The Resilience Principles are a description of how thought works. It is not a theory; it is of a deeper order. It is a foundation that explains how the Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought all work together to create a paradigm of how mental life works.
It is not the content of our thinking or the form our thoughts have taken but how it was created in the first place.
The Principles of Mental Life are:
- Mind is not brain; you cannot hold it in your hands. It is a power, the power of mental life. It is the catalyst of the reality we now see.
- Thought is our ability to recognize the principles—lack of separation of the form of life and the formless. Without thought, we could not recognize mental life. No words, no reality. The Resilience Principles are ALL absolutely necessary for us to have existence.
- Consciousness is this incredible nature of consciousness, the tangible capability of making us aware of life, allowing us to be aware of our thoughts.
- The Resilience Principles are profoundly connected to each other. They cannot be separated. If one element is missing, we do not have a paradigm and, therefore, no life experience. They point to the moment in time where the experience of life is created into the life you now see.
Before the Resilience Principles Understanding
Until now, we have tried to change how people think to change their behaviors to get better outcomes; unfortunately, we have been looking from the wrong direction after our thoughts have manifested, rather than how they started in the first place.
What the Resilience Principles Do for Us
From a Principled understanding of mental life, we now can insightfully understand where our experience is coming from prior to the form life has taken.
To get a feel for why the Resilience Principles Paradigm is an accurate way of describing mental life and why it is different from current understanding, it requires us to listen with an ear to hear something new.
- Listening is one of the most powerful gifts in the universe.
- It is a deeper order of listening than we are used to.
- The act of listening is the willingness to be touched by, changed by, and created by what you hear.
- Insight is a change in understanding—that’s how the Principles work.
- Insight is where ALL change happens.
The Nature of the Resilience Principles Paradigm
The Resilience Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought; are a metaphor to describe how humans experience life. They are natural, neutral elements that cannot be separated; if one is missing, we do not have a paradigm and, therefore, no experience of life.
- Because they are the pre-existing, built-in foundation of our human existence, we all have equal access to them.
- Because they are neutral, it allows us to use our personal thoughts and feelings to create a life of purpose and meaning.
- If you can “hear” the truth of the principles, the profound nature of them, and can see how we are using them to create our life.
- Knowing about the Principles helps us settle our thinking and become present to our life experiences.
In this space, we can have involuntary thinking, which can allow us to have new thinking and new solutions to our problems that we did not see before. This creates a richer, more meaningful experience of life. It is our life.
In contrast, when we are focused on voluntary thinking, we often experience overthinking or intellectualized thinking about our problems. As a result, we can become stubborn or rigid in our perceptions, which feels like stress. This is when we suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically.
The longer we spend in our stressful thinking, feelings of dissatisfaction, anger, depression, insecurity, and fearful thinking appear. In this state of mind, we are now living in a misunderstanding of where our experience is coming from.
The moment we notice that we have been caught up in this type of thinking and remember that we are the thinker of our reality, we always have the opportunity to shift our focus to a more positive direction; this allows our thoughts to settle. Knowing where our experience of life comes from doesn’t seem to be important at first, but it is the difference between suffering, thriving, and joy.
Written by:
Teresa Walding
BSN, RN, NC-BC
Teresa is a Board-Certified Nurse Coach and Associate Director of the Advancing Nurse Coaching Program, which focuses on bringing the Principles of Resilience to nurses and health care professionals through their 80-hour virtual, self-paced course.
