Bouncing Back: Resilience and Healing

“Our conditioning — the wiring of our neural circuitry as we learn from experience — sometimes goes awry. When this happens, we can find ourselves stuck in negative, dysfunctional response patterns that leave us feeling ineffective and miserable and more vulnerable to stressors or trauma.”  —Linda Graham, Bouncing Back

bouncing back | Dianna Bonny Photography

I found this very cool book, Bouncing Back, by Linda Graham. I am still reading it, bouncing around in it, in fact, but I wanted to share it now for anyone who might be looking for a treasure trove of practical healing resources.

Incredibly rich and in-depth, this book is easy to read and includes practices and techniques that are immediately useable. It is a handbook for resiliency, which is key to both healing and a well-lived life.

I wish I had had this book three years ago, but I am so glad to be able to share it here now.

Self-compassion and self-acceptance are major concepts running throughout the book, ideas I am only just learning to integrate into my life. Having spent most of my days focused on the things I have done wrong, it is illuminating to have tools to begin releasing that part of myself.

One excerpt I found particularly helpful:

Acceptance involves no blame or shame: it allows us to honor and accept an entire event and integrate it into our sense of self. We can do so by creating a narrative of the event with the following components:

1. This is what happened.

2. This is what I did to survive it (understandable, even brilliant).

3. This has been the cost (compassion makes it safe enough to even look at that).

4. This is what I have learned (a new narrative of self that allows us to live with, even be proud of, ourselves).

5. This how I can respond to life now (be resilient going forward).

I don’t know about you, but I have had the tendency to resist looking at some of my behavior because I don’t want to have to embrace the dark side of it. Seeing it within this framework has expanded my ability to examine some of my less attractive choices and behaviors with a less critical stance.

I love this book because the author advocates being an agent of change and puts the power of healing right in the palm of your hand.

So many of us have been looking outward for the antidote to our pain. Isn’t it time to look within and embrace the truth about our own power to heal? Imagine if the cultural legacy of our generation was to unlock the power of the individual spirit and ignite the collective healing and radiance of humanity. How magical.

Have you embraced your inner wisdom and taken responsibility for your own healing?

-db

Who is Dianna Bonny?

Hi, my name is Dianna Bonny. It’s my mission to candidly share my journey with you. For me, it’s all about the healing: to create a radiant healing energy for others who have befallen a similar fate. Together, we can forge beautiful lives of belonging and connection. Thanks for joining me today! I look forward to hearing from you.

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