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.

This yoga practice (whether sitting or lying down) releases your body’s tension and encourages you to connect to your physical experiences on a deeper level. You’ll learn movements and breathing techniques that can be used during an average day at a desk or in a car. You’ll learn to let the breath carry the pose and find that union between body, mind, breath, and spirit.

In this practice, you’ll learn how to trigger your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, your relaxation response, whenever you want to calm down. You’ll use your breath to continually invite your body to relax, and then notice your body’s response without judgment. These techniques are always available to you and can be applied at any time throughout your day.

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.

Human beings are wired for connection to others; our initial cognitive development depends on physical touch, and our “mirror neurons” teach us how to be human based on our interactions with others. Learn how to develop quality connections with others, connections that will help you thrive and increase resilience. Your instructor shares the inspiring stories of two individuals who did just that.

Whether or not you think of yourself as a hero, chances are the adversity in your life has caused you to walk the hero’s journey. Discover what that journey entails (illustrated by your instructor’s own life) from initial call to adventure through the ordeal and rebirth, until stepping into your new truth in a world that no longer seems as ordinary as you’d once thought.

You'll thoroughly enjoy this enlightening conversation between your instructor and Suzi Landolphi, a well-known leader in the post-traumatic growth movement, who currently works with combat veterans as a PATHH Guide (Progressive and Alternative Training for Healing Heroes). Just as trauma can be transmitted to successive generations, so can post-traumatic growth.

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.”

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.