The Strength We Forget We Have

It's easy to talk about resilience when life is going well. When we're feeling balanced and connected, we naturally make time for the things that nourish us. We can practise our sound healing, explore our inner world and nurture the relationships and practices that bring us a sense of peace and wellbeing. But what happens when life becomes difficult? When we find ourselves facing uncertainty, emotional pain, family challenges, loss or experiences that shake the very foundations of our world?

It's often at precisely these moments that we retreat. We become consumed by our thoughts and worries, withdraw into ourselves and sometimes lose touch with the very practices that have supported us so beautifully in the past. Our natural instinct may be to pull away, to hibernate, to close ourselves off while we try to make sense of what's happening around us. And yet, perhaps these are the very moments when we most need to remember what we already know.

I've been reflecting on this recently through some of my own life experiences, and it's reminded me that resilience isn't necessarily about being strong all the time. It's about recognising that, even when we feel vulnerable, frightened or overwhelmed, we have resources available to us that can help us navigate our way through.

What Does It Really Mean to Be Resilient?

We often associate resilience with strength, endurance and the ability to keep going regardless of what life throws at us. There's almost an expectation that being resilient means holding everything together, remaining positive and somehow rising above whatever challenges we encounter. It can almost be like a badge of honour.

But I wonder whether true resilience is something rather more compassionate.

Perhaps it means allowing ourselves to experience the full range of human emotions without becoming completely defined by them. We can feel afraid and still have courage, experience sadness and still find moments of joy, or feel uncertain about the future while trusting that we have the capacity to navigate whatever comes next.These feelings don't have to cancel one another out. They can coexist, each representing a different part of our experience, without any one of them becoming the whole of who we are.

And perhaps resilience is also about remembering that we don't have to find all our strength from within ourselves, or somehow manufacture it through sheer determination. Sometimes strength comes through connection, through the relationships we've nurtured, the wisdom we've gathered and the spiritual practices that remind us we are part of something greater than our immediate circumstances.

Remembering Our Resources

One of the things I talk about in my therapeutic and sound healing work is the importance of resourcing. Our resources are the people, practices, experiences and inner connections that help us feel grounded, supported and connected to ourselves. They provide a sense of stability when life feels uncertain and can help us reconnect with a calmer, more centred place within.

For those of us who work with sound, we have an extraordinary resource quite literally at our fingertips, and yet I sometimes wonder how often we remember to use it for ourselves?

We might spend hours preparing a beautiful soundbath for others, carefully considering the instruments, intentions and healing space we're creating. We understand the power of sound to influence our emotional state, support relaxation and help us move beyond the constant activity of the thinking mind. But when we're struggling ourselves, do we offer that same care and attention to our own wellbeing?

Sometimes simply picking up a drum can be enough to begin shifting our experience. As we settle into its rhythm, we may find ourselves moving away from the endless cycle of thoughts and worries and becoming more present within our bodies. The repetitive beat can offer an anchor, creating a space in which we can breathe, release tension, shift energy and reconnect with a different perspective.

For me, drumming also opens the doorway to something deeper, providing a powerful foundation for shamanic journeying and connecting with spiritual guidance.

Connecting with Our Spiritual Helpers

One of the practices that has become particularly meaningful to me is shamanic journeying, and especially connecting with power animals and ancestors. Within shamanic traditions, power animals are understood as spiritual allies or helpers whose qualities, wisdom and energy can offer guidance, protection and support. Through a journey, often accompanied by the steady rhythm of a drum, we enter an altered state of awareness in which we can explore our inner landscape and connect with these symbolic or spiritual companions.

Different power animals may represent different qualities or strengths, such as courage, patience, discernment, protection or the ability to see a situation from a new perspective. Developing a relationship with a power animal can become a beautiful practice that offers a sense of connection and support during times of uncertainty.

For some of us, these connections extend beyond our power animals to include spiritual guides, helpers and ancestors. As we approach Samhain, traditionally a time when the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is believed to be at its thinnest, it's a particularly good opportunity to honour those who have gone before us and reconnect with the wisdom, strength and sense of belonging we may draw from our ancestral connections.

Recently, during some very difficult experiences within my own family, I've found myself returning to these journeys, seeking guidance and drawing strength from both the power animals with whom I've developed a connection and the wisdom of my ancestors.

What has really struck me is how important it has been that these relationships are already familiar to me. I wasn't trying to discover something entirely new in the middle of a challenging situation. Instead, I was returning to a practice and a connection that I already knew offered me comfort, perspective and a sense of being supported when I needed it most.

I think there's something particularly valuable in that. If you're like me, you might find that you often wait until you're struggling before looking for something to help, but perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to establish these connections while life is relatively calm, allowing them to become familiar and trusted resources that we can return to when the need arises.

When We Feel We've Lost a Part of Ourselves

Sometimes, however, our difficulties seem to touch something deeper. We may feel disconnected from qualities that once came naturally to us, such as confidence, joy, trust, creativity or a sense of personal power. Perhaps we've experienced a difficult relationship, a significant loss or a period of prolonged stress, and somewhere along the way we feel we've lost touch with an important part of who we are. We might recognise that something is missing without quite knowing how to find our way back to it.

Within shamanic healing traditions, this experience is sometimes understood through the concept of soul loss. This is the idea that aspects of our vital essence can become separated from our conscious experience following overwhelming or painful events. Soul retrieval is a spiritual healing practice that works with this understanding, seeking to reconnect us with those parts of ourselves that feel lost, hidden or inaccessible.

I have found this to be a particularly meaningful way of exploring the sense of disconnection that can sometimes follow difficult life experiences. Rather than viewing ourselves as broken or lacking something, we can begin to consider whether there are qualities, strengths or aspects of our identity that have simply become difficult to access.Through soul retrieval work, we create an opportunity to explore that disconnection and invite a greater sense of wholeness and integration.

For me, this connects beautifully with the therapeutic work I do through hypnotherapy and other approaches, including constellation work, where we explore the deeper patterns and relationships that may influence how we experience ourselves and the world around us.

Each offers a different doorway into understanding ourselves more fully, recognising the influences that shape us and discovering new possibilities for growth and healing.

When We Feel Least Like Practising

Of course, knowing what supports us and actually remembering to use it are two very different things! When we're stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, our nervous system naturally shifts into protective responses. We can become restless, exhausted, withdrawn or so preoccupied with our concerns that even the things we normally love doing can feel strangely inaccessible. It's good to recognise that there's nothing wrong with this response. Our minds and bodies are doing their best to protect us and navigate something difficult, and sometimes what we genuinely need most is rest, quiet or the support of another person.

But I think it's worth noticing when our instinct to retreat begins to disconnect us from the very things that might help us feel supported.

Perhaps we could ask ourselves what we most need in that moment, and whether there's one small action we could take to reconnect with a familiar source of strength. For a sound practitioner, that might mean picking up a drum and clearing our energy, sounding a singing bowl or using our voice to help release some of the tension we're holding. It might be going into nature and connecting to the wisdom there. For others it might be an opportunity to reconnect with a power animal, seek guidance from a spiritual helper or simply return to that sense of connection with a wider spiritual world.

The important thing is that we don't turn these practices into another obligation or something else we feel we should be doing! Instead, we can approach them as an invitation, a gentle reminder that support is available and that we don't have to remain entirely caught up in the difficulty we're experiencing.

Cultivating Strength Before We Need It

Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons I've been reminded of recently is the importance of developing our resources before we find ourselves in the middle of a challenge or crisis.

Just as we nurture friendships over time, building trust, familiarity and connection, we can nurture our relationship with our own inner world and spiritual practices.The more familiar these pathways become, the easier it may be to return to them, even when our minds are busy and our emotions feel overwhelming.

This doesn't mean that spiritual practices will remove all our difficulties or prevent us from experiencing pain. Life is far too complex for that, and there will always be situations that require practical action, difficult conversations or wider outside support.

But they can offer us another perspective and another source of support, reminding us that our immediate worries are not the whole of our experience. And sometimes, when we reconnect with that deeper sense of ourselves, we discover that we have more strength, wisdom and capacity than we initially believed.

Finding Our Way Back

Life will inevitably bring challenges, some of which we can anticipate and others that arrive unexpectedly and turn our world upside down. There will be times when we feel confident, joyful and connected, and others when we feel uncertain, vulnerable or lost. We don't need to judge ourselves for these experiences or expect to move through them with unwavering strength. But perhaps we can begin to recognise that resilience isn't simply something we either possess or lack. It's something we can nurture through the relationships we build, the practices we develop and the willingness to keep returning to the things that nourish and support us. And perhaps the most important time to remember those resources is precisely when we feel least inclined to reach for them. For me the most important thing is remebering:

We don't always need to discover new strength. Sometimes we simply need to remember how to reconnect with the strength we've already cultivated.

So perhaps today, while life is relatively calm, we might take a little time to nurture those connections, whether through sound, spiritual journeying or another practice that helps us feel supported. Not because we're expecting difficulties, but because we're recognising the value of creating a relationship with our own sources of wisdom, strength and healing.

So that when life becomes challenging, we have somewhere familiar to return.

Explore Your Own Spiritual Resources

If you're curious about exploring your own spiritual resources, I'll be offering a Power Animal Journey Workshop in the Spring where we'll explore how to connect with these spiritual allies and develop a relationship that can become a meaningful source of guidance, strength and support. I also offer individual Soul Retrieval sessions alongside my Hypnotherapy work.