"Gina was one of the golden girls of my circle-charming, smart, and seriously cool. As our other friends rode through their mid-20s on roller coasters of elation and despair, Gina maintained an almost daunting level of emotional perspective. She gave birth to a child who experienced cognitive impairments and cared for him without losing either her detachment or her sense of humor. She went through cancer surgery with her usual rueful grace."
"Then her husband fell in love with another woman, and Gina fell apart. It was as if all the accumulated losses of 20 years had finally caught up with her. She cried for hours. She raged at her husband and at her life. And through it all, her friends kept saying, "But she was always so strong! What happened?" What happened, of course, was that Gina had hit her edge. She met the place in herself where her strength and flexibility gave out."
"The very sound of the word resilience captures its bouncy, rubbery quality: Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines it as "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change"; psychiatrist Frederic Flach describes it as "the psychological and biological strengths required to successfully master change." Resilience lets a writer like Frank McCourt turn the pain of a difficult childhood into a compassionate memoir."
Gina maintained emotional steadiness through early adult turmoil, caregiving for a cognitively impaired child, and cancer surgery, until her husband's infidelity triggered a breakdown. She cried, raged, and exhausted her usual reserve, revealing the moment when her strength and flexibility failed. Hitting that personal edge forces choices that shape one's resilience. Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover or adjust to misfortune and the psychological and biological strengths to master change. Resilience enables people to transform pain into compassion, sustain hope through prolonged hardship, and use internal life force to support physical healing.
Read at Yoga Journal
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