Fiona Robards is the Coordinator of the NSW Centre for the
Advancement of Adolescent Health: www.caah.chw.edu.au and www.twitter.com/youthhealth
. She recently attended the HH Dalai Lama teachings, called
Awakening the Mind.
"The basic sources of happiness are a good heart, compassion
and love" HH Dalai Lama.
This week I was privileged to attend teachings with His Holiness
Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama spoke about how it is immensely helpful
to maintain a calm mind, particularly when there are a lot of
challenging things happening in your life. It is impossible to
eliminate all these troubled times, but we can develop an inner
state so we are not disturbed by these outer problems. The Dalai
Lama said "Problems are bound to happen; try to develop inner peace
and inner strength."
People's resilience is pretty amazing. Resilience comes from
within us giving us social competence, autonomy, a sense of
mastery, problem solving ability, future direction and ability to
connect with others. Our resilience also comes from outside of us,
through our social supports and sense of belonging to a group, like
our friends, family, school, cultural or religious group. The way
that people are able to reach out to others, how they learn the
importance of humour and how they find the ability to put their
lives together again after experiencing a tough time is resilience.
Resilience is also something we all have and use day to day, not
just something that we use to help us back from life's hard
knocks.
Consider these questions yourself as well as for the people that
you work with:
- How do you find inner calm in the face of outer chaos?
- What would your children or significant others wish for you in
how you care for yourself?
- Imagine at the end of the day you said "I had a really
enjoyable day, even though it was just an ordinary day", what would
you have done?
- What are you looking forward to? What can you do in the next
week that will bring about extra happiness?
- What helps you to bounce back from difficult times?
- Describe a difficult situation where you felt good about the
way you managed it? What does this tell you about yourself?
- Who supports you? Who are you connected with who helps you feel
you are not toughing this out alone?