Let us try to understand why and how the development of “inner” resilience appears to “attract” good things our way by some kind of intelligent feedback process.

Move # 9—Creating Your Own Luck:
Resilience and Synchronicity

(click above title to go to Laughing Heart website Move)

It requires no great leap to imagine that if resilience is an essential capability of all living organisms that when resilience is impaired, it can also be restored. After all, this is within the inner domain of an organism. The process becomes more interesting and complex when as in the next section we consider organizational and community resilience, which suggests that the beneficial state or actions or state of one individual, somehow gets “transferred” or communicated to others. This is why some organizational consults speak of instilling a “culture” of resilience, but culture really doesn’t explain the process of transfer. From this vantage it is interesting to begin with an even more basic unit of a community, and try to understand why and how the development of “inner” resilience appears to “attract” good things our way by some kind of feedback process.

I have learned a lot about resilience since publishing the Laughing Heart Field Guide in 2017 and I would edit and refine my original statement thus:

• “I came upon this discovery some years ago when designing the Graph program for the first edition of Piloting Through Chaos. I noticed that when I fell away from integrity (Note: Equally, “integral resilience”) any “move” I made that helped me to reverse course would influence every other element in helping me to recover integrity, or as I defined it, my sense of connectedness and dynamic balance. (Note: This is another way of speaking of integral resilience.) But then, and here’s the point, I noticed wonderful things started to happen in my “external” life, when I regained a state of high integrity. They came to me, as it were, unbidden. With my new program I had a way to track the process. There is an axiom in biofeedback, a field I have studied deeply: what you can measure, you can influence. In biofeedback training the key to influencing is “passive volition,” the art of allowing or giving in control.”
• Another way of thinking about resilience is the concept of “field independence.” “In other words, by simply allowing things to happen and not attaching to them—whether good or bad—we begin to develop a sense of balance and equilibrium. We are no longer tossed around by other people, events, or circumstances over which you have no control, notwithstanding the illusion that we do.”

Still this does not explain the mechanism or as the medical scientist/philosopher Dr. Stephen Post might provocatively ask, “Why Do Good Things Happen to Good People?” In his book by this name Dr. Post points to 10 Ways of Giving, all of which involve love: These include the Ways of Celebration and Gratitude, Generativity, Forgiveness, Courage, Respect, Compassion, Loyalty, Listening, Creativity, and Doing Good or Paying Forward. The mechanism in a western scientific sense remains elusive; although the data Dr. Post cites in support of his thesis in his 2007 book and later work are highly suggestive.

Not knowing the mechanism may actually be a good thing, for if we probe too hard we may kill the thing we love, much like if a child were born with wings perhaps the first surgical impulse of the attending physicians might be to remove them. It is useful to refine our methods for tracking and even measuring the process as we suggest in later sections, while at the same time allowing our hearts and minds simply to be dazzled by the wonder of it.

Notes:

• Embracing Synchronicity
• Authenticity & Synchronicity
• The Art of Creating Meaningful Coincidences (a.k.a Synchronicity)
• Synchronicity, Science, and Soulmaking: Understanding Jungian Synchronicity Through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosophy

Next: Move # 10—Community Resilience and Big Heart Advantage