❖ The Heroic Stance: What does it mean to be the champion of our own lives? How does taking this stance increase our ability to traverse the dark wood of our days and emerge intact, stronger and wiser? What is post-traumatic growth—great resilience under duress—and how can its principles be applied to daily living? These are the questions we will examine throughout the course. Moving toward resilience means moving away from any part of us that’s attached to a victim or martyr stance, and finding a firmer grip on our own abilities to craft strength, capacity, wisdom, calm, and optimism daily.

❖ Gather the Swords: We’ll gather the tools, perspectives, and practices that elevate our capacity and increase our sense of inner steadiness—even in the harshest moments. We’ll consider how we transform stressful moments into opportunities, increase our capacity to learn from missteps and failures, create realistic hope, and leverage what is already good and strong within us to shape the stance that enables us to be at our best in crisis and on those crappy, dreary Monday mornings.

❖ Light the Lamp: All darkness exists without and within; every moment of suffering, exile, betrayal, or tragedy triggers the murky places inside of us, those of doubt, fear, insecurity, and often, too, the swamp of debris left from past sorrows. To move forward, we must not only clear the path outside of ourselves, but also bring light to the shadows within. Here we will explore the tools that enable us to soften and remove the myths we tell ourselves that do not serve us, transform negative thought habits, and examine how we can see our fragilities as the very ground from which good will grow.

❖ Gather the Gang/Don the Robe: In times of stress, we tend to isolate and to feel shame or embarrassment at not being able to figure it all out perfectly or by ourselves. We tend to cloak ourselves in silence or slogans or false identities. We will consider who truly helps, why the help of others makes a profound difference, and how to see each difficult moment as a moment anew—one in which we can don the robe of the novice in order to be open to greater learning and higher appreciation for ourselves.

❖ The Beckoning Road: The road forward, through the dark wood, beckons. Along this road, we’ll find our best chance of discerning who we are at our best and what that looks like—even as our marriage crumbles or our teen uses drugs or our work world becomes hostile. The Ideal Resilient Self is one we both mine from the past and shape toward the future. It represents the healthiest choices we can make in working with our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and is based on our core values and sense of purpose. It is the self of our most authentic, wisest nature, and is also a self open to new learning and deeper understanding. We end our journey with a compilation of the gems gathered throughout the course and a clear framing of what our Ideal Resilient Self looks like.