understanding the window of resiliency

safety, challenge and overwhelm

In last Sunday’s post I shared my experience that the breath of the Spirit assists me in moving from overwhelm to safety and safety back out to challenge.

Today I want to build awareness of the Window of Resiliency itself so we’re all on the same page about what safety, challenge, and overwhelm mean. This is one of the places where my love of psychology, body awareness and spirituality all come together. My mind, body and soul LOVE these weavings! So much joy! 🕊️

Again, I want to thank Dan Siegel for first sharing the idea of Window of Tolerance or as some clinicians refer to it The Window of Resiliency. Either name, the aim is to grow one’s ability to self-regulate emotions, thoughts and one’s nervous system so that you can engage the bulk of life from the arena of challenge. We’re not shooting for 100% of the time in challenge. We’re humans. We are going to have times when we are thrown into overwhelm. We just are. And, our nervous systems need down time from challenge and overwhelm. We need time in pure safety. Sometimes I wonder if this is why God insisted on a sabbath. We all need time to regroup in a space of safety for a hot minute. It offers opportunity to rest, restore, and rejuvenate, so that we can enter challenge again and cope with the times we’re thrown into overwhelm.

• The Inner Circle of Safety - this is the state of being when there is no stress what-so-ever. It sounds good, and it is good. AND, we cannot always live here. We wouldn’t grow, stretch, evolve, integrate, transform if we always were in a state of pure safety. Returning to safety after times of overwhelm, however, is a necessary and helpful thing to our mind, body, and soul. Even knowing you can get back to a felt sense of safety is essential.

  *One of the things I’ve learned along the way is that you cannot talk yourself back to safety after being in overwhelm. You need a FELT SENSE of safety before moving back into challenge. You need to be able to trust you’re ok, you’re safe. As humans it’s much easier to trust that you’re safe if you feel safe rather than simply trying to tell yourself you are safe. So, building up spiritual practices to engage a sense of safety is essential. Honoring times of sabbath & rest is needed.

• Widening the Window of Challenge - stress gets a bad wrap, and most of the time it’s founded. AND, there is positive stress. A little stress motivates us to learn, grow, stretch, integrate learning, evolve. We need a little oomph in our being to meet the challenges of life whether that be learning a new hobby, having a difficult conversation with our partner or child, or working through complexity at work. I think of challenge as the sweet spot. The place where our stress is “just right”- we have just enough juice running through our nervous system to keep us engaged, learning, thoughtful, mindful, wholehearted.

  It’s in challenge that we think and act out of the 8Cs of Self Leadership identified by IFS (Internal Family Systems)- calmness, creativity, courage, compassion, clarity, curiosity, confidence and connectedness.¹ Challenge is where we experience “flow” in life. When our hearts, minds, souls, bodies are in alignment and can flow in the Spirit. (One of the many benefits of mindfulness, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing), and meditation is that these tools/modalities/practices help to widen the realm of challenge.) In challenge, we can experience more and more of life with the 8Cs than being thrown into overwhelm. I’m starting to think of challenge as a garden of intentional wild flowers. Challenge is where we grow into who God called us to be all along, shedding the weeds that hold us back and intentionally allowing the fruits of the Spirit to grow wild within us and all around us- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control/equanimity. As we widen this arena of challenge, we are widening the window of resiliency.

Overwhelm - the place where our nervous system moves into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. When we’re overwhelmed our nervous system perceives it is in danger. And, the reptilian part of our brain works overtime to make sure we stay alive, that the perceived threat doesn’t eat us alive. The perceived threat can run from very small things to large things. And, in some cases (maybe a lot of cases) we’re not even sure what knocked us into overwhelm. We may or may not even notice we’re in a stress response.

In her curriculum The Daring Way,™ Brené Brown talks about a mantra she uses when she can feel herself working with her shame shields- “Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand your sacred ground.” I realized that shrinking is really getting small in place (flight and/or freeze and/or fawn) and puffing up is a fight stance. It was her away of working with herself to coach her nervous system into the stance she wanted to take “holding her sacred ground.” I will admit that it has taken me a fair amount of EMDR (as a client) to get to the point where this mantra even feels like an option in my nervous system! And, oh am I loving life with the capacity to stand my sacred ground now! Though the reptilian part of the brain is good at keeping us alive when we’re in overwhelm, we tend to not make good decisions (outside of staying alive) from this state. When in overwhelm, our thinking brain and our emotional brain are not dancing well together. Good decision making, connective conversations (when we are staying connected to ourselves and the other person), meaningful work is hard-pressed to occur in overwhelm. There is a lot to be gained from simply noticing when we’ve moved into a stress response, when we’re in overwhelm.

The three images below are…

1. Far Left Image- How we all often feel- that overwhelm is dominating our lived experience.

2. Middle Image- Remembering the Spirit can meet us all forms of overwhelm. Spirit is the heart of safety and challenge.

3. Right Image-

Next post we’ll look more specifically at how the Spirit might engage us in each of the realms in the window. How the Spirit might try to guide us in awareness of where we are and into a healthier place to be without judgement.

---

PONDER. I invite you to keep pondering the questions from last week… How much awareness do you currently have about your window of resiliency? What throws you into overwhelm? What motivates you to want to widen your window of resiliency? How might the Spirit be nudging you to widen your window? How might She be assisting you in widening?

PRACTICE. Join us on Sunday mornings on Insight Timer @ 8am Eastern for Breathing with the Spirit. This is a time to drop into the awareness that we are always being breathed by the Spirit. And, this holy breath can nourish us at any time and any place. Join people from around the world as we breathe with the Spirit together.

There will not be a Breathing with the Spirit on Sunday, June 22nd.

Sunday, June 29th @ 8am EST. You can access the June 29th live meditation on Insight Timer here.

PARTICIPATE. If you feel so inclined, please share your ponderings in the comments section, so that we can ponder together. I’d love to hear your thoughts about The Window of Resiliency and how the Spirit might be nudging you to grow your window.

Other Opportunities. Meditation is one of the many ways people grow their Window of Resiliency. Starting August 11th, I’ll be offering an on-line and/or in-person mindfulness group for 12 participants for 8 weeks. In October I’ll lead another 6wk offering. If you’d like to join in for one or both groups, you can find more information at my website here.

Ponder, practice and participate. Keep flowing in the Spirit. Grateful to be flowing together.

1. https://foundationifs.org/images/banners/pdf/The_8_Cs_of_Self_Leadership_Wheel.pdf