Session Five: Resilience and Well-Being

 Essential Questions:

• How does one define resilience through personal. moral and collective lens?

• How does authoritarianism erode well-being? 

• How does resilience restore agency?

• What personal challenges have shaped your resilience?*

• How do you define well-being in your own life?*

• What role does community play in resilience?*

• Which daily habits help maintain your mental and emotional balance?*

• How can challenges be seen as opportunities?

Music: David Bowie and Gail Anne Dorsey, "Under Pressure," Live in Dublin 2003 Link to Site

Welcome and Introductions

Meditation: Vivek Murthy, interview from On Being Link to Site

Gathering: "What qualities or actions do you notice in people or communities who seem to remain steady and compasionate even when the world around them feels tense or polarized?

Speakers: Joseph Anastasio, LCSW

• Joseph's Rap

• Paired Reflection Exercise and Debrief

ª Resilience Under Authoritarianism Exercise and Debrief

• Practices for Well-Being and Recovery

• Video:  Lucy Hone, "Three Secrets of Resilient People, " TedX, Christchurch Link to Site

Closing: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Readings:

• Daniel Hunter, "Finding Steady Ground,"Link to Site

• Joseph Anastasio, Flooding Strategies, Link to Site

• "Love is a Verb." Heather Cox Richardson and James Talarico, Link to Site

• Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things," On Being Project, Link to Site

• Monica Guzman, "Curiosity as an act of courage,' Nonviolence Radio, 8/26/25 Link to Site

• "Explore the pillars of wellness," World Wellness Weekend 2025, Link to Site

• podcast, Rivera Sun , "Self-care, community care and the call to act for a nonviolent world," Pace e Bene, July 27, 2025 Link to Site

• podcast, Layal Beyhum, "Feeling Tender,"Episode 7, Nonviolence Now, Link to Site

• To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
• Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from from my bronze, pounded  chest, we will rise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sun-baked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if we're  brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it.

                Amanda Gorman,  The Hill We Climb