If you battle a chronic illness, there are 3 things you need to consider. What you can do? What you have? What do you do if things get worse? Asking why you have your debacle and how much more you will suffer, we believe is NOT resilience enabling. If the last two considerations are left out of the equation, you do not have to ‘hope’ to get better or happier. The primary prerogative with our resilience program is to look squarely at what there is, and work with what you get.
Our resilience paradigm has 3 main elements, Reframing, Arranging and Maneuvering. Do bear in mind that these are only the major building blocks. The program is detailed and geared to generate capacity which keeps it forever open ended. The 3 main building blocks are described briefly below.
Reframing
Essentially, reframing means looking at every aspect and domain of your life with a view to inhabiting a position where you look for nothing. Say, you have pain. Reframing ultimately seeks to take you to living without the desire for freedom from this pain. Reframing is an overall objective, much like the direction on a compass. You aim for it, cultivate the program and its elements to constantly head in that direction.
Arranging
With reframing in mind, arranging seeks to begin to conceptualize how you can live with whatever you have, limitations or strengths. If you think about it, arranging means setting about to put in place the means, not to remove the pain (see above) but to design a way to not seek its abeyance. Arranging includes what we term ‘Respecting the Ground’. This means that if you have pain, you respect it, you use the means available to lessen the pain. But any lessening is meant to better generate the ability to not look for the absence of pain.
Maneuvering
With maneuvering, we work with whatever we have at our disposal, whether facilitatory or inhibitory. For someone with terminal cancer, this means looking at death and readying for it, not seeking to delay it. As with arranging, with maneuvering too, we respect the ground. This means respecting the will of others, using contemporary knowledge and resources for some strength and comfort but primarily so that you can keep looking at what you have without desiring to not have it.
With reframing, we look only at the debacle and the measures, and nothing more. Reframing is not a call for resignation. It is clearly seeing that resisting what is occurring leads to machinations that deepen our reliance on things. And the things that we rely on keep increasing. In addition, relying say on medications is a lesser dependence than resorting to harboring ill-will or misgivings. With medications, we might get to a state of lesser pain or discomfort which in turn enables the readier adoption of wholesome views and feelings while ill-will embeds and perpetuates, especially if arising from the experience of illness or difficulty. When we resist, for example an illness, we instantly create a picture that depicts ourselves without comfort or pleasure, and we begin to act, mentally and physically and that too with primarily ourselves in mind. Such action takes us all the way to certainty and security, and if we take recourse to unwholesome states and feelings, we invariably couple such ways of being with things that are as basic as looking for food or say the desire to be free of pain. Hence the emphasis on not resisting. When we do not resist, we abort this entire chain of events. Instead we can focus on what is occurring and what we can do.
Reframing, Arranging as well as Maneuvering involve actions or perhaps more aptly, machinations. Mental or physical machinations can be coarse or they can be extremely subtle. With each such move, we interface with what we think is certain, either directly or by virtue of its absence. In considering our three primary variables impinging on resilience, one cannot ignore direction. Direction could be deemed supposedly positive or supposedly negative. Say, you are worried about the impact of pipe smoking on respiratory health. In that manner, pipe smoking is a negative direction. If we look closely, we find that if we give in to this supposedly negative direction, we actually do not interface with apparent certainty. So, if there is no resistance to the idea of pipe smoking, our machinations tend towards uncertainty. On the other hand, buying bread in order to make a ‘healthy’ sandwich is a positive direction that quite obviously interfaces with apparent certainty. Now consider this. With the pipe smoking example, we stay uncertain and our machinations do not lead to a reliance on the reinforcement of body-mind mechanisms. With the supposedly positive direction of procuring bread, we are certain, and we immediately reinforce all associated body-mind mechanisms!
Why is this relevant to the discussion on resilience? Because no matter what happens, with our machinations, we reinforce our reliance on body-mind mechanisms. And it is these mechanisms that are the basis of illhealth. If we were to stay uncertain, we would not embed factors that could perturb body-mind dynamics. With certainty, which is always only apparently so, we could do damage with even a supposedly positive direction. Reframing aims to mitigate the chain of resistance-machinations-interfacing-reinforcement so that body-mind dynamics are minimally perturbed. If one is unwell, there are many directions that can be taken and there can be a lot of attendant resistance. When we attempt to inhabit a position where we look for nothing, we continually undermine predispositions that might embed what might be unfavorable to wellbeing.