Spiritual Qualities for Resilience Part I: Love

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I wrote a short blog post about five spiritual qualities that might help support our resilience.  I’ve learned a lot over the past five years.  In addition to experiencing firsthand difficult things that human beings go through, I have learned so much (and continue to learn) about trauma in its many forms and how we can begin to heal.  It occurs to me, given this moment in time, that that blog post needs an update.

So I would like to offer a new set of five spiritual qualities that we can cultivate to support our resilience.  These qualities are:  love, awe, self-compassion, creativity and faith.

Let’s start with love. 

It seems clear to me that the dominant energy across the globe right now is one of separation.  There is nothing inherently wrong with separation.  A child needs to individuate from their parents to become a full adult.   Separation allows for new ideas, creativity, growth.  But when separation is too strong and not grounded in love and connection, it causes great suffering.  You may know this from your own experience.

This is not the first time that the energy of separation has dominated, bringing with it turmoil and anguish.  One of the most cryptic stories at the heart of the Zohar, the classic book of Jewish mysticism, tells how Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his disciples felt that the separation in their time had grown so intense that it disrupted the proper balance with the Divine itself.  “It’s time to act for the Compassionate One,” they said, and engaged in a dangerous ritual that realigned the most primal, ancient, compassionate “parts” of God, which unblocked the flow of blessing into the world.  This ritual was so urgent that three of the disciples sacrificed their lives in the effort.

In this moment, which also seems like an urgent moment, we may not be called upon for such a big sacrifice, but we actually can explore what it might be like to channel that Divine energy of compassion and love.  Not only might it temper the predominance of separation, but it can also be a profound source of joy for us.  After all, joy is the emotion that often spontaneously arises when we experience connection. 

One way to practice with this is the act of blessing.  All the way back to Biblical times, blessing was a way of connecting into the Divine Love that permeates the world and channeling it to the people around us.  In the Song of Songs, the lush love poetry of the Hebrew Bible, there is a sweet image of the beloved tossing pebbles, as it were, against the window of his darling’s room, to wake her up and invite her out into the night with him.  The midrash on the Song of Songs, transforms the metaphor and imagines God peeking through the lattice of the priests’ fingers as they raise their hands to bless the people, “May God bless you and protect you.” 

You don’t have to be a priest to bless; anyone can do it.  Here is one way:  Bring a person to mind.  It doesn’t matter if you know them or not.  Maybe they are standing in front of you in line at the grocery store; maybe they are a loved one far away.  Pause for a moment and see if you can connect to a sincere desire for that person’s wellbeing.  Then say, “May you be blessed and protected.”  You can say it out loud, you can whisper it or you can simply think it.  Then notice your experience:  what was it like to bless that person?  What happened to your own heart?  Then try it again with another person.  Keep practicing.

Next time we will explore awe as a spiritual quality for resilience.