Resiliendo is about actively growing resilience. The word comes from resilire, ‘resilience’ in Latin. “-iendo” is the latin active conjugation. Resiliendo is a philosophy and a practice. It involves engaging in thought, behaviour, practice and therapy to increase your ability to recover from difficulty, and successfully adapt to change.

Essentially, Resiliendo, is about increasing your bandwidth and flexibility so that you are better able to restore ‘normalcy’ amongst ever-changing conditions. The better you are able you to interact with your environment, the ‘friendlier’ it feels, in many senses of the word.

I believe that resilience is the single most defining factor of our health that we can directly influence. Our bodies are constantly seeking homeostasis. That is to say the many systems in our body are constantly running a loop of assessment to establish ‘the new normal’ so that the systems in our body can adapt accordingly.¹

What are we adapting to? Anything and everything. From a shift in temperature, to social distress, mental overload, illness, life events, stress, injury, and disease.

Allostasis refers to the process required to change the levels of one or more regulated parameters as needed to adjust to ‘the new normal’.³ This is our ability to upscale or downscale our (internal) response if you will.

In laymans terms: You could see resilience as bandwidth. The objective at hand is not to learn how ‘not to fall’ or avoid incidents. Assume change is constant, because it is. What matters is how long it takes you to recover and if you have sufficient resources and flexibility  to do so.

This is where it gets tricky. The principle of constant change remains the same irrespective of your starting position. In the presence of suboptimal health or (chronic) disease, your standard situation consumes an excessive amount of resources. And, if you have become physiologically inflexible, that is to say, your metabolic system for instance, does not work as it should, you will have less breadth (flexibility) to upscale or downscale your response. In both cases, you will be poorly positioned to adequately respond to change. This is where the wheels of the wagon start to creak, and you may feel yourself dragging. When you are unable to restore homeostasis, or lack the resources to successfully engage allostasis, disease awaits.

In an environment of constant change, where would you put your money? On controlling the (instigator of) change, or nurturing your ability and capacity to respond? Change could be a single incident or a diverse stream of events. Chances are, the change is beyond your control.

“The more we can learn about resilience, the more potential there is for integrating salient concepts of resilience into relevant fields of medicine, mental health and science. This integration is beginning to foster an important and much needed paradigm shift. Rather than spending the vast majority of their time and energy examining the negative consequences of trauma, clinicians and researchers can learn to simultaneously evaluate and teach methods to enhance resilience”.(¹ Southwick, S) We define resilience very simply as a stable trajectory of healthy functioning after a highly adverse event.¹ (Bonanno, G)

The greater the bandwidth, the greater the capacity to restore homeostasis – normalcy – amidst the inevitable bumps we encounter in life. Resiliendo is the practice of actively growing resilience by applying various practices as therapy to increase your ability to recover from difficulty, and successfully adapt to change.  More than a philosophy and a practice, it’s a way of life.