The Great Courses

Resilience, one of the most important skills we can master, is essential to navigating life successfully and reaching our fullest potential. As we each go through our own hero’s journey, we venture through life’s trials and tribulations, but also through its beauty and rewards. Learn how to identify and evaluate your personal strengths, and how they will help you on your own hero’s journey.

In this practice, you’ll learn how to find safety and peacefulness within yourself. You’ll be guided through a very deep relaxation, a safe and peaceful awareness similar to what you might experience just before sleep. This is the peace that is always available to you, no matter what’s going on around you in the outside world, a stillness you can always access.

Authentic, lasting joy is an internal experience, not dependent upon any circumstances outside of ourselves. Learn how to find authentic joy by opening up to all of life (allowing yourself to feel the full range of your feelings, including those emotions you’ve been taught to bury) and taking responsibility for your own choices in your unique journey.

When we feel unsafe, our brains become stuck in the response of the sympathetic nervous system and we have very little access to higher cognitive functioning. Learn how to increase your number of protective factors, increasing your feeling of safety and your resilience. The goal isn’t to eliminate the risk of danger, but rather to have as much control over it as possible.

Humans have always experienced periods of acute stress, and we have the nervous system to prove it. Explore how the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for the fight-flight-freeze response, and how the parasympathetic nervous system relaxes the body when the cause of stress has passed. But if the cause of stress becomes chronic, serious long-term health consequences can result.

We often think of sleep as simply what’s left over at the end of the day. But to the contrary: Healthy sleep patterns can transform your life with improved physical and mental health, better memory, and even increased longevity. Learn how to prepare your bedroom, your body, and your mind for high-quality sleep, and the many ways in which your phone can both hinder and help you achieve that goal.

Learning to work with breathing is particularly powerful, as breath is the only function of the autonomic nervous system we can control. You’ll practice the three-part yogic breath, relaxation breath, energizing breath, and alternate-nostril breathing, among others. You’ll develop a better understanding of the yogic saying: “The mind affects the breath, and the breath affects the mind.”

We’ve been socialized to believe positive emotions are good and negative emotions are bad, but that is far from the truth. Our emotions are simply our individual responses to the situations we experience; we can accept, pay attention to, and learn from all of them. Explore some coping mechanisms for regulating your emotions, which some scientists see as the single most vital aspect of resilience.

Our lives can feel like maelstroms of sensory input, thoughts, and emotions. But there is a way to find the stillness that permanently exists beneath it all: meditation. Validated by thousands of scientific studies, meditation has been proven to enhance almost every aspect of life. Experience the power of mindfulness meditation and learn how it can help you find peace in the present moment.

Instructor Birkholm takes you through a gentle yoga practice to help build awareness of your body, feelings, and beliefs. No yoga experience is necessary. You’ll be guided by this step-by-step instruction, which is modeled both standing and sitting. At the end of the practice, you’ll experience a deep relaxation pose, resting in the stillness that is always available to you.