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What if you could tap into your inherent resilience at any time? Prentis Hemphill guides a meditation to turn good memories into a state of resilience.
How to Do This Resilience Practice:
Find a position that is comfortable for you, whether that is sitting, laying down or even standing. Don’t feel pressured to remain still for this practice. If you feel like you need to move or make sounds to stay present, feel free to.
Today’s Happiness Break host:
Think of something that brings you a sense of resilience.
While in this memory, what are you doing with your body? What does your body feel like?
Try to intensify those feelings. Notice how that feels in your body and in the experience of that memory.
Take yourself back to how the memory was at the beginning of this practice, at a lower intensity. Notice how you’re able to make that change.
Thinking about the day ahead or the day that you’ve had, ask yourself how much space do you want the day to take up in this moment?
Once you’re ready, move from that comfortable position. See if you can take this experience with you throughout your day.
Prentis Hemphill is the founder of the Embodiment Institute, and a writer and therapist who prioritizes the body in their approach to healing.
Learn More About the Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/about
Check out Prentis’ website: https://prentishemphill.com
Follow Prentis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/prentishemphill
Follow Prentis on Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/4d99f4xs
More resources from The Greater Good Science Center:
How to Hardwire Resilience into Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/26mff6hf
Four Ways Social Support Makes You More Resilient: https://tinyurl.com/34ntce8u
Evidence Mounts that Mindfulness Breeds Resilience: https://tinyurl.com/2u6k6mkh
Mindfulness and Resilience to Stress at Work: https://tinyurl.com/yrujmwxs
Three Ways to Boost Your Resiliency as a Parent: https://tinyurl.com/w6f3w3ak
How Tuning into Your Body can Make You More Resilient: https://tinyurl.com/yv5yzper
We love hearing from you! Tell us about your experience of this resilience meditation. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
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We’re living through a mental health crisis. Between the stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout — we all could use a break to feel better. That’s where Happiness Break comes in. In each biweekly podcast episode, instructors guide you through research-backed practices and meditations that you can do in real-time. These relaxing and uplifting practices have been shown in a lab to help you cultivate calm, compassion, connection, mindfulness, and more — what the latest science says will directly support your well-being. All in less than ten minutes. A little break in your day.
Transcript:
Dacher Keltner I’m Dacher Keltner, and this is Happiness Break. Today we’re trying a practice where we cultivate a sense of resilience by tapping into an empowering memory.
When we reminisce on the good we feel more resilient. Namely stressful situations don’t drag our mood down as much, and our cortisol levels don’t spike as much, either.
Resilience is also connected with longevity, lower depression rates, and more satisfaction with life.
This week’s Happiness Break on resilience is hosted by Prentis Hemphill, a writer, the founder of The Embodiment Institute, and a therapist who prioritizes the body in their approach to healing.
Prentis Hemphill Hi everyone. This is Prentis Hemphill and I’m offering a resilience practice today.
Resilience is really our birthright. It’s what we come into the world with. It’s where creativity comes from. It’s where our relationality comes from. And so this practice is about resourcing ourselves, accessing resilience, and the experience of resilience whenever we might need it.
So I wanna ask you, to get into a position that’s comfortable for your body, and that can be standing, it can be seated, it can be lying down. If you need to move around, if you need to shake, if you need to let out a sound, if you need to dance a little bit so that your body arrives, go ahead and do that. You don’t need to be calm and still to engage in this practice.
We are finding our way into our bodies, and that can look like a bunch of different ways.
So while we’re here, I want you to think about something that brings you a sense of resilience. This can be a special place in nature or something you do creatively. It could be laughing with your friends, it could be dancing, whatever image you have, whatever experience you have, I want you to just conjure it in this moment.
Once you have that memory or that place or that moment, let it start to fill you up.
So if it’s seated in your center and your gut, or if it’s in your heart, let that memory spread.
Let it fill up your arms, your legs, your face. Really be there. See that. Experience it.
When you are in this place, when you’re experiencing resilience, what’s your face like?
What’s your throat like? What’s your chest like? What are your legs doing? Let it come alive in you.
And then I want you to take this experience that you’re having and turn it up. Turn it up 20%.
Whatever it is for you, turn that experience up to where it’s almost spilling out of you.
Invite the experience even more into your muscles, into your cells. Notice how your breathing changes, how your position shifts.
And now I actually wanna ask you to turn it down. Turn it down maybe 10% and just notice how you do that.
What changes? What comes back into view? What stories might be there? How does your body position change?
And you can turn it down even more really, so the experience is kind of off.
Bring yourself back to approximately where we began this practice.
There may be residue from that experience. Or you may have arrived all the way back. Just notice the difference and notice, especially, that you did that. Whatever change happened was one that you made happen.
You invited that experience in.
And so for this next round, we’re gonna conjure that experience again, that resilience.
As you think about your day ahead of you, the day you’ve had already, how much space do you want that experience to take up in this moment? And just take a second and fill yourself up with it.
Keep letting it shift your body. Keep letting it move your actual body. If you wanna shake, if you wanna let out a sound now, a wiggle, whatever you need to do, but let that fill you up to the degree that you need it today.
And we’ll move towards closing out the practice. But you get to keep that exactly where you need it. And the reminder here is that this is always accessible to us.
That experience is always a resource that can shift your mood, shift your breath, shift your way of being. And lastly, that resilience is our birthright. So it’s from this place we can live, we can let go of the doubt, the guilt, the stories, the ways of the world shapes our bodies, and we can shape our bodies back through our experiences of life that fill us up.
Thanks so much.
Dacher Keltner That was Prentis Hemphill, writer, therapist, and the founder of The Embodiment Institute.
I’m Dacher Keltner, Thanks for taking this Happiness break with me.
Happiness Break is produced by PRX and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
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