Resilience Composure: Cultivating Your Inner Bulldog
The dog in you persists
Photo of a bulldog in a blue coat taking a rest by Chris Benson at Unsplash
There is a family story my parents liked to tell and retell about me. It goes like this. I was a little tyke wearing a dark blue coat one cold afternoon at grandma’s house. Maybe 3 years old. My older siblings and cousins were raising a ruckus that afternoon, saying they were going to flag down ice cream truck when it came by. In the middle of LA winter, the ice cream truck never missed this neighborhood, but you had to be ready and you had to be quick. When the little tinkling music box music of the ice cream truck song became clear, the big kids ran out the door and down the long driveway at grandma’s. I remember that long driveway well. Years later, I would skip and skip up and down that driveway just for fun pretending to be a horse. That cold afternoon, with the ice cream truck approaching, my three-year-old self did her best to run after my cousins and big sisters. There was no time to lose! I made it halfway through the long driveway, fell down and skinned my knees, but I got up! I got up, and I kept running. I ran after the big kids not wanting to miss anything. My parents told me that story many times: “You got up and kept running as if nothing!”
The day I got up ignoring my skinned knees was a proud moment. I don’t remember the ice cream, but I remember the family pride at the retelling of this story. It got instilled in me that getting up after you fall is a good thing. That’s when my resilience education began, and it shaped my personality in many ways. But maybe it also taught me to push through limits and ignore pain to fit in. Ugh. I had to unravel all that later. Whatever the case, the important detail here is the getting up after a fall.
In my Tai Chi practice, my teacher, Tony, often spoke about "getting in touch with your inner bulldog." It’s a striking image—not necessarily pretty, but tenacious, grounded, and unwilling to let go. As I diligently practiced Tai Chi forms and meditation, I grew to think of the inner bulldog as the gritty ordinary work and play of showing up and not giving up. The important part, according to my teacher, was doing the muscular and physical work—putting in the time to change the mind and body. That is, making good on a desire to learn Tai Chi means practicing Tai Chi. There is no other way. Like anything, Tai Chi practice itself can feel like drudgery when you try too hard and get tense or when you encounter challenge or harsh criticism. You can get shy about trying again after having your feelings hurt or getting confused. Like life, Tai Chi can feel complicated, especially when you are trying to memorize something new. It takes time. Impatience can kick in. That’s when it’s tempting to skip class and miss practice. But then (sigh): you try again. You come to class. You start practicing what you remember on your own, not caring what you look like, and just letting yourself explore, play, and find your way. You ask questions. You don’t give up. You cultivate discipline, which means remembering what you want. Over and over. Then the discipline pays off. The peace and quiet emerges. Boredom and drudgery give way to peace and a quieter mind. That’s when practicing Tai Chi feels like play. Ahhh.
I call this resilience composure.
Famous rock climber, Tommy Caldwell, embodies resilience composure when he climbs free solo (no ropes or assists) and faces moments of sheer terror holding onto the side of a mountain with just fingers and the pressing of his feet into rock faces and crevices. He gets through many such moments during his rock climbing expeditions. Fellow climbers particularly enjoy inviting Caldwell on adventures, because he is so cheerful in the face of challenge and adversity. Caldwell grew up with a father who routinely encouraged him to do hard things. An outdoorsman, Caldwell’s father took the children camping at a young age and had them facing their fears to traverse challenging hikes and climbs regularly. Caldwell’s father simply expected little Tommy to rise to the challenges, and he did. Even missing a finger from an early accident as a teenager, Tommy Caldwell is undeterred in undertaking climbing adventures and expeditions. Caldwell has an amazing capacity to get through hard things. This is resilience composure.
Tai Chi taught me about resilience composure in the sense of paying attention to when my body has tension especially as I move my body and practice the forms. Some forms can be really easy to learn, others less easy to learn and memorize. I have found that if I am relaxed, gestures and movements stay with me, and I can memorize them. It took practice to learn how to do that. I would say that memorizing movement is challenging, because it requires that you trust your perceptions and you trust your muscles to replicate movement. Yes, you can doubt yourself, and then seek answers from teachers. But then you practice and practice and find flow. It is very important to get that sense of flow and relaxation in the muscles and the bones. That is the process that leads to a deep knowing that no one can take away from you, as Tony, my teacher, would say. Stay relaxed and simply persist. Trust yourself. Practice trusting yourself. I am a slow learner, and so was my Tai Chi teacher, Tony, who kindly said one day to me, “Those who learn the slowest, learn the most.”
Yes, I believe that at some point in the practice of any art, you touch into a driving force that makes you ask, “What happens if I go further? What happens if I try my best?”
Master gardeners say something similar and paint a picture of the gritty process of going further. The truth is: gardening isn't just about the blooms and the harvest; it’s also about learning how to deal with frustration, challenge, and loss. Critters can come eat every pear in your pear tree when you least expect it (this really happened to me when taking my first steps as a gardener). The rain can disappear, and the drought dries out your herb garden prematurely. The snails eat your mint plants that you were growing to make tea. You sprain your ankle and are unable to get out there in the dirt for weeks. Life can be unpredictable, and the pursuit of any art will put you face to face with this changing nature of life conditions again and again. Gardening is especially humbling because it teaches you to let go of the outcome. When results are not coming, you take note of what worked and what did not and you also humbly accept that you cannot control everything. The weather conditions and the critters or whatever happens are all teaching you how to grow a garden and how to be a gardener. You remember that you are learning. Always learning.
Faced with these obstacles and limitations, something inside makes you breathe deeply and sigh and just let go into an unknown future. That little voice inside tells you to hang in there, try again or come back tomorrow. Come back and see what happens. The capacity to come back again and again is what builds the skills to create art, to garden, to heal from injury or to mend a broken heart and find the way back to open your heart and find that you can still love. Still live. You don’t know what to expect, but you know it may be interesting; and it will be educational for you. Some people call this the athlete or warrior stance of existence that comes from self-belief and translates into acts of will and making choices. But it’s not just any choice. It’s the choice that leads to learning and growth and sensing your future self calling you. The phrase, “I will” is a promise that is full of power. “I will” is the call of your future imagined self (the healed self, the accomplished self) showing up in present time as the growth mindset that enjoys learning, but maybe does not always enjoy being taught.
Whether you are trying to learn and memorize Tai Chi forms, create great art, heal from an injury, or simply trying to get through a Tuesday, you can tap into this mindset, try your best, and see what happens next.
Nature is full of examples of bringing new things to life seemingly from nothing. What we see in nature is that there are phases of growth and expansion that are full of purpose and wonder. The seeds break their seed coats that have been properly softened by rain and water. The water also activates the seed to turn into a seedling nourished by the soil and the starches in the seed. Science is showing that seeds can “sense” the vibrations of rain hitting the earth: the light pitter-patter sound of rain hitting the earth seems to awaken and encourage the seeds to sprout by design. The vibrations jostle microstructures in the seed called statoliths that set off the biological reactions that make the seed germinate. It happens by design. When roots emerge, and the seed has sprouted into a little plant that pierces through the soil, it is an illustration of nature’s tenacity to come forth. Life finds a way to grow and keep on going, and you can tap into this natural life power, too. It is your nature!