Crisis and Growth? Crisis often catalyzes growth by challenging our perspectives and pushing us beyond our comfort zones. It fosters resilience, adaptability, and self-discovery. Through introspection and seeking support, individuals emerge with newfound strengths, deeper insights, and an enhanced capacity to navigate life’s complexities, fostering profound personal development. Crisis brings out the best in us. It forces reconnection with our bodies at the most primal level and potentiates reconnection with our relationships in a more immediate way – the acknowledgment that I need others to survive and forces a letting go of control and image. A crisis means a change is overwhelming our current capacities, and we have to grow, to expand in some way in order to maintain our health and our physical and emotional integrity. This is what all of life is like. We take for granted that from the single cell we start out as in our mother’s womb, to the multi-dimensional beings we become as humans, our’s is a story of triumph of health, and creativity in the face of struggle and hardship.
Transformation is our natural state in the wild. From moment to moment, we cannot afford to hold on or hold back, to control our feelings or go it alone. Crisis forces us back into our bodies to our natural state of authenticity, by overwhelming our mind’s capacity to control our perception and attachments, breaking down the masks we create to fit in, we are forced to complete emotions we had to compartmentalize in order to survive, in relationships we could not be ourselves in. Crisis helps us therefore to know what we intrinsically value at our most essential level. From there, envisioning our lives and taking action means our life becomes more full, complete, and meaningful.
Crisis makes us aware of our deep need for belonging, and that we can only be whole when we give ourselves authentically in service to others, our loved ones, and our community. By bringing us back to the awareness of our essential nature as interdependent beings, it brings us back to our most humble and sacred memories. Crisis helps us piece together the story of who we are, where we have been, and where we will derive meaning in life. For this reason, traditional cultural practices of healing like the sweat lodge or psychedelic ceremonies push the individual beyond his or her perceived limits. The method is to evoke a crisis to expand consciousness, to create access to our deeper capacities for meaning and resilience before the community, and in doing so, to return us to community.
The most practical lesson crisis teaches us is to not wait for a crisis in order to be prepared.
Integrative psychiatry encourages you to take your physical health seriously by eating whole foods, getting adequate sleep, and making rest and play a priority. Make time for deep connection by being there for others you can be yourself with, and being good at receiving from others well. See love and community as a primary, essential purpose for living. Know your intrinsic values and make sure your actions are lining up with them as much as possible. This makes all work creative and meaningful. Because the most important lesson crisis can teach us is how fragile and fleeting life is, and that we do not have endless opportunities to live the life we are here for. So yes, Crisis and Growth can go hand and hand.
