Resilience: Blooming Beyond Adversity - A Wider Circle
“Resilience is not about overcoming.
It’s about becoming.”
— Sherri Mandell
Resilience is often misunderstood as simple toughness — a rigid, unyielding strength that pushes through hardship.
But true resilience is much more like a lotus: It grows not despite the mud, but because of it. The most difficult experiences in our lives have the potential to nourish us, shape us, and reveal unexpected beauty.
Hello fellow human!
You are cordially invited to a virtual Focused Circle Share on April 17th, the third Thursday of the month. The theme of this Circle will be Resilience: Blooming Beyond Adversity.
The three main invitations we will be discussing are:
Starting with the seed, what does resilience mean to you? How do you recognize resilience in yourself and others?
A Buddhist proverb reads: “The lotus flower blooms most beautifully from the deepest and thickest mud.” Think of a time when you felt deeply rooted, even in difficulty. What did this feel like in your body? What kept you grounded?
The lotus turns mud into nourishment, showing that challenges catalyze growth. Resilience often requires redefining assumptions about identity, others, or the world. How do you support your own blossoming? What is a challenge you’ve experienced that, in hindsight, you now recognize as a gift? What has resilience taught you about beauty?
You are also invited to share this invitation with others in your network. We welcome all deep divers, truth seekers, big dreamers, and creative catalysts!
Focused Circle Share: April 17th, 2025
Time: 7:30-10:30 PM ET - Time zone converter - When the connections are flowing, it’s easy to get swept up, but we will try to keep to a three-hour container!
Your Facilitators: April Sargent and Christy Hart Smith
Format: Focused circle share on the topic of “Resilience: Blooming Beyond Adversity ”
Altar Item: You are invited to bring something for our digital altar that represents a way that you nurture resilience in your daily life
RSVP below to receive the Zoom link to join this event…
New to Circle? You can learn more about the practice of circling here.
The light flucture of these events—a portmanteau of “light flow plan / structure”—consists of introducing the theme and the digital altar, opening and closing meditations to ground and center us, reading aloud of the Circle Guidelines, an introduction of the current prompt, and then space in the center to hold us all as we practice sharing our truth.
After an amazing 15-month journey through the Atlas of the Heart, this event is part of a series of Wider Circles running from May 2024 through April 2025. Stay tuned for a new wave of circles to be announced as we investigate how we would like to experiment and grow.