I love hearing all these buzzwords that appear out of nowhere and the next thing you find is that everyone is speaking the speak. At the moment the buzzword appears to be 'robust'. Everything has to be robust; robust this and robust that.

Not to long ago another word crept into our vocabulary — 'resilience’ — and once again I heard the word resilience spoken everywhere and I found myself exploring the word and it’s origins.

Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. Being resilient does not mean that people don't experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. But resilient people tap into their strengths and support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems.

That's an excellent definition and appropriate to the times that we are living in. With fingers crossed, we are hopefully moving out of the pandemic and if ever there was a time to be resilient, it’s now, as we begin to bounce back. God knows but that last couple of years has taken its toll on us — as we all suffered.

As I explored the word resilient, I found myself asking around, what’s this thing called resilience and do we all have it.? My good friend, teacher, and mentor, Paul Haller out win in the San Francisco Zen Centre (a long way, indeed, from Tullymore Gardens) explained to me that mindfulness breeds resilience. If that is the case, we have to start practicing in order to cultivate resilience. I know that’s it’s an inside job and if we don’t go within with go without.

A recent study in Berkeley university found the following: “Pausing and observing the mind may (help us) resist getting drawn into wallowing in a setback.” Put another way, mindfulness “weakens the chain of associations that keep people obsessing about” their problems or failures, which increases the likelihood they will try again.

Many times I found myself in diffs and believed that was me beat. Then suddenly I’m able to tap into my resilience and bounce back.

Some years back in Twinbrook on the road between Cherry and St Luke's chapel, a beautiful tree was vandalised, it had been set alight. To my father who was a daily communicant, this tree looked dead, but as the seasons came and went, new shoots appeared on the tree, as it grew again. Now there’s an amazing case of nature’s resilience, and my father told me that the tree reminded him of me. It reminded, him of me in the depths of addiction and my journey into recovery.

There is a step in AA, step eleven, that says, ‘sought through prayer and meditation’, and for me mindfulness practice is my meditation. Mindfulness breeds resilience and therefore I need to practice, practice, practice. The daddy of mindfulness is the west is Jon Kabat-Zinn and he likens mindfulness to sewing your parachute everyday. He says you can’t sew your parachute when you are falling from the plane.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, "Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."