What makes us resilient? When life throws at us more than our share of challenges, how do we stay grounded? Beyond keeping our bodies strong and supple, yoga offers tools for resilience and to cope mentally and emotionally. Through practice, we become more steady in the mind and the body, and can maintain a sense of wellbeing that’s not dependent on our outer circumstances.
Inner Resource is a tool within the practice of iRest that is used to foster peace and equanimity. It’s an internalized felt-sense of ease, an inner sanctuary, a place of restful stillness and peace. We can experience the Inner Resource as a felt sense in the body that helps us stay relaxed and in control. Even when we can’t control our outer circumstances, the Inner Resource provides us with an underlying sense of well-being and security.
Yoga philosophy states that we already have everything we need inside of us, but our vision gets obscured and we lose access to our inner knowing. How do we reconnect to this internalized sense of wellbeing? Feeling peaceful can be a tall order. We often start simply with a sense of being okay, or just a neutral sensation. This practice does not call us to create anything that’s not there, but to simply tap into what’s already present in the moment.
The process can be different for each person. Often we can use a specific memory, or a place that helps find this sense of security, or simply a sense of being okay in the moment. We engage all our senses to create a bodily memory of how it feels to be in that place. The more we practice experiencing this sensation the more accessible it becomes, turning into our internal refuge that we can call upon whenever we need to feel secure. Sometimes the Inner Resource is accessible directly as a felt sense in the body, without a recourse to a real-life experience. But, whichever path we take, grounding our experience in the body through all the senses is an important first step.
Once we are established in the Inner Resource, we can further explore our internal landscape to develop an unshakeable sense of wellbeing, meet every moment of life with full awareness, and let our actions come from our true knowing.
When dealing with persistent pain or other physical challenges, fostering resilience by strengthening our inner resource through meditation and self-reflection is especially important. Feeling positive and steady in our mind can in turn create positive effects on the body by strengthening our immune system and decreasing our perception of pain.
The Inner Resource is part of the teaching of iRest, a contemporary evidence-based meditative practice founded on traditional yogic philosophy by Richard Miller, PhD, a psychologist and a lifelong student of yoga.
