt and fear with grace. We need to believe that we can affect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts. Is anyone doubting right now that they can’t affect the change that they desire in their life? I’m going to put my hand up. I’m human. That’s all right. There’s something we can do to remind ourselves. So what is a resilient person? I’m taking a lot of this straight out of the book to give you the perspective of where Brene Brown is writing from, and if you’re not familiar with her as an author, she blew up on as a Ted Talk speaker talking about vulnerability 15, 20 years ago, and she started off as a researcher.
(05:31):
So she’s one of the people that I absolutely love and adore because I don’t have the patience for research, but I love to talk about the findings, right? I like to talk. I don’t like to sit in the room and go through data, but she’s the one who gets people in a room and does research, does anecdotal study, and these are the top five things. She said, there’s so many more, but these are the top five things that she saw in her research and some of the research of her colleagues that qualified or was a part of a resilient person. First and foremost, they are resourceful and have good problem solving skills. Okay? Fair enough. Now, here’s what I want you to recognize. I’m going to read these things off and probably your mind is going to look for all the ways that you are not resilient.
(06:23):
Well, I am an okay problem solver, but I didn’t really solve that problem. Well, that’s at least how I show up. That’s the way my personality is as a human being. 80% of the time I look at the negative. So we’re looking for the ways that things aren’t working because we think by finding the negative, we’re going to fix it, but it can put us into an emotionally dark place if we’re always looking at the way things don’t work. Yes, breathing. Okay? So we are resourceful and we have good problem solving skills. So just take a moment and recognize you solved some problems this morning, whether it was how to get here, whether it was I can’t find my toothbrush, what am I going to do? I’m going to get a wash cloth. Like whatever. You had to solve some problems this morning to get yourself here, those of you online, even though you’re not here, you still had to solve some problems.
(07:19):
I’m going to invite you to solve a problem of multitasking right now and let go of any other screens. Let go of multitasking with multiple screens and let yourself be fully here. So you have the capacity to be a problem solver. You have always had the capacity to solve problems. You may have not always liked the outcome or the path to get there, but you have solved the problems that you’ve needed to solve in your life. Yes, okay? So remind yourself of that frequently. That’s what promotes a resilient spirit. Number two, she says they are likely to seek help. So that song today, you’ve got a friend. I needed to hear that so bad because the way that I show up in the world is I’m going to get it all done by myself.
(08:06):
Resilient people are more likely to seek help. So here’s the anecdote. If you are like me and you like to get stuff done and show and prove that you’re a bad, shut your mouth and you can do it all by yourself, start practicing asking for help. The simplest thing, just see what it does to elevate your resilient spirit. The third, she says they hold the belief that they can do something that will help them manage with their feelings and to cope with the challenges of life. They hold the belief that they can do something that will help them to manage their feelings and to cope.
(08:54):
So believing in ourselves, I can handle this. I can do something to impact my life, just to hold that as a possibility. You may not know how, but to affirm that, that’s why one of the biggest spiritual practices that we do in religious science here at Cityside and in the new thought world is affirmative prayer. We spend enough time negating our lives to say, I can do this even if I don’t know how, is doing something to uplift the spirit and make it more resilient? The fourth is they have social support available to them. Now, this is a funky one today because what do we call our media? Social media. It is social, but I guarantee the experience of being in the room with someone, it’s very different than what you are fed with virtually. Now, I’m a lover. I get on social media all the time, but from the space of building up your resilient spirit to connect with others and to see their eyes, to hug them, to high five them, even to just give ’em a fist bump if you just don’t want to get too close, but there’s something organic in that exchange.
(10:11):
So seize those opportunities. I’ve recently started to, my wife and I have started to do swing dancing, and it’s literally called social dancing. I don’t go there to only dance with my wife. She steps away and walks up to a guy and says, Hey, you want to dance? And I’m like, oh, I’m going to go over here and ask someone else if they want to dance. We are literally practicing being social, and there’s something about that. It’s really, really powerful. So if you’ve been in that space that has been cultivated in the past four to five years since we’ve sheltered in place where everything feels like it’s inconvenient to go more than five miles from your home, anyone, or is it just me? Okay, so stretch through that a little bit. If you think prior to 2020, I think about a lot of the things that I used to do.
(10:59):
It was nothing to go 30 minutes from my house, and now it’s like, oh man, that’s like two minutes away. Way says it’s going to be five because of traffic. I don’t know. Find a way to get out and be social. It does something to uplift your spirit. Then lastly, she says they are connected with others. Resilient people connect to their family and friends. A little bit different than being social. I’m talking about those deep connections in your life, the friendships, the family. And here’s something might be pushing some buttons. How many of you are waiting for someone to reach out to you?
(11:40):
They haven’t called me in a while. Why haven’t they called me? Why haven’t you called them? Resilient? People get outside of themselves, which is a huge piece of information I think that we can use today. Resilient people are not loners. Our resilience is bound up in our communities, which I’m just so excited Reverend Amy about this. 24, 7, 7 days a week like access to space. It’s going to literally create more opportunities for resilience to be cultivated here at Cityside. It’s amazing the word burnout. Anyone know what that means? You probably have your own definition. Some of you may be experiencing it right now. Burnout is the result of doing too much on your own, trying to do everything not only for you, but probably for lots of other people in your world. There’s nothing wrong with that, but realize that is burn. You are frying yourself out.
(12:56):
Take a moment and realize that you need to do something to soften that burn of constantly going. So the other thing that I think that is so poignant to us being a spiritual community that Brene found in her research is that almost everyone in her study that either self-identified as resilient or checked the boxes of her research, they all said that they had some level of spirituality in their life. So cultivating a resilient spirit on some level, you could just say that to cultivate spirit makes you resilient. That connection and the definition, I really like the definition that she gave of spirituality because it didn’t use the word God at all, because that can send us down all sorts of pathways. I like the word God, but not everybody does. She said spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us.
(14:02):
And that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives. So some sense of spirituality was the foundation for all of the people in her research that expressed resilience. That is why we come here to cityside, whether we’re in person or online, we come together and practice together. We come together and do our own personal spiritual practice, meditation, prayer, forgiveness, gratitude, visioning, journaling, writing, all of those things to stay connected to that thing that’s a little bit greater than our circumstance. So from this foundation of spirituality, three other significant patterns emerged in her resilience research. People that were resilient were cultivating hope. Second, they were practicing critical awareness, or I like to call critical thinking. And the third was letting go of numbing and taking the edge off of vulnerability, discomfort and pain.
(15:13):
So if we go back to that quote, the beginning one, when we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. So to let go of the numbing behaviors that keep us from experiencing some of the sharp edges of life, that’s actually what resilient people do. They stop the numbing. I’m going to get to that in a minute. So first, cultivating hope. It was really interesting. I think a lot of us think of hope as an emotion, like something that just kind of organically happens beyond our control. But she challenges that notion and says that hope is not an emotion, but it’s a way of thinking. It’s an actual cognitive process. So if we have the ability to set a realistic goal, that’s the beginning of hope to set a goal, two, to figure out a way to make that goal happen. Now, some of us may stop there and be like, I know what my goal is, but I don’t know how to make it happen.
(16:08):
Here’s what she says. Resilient people are able to figure out how to achieve goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative routes. So it’s not about one path to our goals coming to pass, it’s being willing to step forward towards whatever direction and guidance we get from spirit and then course corrective. We need to, that is how we cultivate hope. And then lastly, believing in ourselves. I can do this back to the power of affirmations. If we aren’t cultivating that within ourselves and we’re constantly looking outside for proof that we can do something, we’re going to be disappointed. Yes, not the greatest pill to swallow, but a good one to swallow nonetheless. So practicing critical awareness and thinking. To me, this is a little bit tied into the numbing behavior, especially in our social media world. So our TVs, our social media and other apps, they don’t have all the answers.
(17:13):
They just don’t, don’t even have most of the answers, but they are businesses behind all of them, and their goal is to make you believe that they have all the answers so that you continue to subscribe to their work. Stop for a minute and release being a consumer only and be a data fact checker in your own heart and mind. Step back and go, is this something that really resonates with me or do I just feel like I have to do it? I’m not saying don’t engage those businesses, but I’m just trying to get you back into a space of reclaiming the autonomy of your own thinking. It is quite hijacked today, and that goes into the numbing behaviors, taking the edge of, of our vulnerability and discomfort and pain. There are so many ways to do this, and for some of us, we have what we would call full-blown addictions, and we go through processes to alleviate ourselves or at least be a better relationship to those addictions.
(18:18):
But you don’t have to label yourself as addicted to something to realize we all numb in some way. If you got a phone and it’s connected to the internet, I guarantee at some point in the next 24 hours, you’ll engage in a numbing behavior. This doesn’t mean that you have to deny joy to yourself, but this comes back into that critical thinking. Are you actually enjoying the game that you’re playing again and again and again? Or are you distracting yourself from something? I just removed all the games from my phone last night as I was thinking through this. I was like, you know what? Why in the world am I playing Candy Crush again? I took it off my phone like eight years ago and somehow it popped back on. I’m like, oh yeah, I got to get to the end of this level. It’s not doing anything for me.
(19:15):
And here’s one other thing that in terms of critical thinking, there’s a lot of marketing that happens today saying, if you play this game, it’s going to make you mentally stronger. Most of the time, those games only make you better at playing those games. They’re not really increasing your intelligence, your capacity to think critically. So just unplug a little bit and think, is this something that is distracting me from something I really need to do? Because if it is, you’re distracting yourself from discomfort and joy. You have to be fully present in your life to cultivate a resilient spirit.
(19:55):
Okay? Time. So cultivating a resilient spirit, it ultimately comes down to the power of practice. That’s my jam, right? That’s why I wrote my book, soul Jam. It’s about working out, cultivating, or exercising in some way to deepen our awareness of and conscious connection to our spirit. It inherently makes us more resilient. Remember from the research, Brene Brown said that spirituality was a component. So some of the way that we could extrapolate that data is that there’s something inherent about spiritual practices that make us resilient. I’m not saying there’s one practice to do or two, but to do something regularly. This is what increases our capacity. When we touch the grace, the peace, the love, the trust, the compassion, the gratitude, and so much more of our spirit, we are better able to make sense of the world. When we touch upon those things of our spirit, we are better able to make sense of the world. You’ll appreciate this from Amy, anyone who’s gone through ministerial school. So there was a book that we had to read called Sacred in the Profane. Do you remember that book? Anyone know that book? Sacred in the Profane, the basic premise. It was a cultural, spiritual, religious study by the author of all of the religious and ritual and spiritual practices that have been happening. Mind you, for like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,000 years on the planet.
(21:44):
Let that, just think about that timeframe. How long have you been alive? 5,000 years. There’s etchings on the side of caves of people practicing mindful meditation. That’s a long time. Anyway, okay. So the whole point of this book is that we need to have these sacred moments in order to better live in the profane world. And profane doesn’t mean profanity bad, it just means secular. So this book was all about balancing the sacred and the profane, the sacred and the secular that’s being resilient in life, being able to toggle back and forth, being agile, having the balance, the capacity to rebound, not have life look a certain way, be in relationship to life as it is
(22:47):
These sacred things that we engage in. They ground us in something greater than the secular. They ground us in something greater than what we could call the profane existence of our surface level of living. This doesn’t mean that our sacred moments are greater than anything else. It’s just a tool. It’s just a requirement. It’s just a necessity. This capacity to embrace both the sacred in our lives, in the midst of the profane or secular living, this is cultivating our connection to spirit, which is the cornerstone of living a resilient life. Now, we’re continuing with this book in May, right? Okay, so if you haven’t picked up this book, check it out. Here’s one thing I want you to hear. All of the chapters start with the word cultivating all of them. It’s springtime. I was just talking to a 15-year-old who’s so excited about this garden that he’s growing in his parents’ backyard, and all he was talking about was how to cultivate.
(23:55):
It’s a process. So cultivating this ability to be resilient, it a process. It’s not an intellectual understanding. One and done. I got it. Now I’m just going to walk into the world and be more resilient. It is something that we do every day. There is something to engage in. We must cultivate, we must nurture, we must dig up sometimes. Sometimes we need to stir and get all the weeds out and put in some fertilizer and add some nutrient to our minds, hearts and souls. This is the work of our spiritual practice. So to close today, I have a question. There’s things that we can do and there’s things that we should stop doing into a little bit more and continue doing, and what is it that you could stop doing? Do you need to delete some phones, some app from your phones? Do you need to delete some conversations that you’re looping in your mind or having with people all the time that just aren’t getting you anywhere? Don’t let your resilience be solely reliant upon your external life. Your resilience is bound up in the community that you’re in, but what you bring into the community is what you cultivate within your own heart and mind. Let’s go into a practice of cultivating right here and right now
(25:37):
To know that there is something greater than our circumstance. We are not lesser than anything, but there is something greater in through, and that is what I like to call God, the living spirit, the truth, whatever we want to call it. What I know is that it doesn’t exist outside of anything. It exists in everything. It exists in my life and it exists in your life. Now, whether you’re in the room with me or hundreds or thousands of miles away, this is a principle that exists in every place in space that there is. But one life. That life is God, that life is perfect and that life is our life. Now, even if we don’t like the way things look, there is still some divine perfection in the center of it. The divine perfection of peace, the divine perfection of possibility, the divine perfection of love, the divine perfection of abundance, of sufficiency. It is here in and as our lives.
(26:43):
So let us step into a consciousness for this next few seconds of just saying, yes, my life is blessed. Yes, there is possibility. In the midst of whatever’s going on, I resolve to be open to guidance. I will ask for help in some way or form. This week, I will continue to engage in the practices that feed and uplift my spirit. It is in this feeling of being uplifted that we inherently touch upon the resilience muscle. So let us all be blessed this week from the reminding, from the memory, from the remembering that just as we are is enough that we live truly a life that is blessed. And so let us find a way to reconnect to the blessing that we are, to the blessing that life is, and allow it to guide us, to help us, to sustain us, to make us more resilient, to give us whatever it is that we need in the moment. Just that moment to step into the next moment, and in that moment, step into the next moment, slowing down and getting present to how good things actually can be and how good they are. We are so blessed, and so it is.