LU HANESSIAN

What is resilience?

Resilience is not a trait, a one-size-fits-all skill or a formula to be distilled and packaged for distribution. Resilience is an... integration. Across decades of research and multiple disciplines from developmental psychology to interpersonal neurobiology, metallurgy to cultural and social sciences, physics to neuroplasticity, scientists have studied the characteristics of resilience and the factors that might promote it. 

Studies in the neuroscience of trauma and healing have yielded insights and discoveries about how we are wired and how our innate chemistry, systems, and circuitry are impacted by thresholds of acute, recurring, and chronic (toxic) stress. 

Resilience is generative, adaptive, and relational in its neuroplasticity and embodied experience.

Resilience holds inherent paradoxes and possibilities. We are wired for interconnection and wired for threat detection. We can be vulnerable to the negative impacts of adversity and yet be strengthened in our vulnerability through relationship as a buffer and healing pathway to aliveness and thriving. 

There is deep wisdom in resilience as a living biointelligence guiding, guarding, galvanizing, pushing us inward, outward, forward, toward.

Resilience is integrative and transformative in its dynamic process.

The dynamic complexities of resilience also integrate resistance. Harnessing collective imagination, hope, and living potential, resistance is embodied discernment, context sensitivity, and wisdom story that gives voice to vision, a catalyst for generative processes of growth, flourishing, and transformative change.