Cultivating Resilience

7-31-26

On January 7, 2025 my house burned down along with the homes of my neighbors and the town of Pacific Palisades, California. The year before that, so much water flooded into my house from torrential rains that the house required a major restoration to be at all livable. Prior to that, my mother passed away. And did I mention the deer that hit my car?

By far, the word most people use to describe me is “resilient.” When asked where that resilience comes from, I reply, “My practice of Continuum.”

Resilience is the most essential skill we can cultivate in the 21st century because we live in a time of uncertainty, recurring global natural disasters, and rapid change. Resilience—our innate ability to recover, return, transform, and carry on—can be complicated and compromised by confusion, trauma, fear, and anxiety that lock down our tissues and block our inventive responses. Continuum restores resilience by introducing body-based practices that open reliable, fluid pathways to meet change by learning to move with the nature of change.

From a movement perspective, we can view all change as the movement of change. It has weight and speed; direction and texture. How we learn to move with the movement of change will determine how well we thrive in a constantly changing environment. It is certainly my in-depth practice of Continuum that has developed within me a strength that is both steady and flexible. Continuum has trained me how to adapt and pursue, rather than shatter and collapse.

Continuum, at its core, is the embodied practice of entering the unknown, over and over again. Initiated by curiosity and courting awareness that is guided by sensation, we learn to navigate an ever-changing internal landscape and our response to the larger external one.

Continuum teaches us the art of orientation and re-orientation; the healthy response of a resilient system. Whether in response to overwhelming change events, deep loss, sharp turns, quick change, or impossibly slow ones, the ability to recognize and accept the circumstance of change is essential for strengthening resilience that contributes to thriving. To be able to assess, orient, and then find new solutions and re-orient to new circumstances is the adaptive path to resilience. Continuum provides a visceral understanding of how to locate the necessary stable ground that allows us to to settle, trust, and then support the next movement of change, be it calm or chaotic. It teaches us how to use our breath to bring inner spaciousness, and how to shift emotional and physical response states. It teaches us to stay the course, especially when the course contains many banks and turns; upsets and disappointments.

Perhaps most important: Continuum is a nature-based practice. When we place ourselves into the streams of biological belonging, into the weave of the matrix of all of life, we feel ourselves directly shaped and influenced by the seasons, the elements, the pulls of gravity, and the movement of water that is the primary component of all living beings. We ask, “How does Nature do it?” Ultimately, this alignment is our greatest support for thriving in life and in change.

The cycle of life-death-rebirth/reproduction is encoded into the very nature of plants, animals, fungi, and the components that organize them: cells, microbes, and their substructures. Our own biology is similarly encoded. Therefore, by nature, we are resilient creatures, made of resilient tissues, renewing our bodies in growth and healing, everyday. Modern life can remove us from the awareness of this inheritance, so we need to be reminded how to participate in our resilient nature.

Megan Bathory-Peeler and I want to help others strengthen their capacities for resilience by providing a Continuum toolkit for moving with change. Whether you have experienced injury, loss, the effects of aging, or an uninvited or unexpected redirection of life, the quality of resilience is already within you to cultivate and strengthen. We are offering a four-class series: Cultivating Resilience, A Toolkit for Moving with Change. https://somanautiko.com/series/cultivating-resilience/

Building skill and practice now, at a time when you may not need it, provides a reliable resource for the times when you do.