Deep Resilience: A four-step journey to unshakable inner strength

Now consider the situation you have described, and in the second box, note down any thoughts you have that create additional suffering. These could be thoughts that amplify stress, make you feel insecure, small or anxious, limit your potential and hold you back, increase anger and hostility or cause you to feel helpless or disempowered. Once you ca

EXERCISE 4: Three-minute exercise: Pain vs suffering – recognising the source of the struggle Start by drawing two boxes on a piece of paper or in a notebook. In the first box, write down your situation, the source of your pain – for example, ‘I lost my job’/‘my partner left me’/‘I have been diagnosed with an illness’/‘my neighbours are playing mus

Suffering can take many forms, including frustration, annoyance, insecurity, resentment and low mood to anxiety, rage, fear, depression, helplessness and despair.

Suffering arises in secondary experience.

Pain is all the unpleasant and unwanted things that happen in our primary experience,

Viktor Frankl, the American psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, observed: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’22

In any given moment of our lives, there are two basic dimensions to our experience: primary and secondary. Primary experience involves our direct experience of the present moment, our sense perceptions – what we can feel, see, hear, taste and smell. Some sense perceptions are pleasant or pleasurable, others are unpleasant or painful. Secondary expe

You can access a guided audio version of this meditation as well as all the other meditations in this book (and a suite of five other free gifts) at

EXERCISE 3: One-minute exercise: What is a thought? Take a moment to think about something you’re planning to do later on today or tomorrow. Focus on examining the thoughts as they arise. What is a thought anyway? With an attitude of curiosity, notice what form the thoughts take, how long they stay around, what they’re made of. Try to be curious, n