Activating Women’s Innate Resilience Through Transcending
This article will provide you with insight into the means by which resilience can be cultured and will focus particularly on the psychological and emotional composition that are unique to a woman’s path to resilience.
I can best start with my own story as an example. I lived in Africa as a child—It was glorious, exotic, exhilarating, and often with wild animals in close proximity, sometimes throwing me into a flight-or-fight mode. As a teenager studying psychology, I worked part time as an intern in the intense environment of a psychiatric hospital. Then I learned Transcendental Meditation, a technique for development of consciousness, and found that it provided me with what would have been so valuable throughout my youth: an experience of inner silence—an innate source of resilience and a state that transcends stress and anxiety.
States of consciousness
The waking state, the dream state, and the sleep state are three states of consciousness greatly familiar to us all. A fourth state, transcendental consciousness, has been objectively verified and widely subjectively experienced. Plato referred to the fourth state of consciousness when he asserted that there is an inner or underlying reality of life beyond what we ordinarily experience; he called it The Good and the Beautiful. Laozi called it the Tao, and Plotinus—the Infinite. Ralph Waldo Emerson named it the Oversoul. In Christianity, it’s referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven Within.
The premises and facts in this article are backed by public research studies which reveal that experiencing the fourth state—tapping into the transcendental field of our own Being—activates and strengthens women’s innate resilience. This transcendental field lies beyond—and is the source of—our thinking process. It is innate and present at the depth of human awareness, it is there—it is real—and it is you and me.
The direct and regular experience of the transcendental field of pure consciousness allows for a restructuring process by which the optimal functioning of the brain and nervous system support a continuous connection to the underlying intelligence of natural law that guides the evolution of all life. This experience is the very foundation for psychophysiological resilience.
Stress
Stress plays a role in many disorders that occur more often in women than in men.
| Disorder | % in Men | % in Women |
| Panic | 3.1 | 6.2 |
| General anxiety | 4.2 | 7.1 |
| PTSD | 3.6 | 9.7 |
| Major depression | 13.2 | 20.2 |
| Migraine | 6.5 | 18.2 |
| Insomnia | 6.2 | 12.9 |
| Irritable bowel | 7.7 | 14.5 |
The key is transcending stress and anxiety by allowing the mind to settle within, beyond the active thinking level, to quieter, more powerful levels—to the real you at the basis of all your thoughts and actions. In transcending, the mind settles naturally. Correspondingly, the activity of the body decreases and the body settles into a deep state of rest that allows deeply rooted stress to dissolve.
Resilience
Resilience means flexibility and adaptability grounded in an underlying theme of stability. Resilience is found in Self-reliance. The deeper and broader the sense of Self, the more stable the Self-reliance, and the greater the resilience. The experience of Transcendental Consciousness—the field of infinite inviolable non-change—being an experience of absolute Self-sufficiency, or complete Self-reliance, is the ultimate means of structuring resilience.
Resilience has the potential to be far more than just the ability to recover from trauma. In its most fundamental value, it is an inherent mechanism by which a baseline of well-being may be cultivated and continuously maintained in higher states of consciousness.
The transcendental state of pure consciousness has been recognized as a fourth state of consciousness, distinct from waking dreaming and sleeping. It merits this label because it not only provides a unique subjective experience, but a unique physiological signature as well. This fourth state of consciousness is not only the source of resilience but it is the means by which resilience is integrated into individual awareness to the extent that it transforms and expands our perception of ourselves and of the world.
Because women, in general, more easily access the deeper levels of their feelings and emotions, they can also more easily access the transcendental field of silence within, the ultimate reality of Self. This field itself is postulated to be a universal reality—the Self of everyone—based on both subjective experience and leading quantum field theories. From a quantum perspective, access to an underlying unified field of consciousness not only gives women access to an innate personal resilience, but also gives women the ability to enliven that value of resilience in collective consciousness.
About the Author
Sonnette Steyn, originally from Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, is the director of TM for Women in Santa Fe
