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For a long time, I thought resilience was something you either had or didn't.
Some people seemed to move through disruption, illness, loss, or sudden change with a steady, grounded quality. Others—often just as capable and thoughtful—were left disoriented by experiences that looked similar from the outside.
Over time, I began to suspect that resilience is not a personality trait.
It is not toughness.
It is not even optimism.
It is something learned.
Not taught directly.
Not written into any formal syllabus.
But acquired through a form of lived education that rarely announces itself.
In many ways, it functions like a hidden curriculum of being human.
We are never formally instructed in how to stay present when certainty dissolves, how to sit with grief without collapsing into it, or how to recover when our inner orientation is shaken. Yet our nervous systems are constantly learning how to respond to exactly those moments.
Modern neuroscience now gives language to this learning process.
Mythology has been encoding it in story for thousands of years.
When the two are placed side by side, a striking pattern appears.
Resilience is not built through answers.
It is shaped through repeated returns.
In recent decades, the idea that the adult brain remains changeable has become widely understood through the work popularised by researchers and clinicians such as Norman Doidge, particularly in The Brain That Changes Itself.
The implication is simple, but far-reaching.
Our capacity to cope, regulate, and adapt is not primarily shaped by insight or instruction. It is shaped by experience—especially emotional and physiological experience.
Each time we pass through stress and manage to settle again, the nervous system learns something.
Each time we return from agitation, loss, or uncertainty to a state that feels even slightly safer, the body registers that transition.
This is how regulation is trained.
Trauma-informed neuroscience makes this clearer still. Clinicians such as Bessel van der Kolk have shown that recovery is not something we reason our way into. The body must first experience safety before the mind is able to organise meaning around what has happened.
Understanding follows regulation.
It does not create it.
This quietly challenges one of the dominant cultural assumptions about resilience—that if we can simply adopt the right perspective, we will become stronger.
In practice, the nervous system responds far more to recovery than to reframing.
Stress itself is not the enemy.
What reshapes us is whether the stress cycle ever completes.
A simple pattern sits underneath much of what resilience research now describes:
stress → settling → integration
When the settling phase is repeatedly missing—because life remains chronically pressured, emotionally unsafe, or socially unsupported—the nervous system never learns how to return.
Resilience, then, is not the ability to avoid disruption.
It is the learned capacity to come back.
Long before brain scans and nervous system models, cultures were already teaching this learning process through story.
Across mythologies, a remarkably stable structure appears again and again. A person leaves what is familiar. They enter confusion, loss, or danger. They are changed by what they encounter. Only later do they return.
The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell described this recurring structure across cultures. What is often overlooked, however, is not the heroism of these stories, but their emotional realism.
One of the clearest examples comes from the ancient Sumerian story of Inanna.
In the myth of her descent into the underworld, Inanna chooses to leave the upper world and pass through a series of gates. At each gate she is required to remove a symbol of power—her crown, her garments, her authority—until nothing remains. She does not conquer the underworld. She is undone by it. She is killed. And for a time, she does not return.
What enables her return is not strength or cleverness. It is relationship.
Others intervene on her behalf. Care enters the story. A response arises that does not originate from within the descent itself.
Only after this interruption—after recognition, support and a different rhythm appears—does she rise again.
The structure matters.
The descent is not presented as a mistake.
But neither is it survivable alone.
In psychological language, we might say that the system is overwhelmed.
In mythic language, the goddess cannot restore herself from inside the underworld.
What is striking is how closely this mirrors what neuroscience now observes.
Myth does not teach that resilience comes from enduring collapse.
It teaches that return requires conditions.
And that transformation does not occur inside isolation.
Neuroscience tells us that the brain and body adapt through lived experience.
Mythology shows us that wisdom emerges through lived experience.
Neuroscience shows that regulation must come before reflection.
Mythology shows that meaning becomes possible only after the journey has unfolded.
Neuroscience reveals that recovery strengthens capacity.
Mythology reveals that return matters more than conquest.
Both point toward a deeply counter-cultural truth.
Resilience is not something we build in preparation for difficulty.
It forms while we are learning how to come back from it.
There is, however, an important and often overlooked shadow to this learning process.
Not all nervous systems are given repeated opportunities to return.
When disruption is persistent, relationally unsafe, or developmentally early, the body may learn something very different. It may learn vigilance rather than recovery. Contraction rather than settling. Readiness rather than restoration.
In such cases, the difficulty is not a lack of resilience.
It is that the nervous system has adapted precisely to the conditions it was placed in.
For some people, "return" is not simply a skill waiting to be activated. It may feel unfamiliar, threatening, or even neurologically difficult.
Acknowledging this does not weaken the idea of resilience.
It clarifies it.
Resilience is not evenly distributed.
It is shaped by the environments in which our earliest regulation learned what was possible.
This also makes the role of support—relational, social and cultural—central rather than optional.
Just as Inanna does not rise alone, neither do human nervous systems relearn safety in isolation.
At this point, the language of neuroscience and myth can describe the same learning pattern. But the title of this essay points to something more specific: spiritual resilience.
The difference is not found in belief, doctrine, or metaphysical explanation.
It appears in the orientation we bring to experience itself.
Psychological resilience is concerned with functioning, coping, and recovery.
Spiritual resilience begins when the question quietly shifts.
Not from How do I fix what I am feeling?
but from How do I remain in relationship with what is happening?
Presence, in this sense, is not a coping strategy.
It is an orientation toward reality as it is, rather than as we wish it to be.
Not-knowing is not a failure of meaning.
It is a willingness to stay available when meaning has not yet formed.
This is why contemplative traditions, across cultures, place such emphasis on attention, stillness and witnessing. They are not attempting to eliminate suffering. They are training the capacity to remain in contact with experience without immediately escaping, fixing or explaining it.
Spiritual resilience begins where psychological regulation becomes relational awareness—awareness that does not seek to control what arises, but learns how to remain with it.
What neither textbooks nor most spiritual language make explicit is that a subtle curriculum is unfolding beneath our daily lives.
It is not about acquiring insight.
It is about learning how to remain present when insight is unavailable.
Over time, something begins to develop:
a capacity to stay with uncertainty,
a willingness to feel before interpreting,
a growing ability to pause instead of immediately resolving.
This is where spiritual resilience differs from emotional endurance.
Endurance holds tension.
Resilience allows movement.
In my own experience—and in the stories people share when given enough space—the most stable form of inner strength is not certainty. It is familiarity with return.
Return to breath.
Return to attention.
Return to a grounded sense of being here, even when the wider narrative feels unstable.
Practices centred on listening, noticing and reflective presence matter because they train the nervous system in something very specific: how to re-enter safety without requiring the world to first become predictable.
Not answers.
Not affirmations.
But orientation.
The people who appear most resilient are rarely those who carry the strongest defences.
They are usually those who have learned—often through difficult and unchosen experiences—how to find their way back.
Back into their bodies.
Back into attention.
Back into a relationship with life that can tolerate uncertainty without needing to dominate it.
Resilience is not what we carry into difficulty.
It is what slowly forms while we learn how to return from it.
