True Resilience - Fighting Or Letting Go?

​Much of my professional and personal life is centered on resilience. I often say I'm not as big a fan of the word resilience as I am the character trait resilience. Mainly because the word itself comes with a lot of definitions that at times aren't helpful to one's becoming resilient.

We often think of resilience as an act of will. As something we do -tighten our grip, toughen our skin, stand back up when life knocks us down. And sure, there’s a kind of courage in that. There’s honor in standing tall when the wind is fierce.

But maybe we’ve mistaken half the story of resilience for the whole thing.

Because my resilience journey has taught me some of the most resilient moments of my life weren’t the ones where I stood firm, but the ones where I finally stopped fighting. When I stopped trying to control what was breaking and let myself break. When I stopped demanding transformation on my terms and allowed transformation to simply have its way with me.

Dr. John Price said recently on the Rich Roll Podcast that the psyche is a self-healing organism. I love that. He said there are measurable and immeasurable currents at work within us - forces that, if we stop resisting, carry us toward healing and transformation.

He compared it to the old AA phrase, “let go and let God.”

That struck me because so much of what we call “resilience” today is really our resistance to those very currents. We push against life’s natural flow, insisting we know better than the river where it should go. We armor up, convinced that survival depends on control, but often what we call strength is just a slower form of drowning.

Maybe resilience isn’t about how hard we hold on but about how willingly we can let go.

Let go of the need to hold a marriage together just to look strong.

Let go of alcohol even when you have no idea where strength without it will come from.

Let go of the grief of that broken relationship that once felt required and let it make space for love again.

Let go of the hurtful narratives from the past that feel like self-protection and choose not to let bitterness any longer lead the way.

Maybe true resilience is less about muscle and more about momentum - our willingness to move with pain instead of against it. To accept pain without trying to outthink it. To trust that transformation often has its own agenda that has little interest in our own agenda.

There’s a reason Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Maybe he was describing this very thing, the idea that the life we’re desperate to hold together often begins to heal when we finally surrender it.

I’ve spent years trying to become stronger, wiser, tougher, more disciplined. And yet, the moments that have truly changed me weren’t when I conquered something, they were when I finally let something go. When I let the storm have its say. When I stopped forcing my way through the pain and started listening to what the pain was trying to say back.

Because that’s where healing lives.

In the letting go.

In the trust that the current usually knows the way home better than I do.

Maybe resilience was never something I had to build, but something I had to stop interrupting.