Written by Jen Liu

“Progress often resembles a zigzag or spiral more than a straight line. When we develop resilience, our discipline becomes able to bend and not break with those inevitable curves and corners. If we approach our New Year's aspirations with strict inflexibility, we might decide to give up at the first sign of a hiccup. But a healthy measure of resilience can help us carry our aspirations through the entire year and beyond.”

Around this time each year, people all over the world undergo a collective ritual of setting goals and envisioning positive change for the year ahead. Whatever realm one wishes to make progress in — spiritual, physical, relational, professional — the framework of mindfulness meditation and its emphasis on resilience can help us better carry out our aspirations and understand what it means to commit to the winding path of genuine, lasting transformation.

In Dharma Moon's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training, we teach that one of the three main benefits of mindfulness meditation practice is the cultivation of resilience. In the context of meditation, resilience refers to the ability to return to one's intended aim — such as awareness on the breath — over and over with precision and gentleness. This instruction is sometimes misinterpreted as trying to go as long as possible without having a single thought formation. But developing the quality of resilience actually involves rather than excludes the occurrence of thoughts, distractions, emotions, and reality in general. It requires us to accept that it is natural and okay for the mind to stray, and our task is to simply return to our breath when we notice that it has.

Allowing the mind to run its natural course might sound like a contradiction of discipline, which can evoke the image of trying to whip a wild animal into submission. But letting the animal wander and teaching it to return to the path with ease and resilience is actually a cornerstone of discipline. Leaving room in our New Year's aspirations for the occasional blip means we’ll be able to stray from what we set out to do at times and still come back to center relatively quickly — much like a macro version of what we practice during mindfulness meditation. The goal is not to never stray, but to be able to stray and return with grace, without having lost too much of the aspirational energy that preceded the straying.

When we cultivate resilience, all that which doesn't perfectly resemble a manifestation of our goal has less power to make us feel defeated in our efforts. Progress often resembles a zigzag or spiral more than a straight line. When we develop resilience, our discipline becomes able to bend and not break with those inevitable curves and corners. If we approach our New Year's aspirations with strict inflexibility, we might decide to give up at the first sign of a hiccup. But a healthy measure of resilience can help us carry our aspirations through the entire year and beyond.

From all of us here at Dharma Moon, we wish you a happy, safe, and easeful New Year.