Resilience Training
I wonder a lot about the honesty of the resilience-training narrative I carry about spiritual practice.
As obvious as the problems facing our species are, it’s equally obvious that humans are not AT ALL prepared for what’s happening.
I am not not a utopian we-are-gonna-make-it technology believer. I am just more concerned with the loss of skills that are older than that, with which humans survived arguably way more dire extinction threats, and which we’ll need regardless where we land in the range of scenarios.
We need to practice while we still can. This is the framing of spiritual practice as resilience training.
But is this an appropriate framing?
Even in the near term, when there is a need to give a reason for all this, the most convincing one is always, “Life is difficult, it gets more difficult over time, and the world’s condition is getting increasingly difficult as well. Spiritual practice is moment-to-moment preparation to face difficulty.”
But for many years, while I have felt fathomless support and refuge sitting in zazen, I have never found an honest measure of any deepening resilience. I’ve had to just rely on the counterfactual: “Imagine how much less resilient would I be WITHOUT it!”
And in the moment of need, when something difficult is happening, I reach for the practice, and it’s there, but not the way it is in a dark, silent room with nothing but a blank wall in my visual field, my body in its most stable and supportive possible posture.
In recent years, though, I have noticed unmistakeable shifting underneath the surface of behavior and emotion and psychology. The underlying system has changed, and its energy has intensified. My awareness of the state of that system has increased in reliability and sensitivity.
The breath in zazen catalyzed that transformation. I could feel its effect in real time. The energy arising in zazen was almost overwhelming. It was difficult at times to get back into motion, directing that energy to its proper function.
That’s when I encountered LaoHuGong.
All spring and summer, I worked through these movements one at a time, stacking them together, waiting to add the next until the entire sequence up to that point felt fully integrated.
When I got up from the cushion, I went into those movements. The transfer became natural.
This morning, I finished the sequence, returning to the cave.
I said שהחיינו, the blessing over the One “who has enlivened us,” which we say to mark momentous occasions and sacred moments.
I felt in touch with my whole system at once.
And now I feel resilient.
