Jun 9 • NSIF Daily Dose
The NSIF Dose Cultivating Resilience
The Dojo and the Dirt: What Cultivating Resilience Actually Takes
There is a man who shaped the way we think about resilience here at Hope Reimagined. His name is Tesfaye Tekelu, a trainer with the Strozzi Institute and someone I had the honor to work and learn along side at Destiny Arts Center. Today he lead the Strozzi Community Dojo—a practice space that brings us back to body, in relationship and growing together. This is an open free space and the link is attached. My relationship with Tes and what I have learned from him is deeply embedded in the NSIF.
Today Tesfaye led us in practice to cultivate resilience. He reminded me it’s not a trait you either have or don’t. It is not toughness. It is not the ability to push through. It is something much more alive than that: the capacity to be moved by life and return to yourself. To be knocked off center—by grief, by conflict, by overwhelm, by joy—and to find your way back. Not perfectly. Not immediately. But reliably, over time.
Resilience is not the absence of being shaken. It is the practiced ability to return. And that return is not a mental decision—it is a somatic one. The body knows the way back. We practice so that path becomes familiar.
Within the Neuro-Somatic Integration™ Framework, we understand resilience as a nervous system capacity—not a personality trait, not a mindset, and not something you perform. It is built through patterned, rhythmic, embodied practice. It is built by presenting moments of joy and how they felt in your body,. By recalling in sensation the memories of those moments. It is not toxic positivity it is remembering viscerally authentic moments of joy that help us navigate day to day.
Tes talked about resilience as a spring rather then a bucket and our somatic practice is to identify the blocks to resilience and to clear the path for it to flow in ways we can return to over and over again.
🌱 Micro-Practice: The Joy That Lives in Your Body
Rather than a centering exercise, it becomes a guided somatic resourcing journey — walking the reader back into a real memory of joy through each sense, in sequence:
- Sight — quality of light, the particular look of a place they loved
- Smell — rain on warm earth, coffee, salt, cut grass after a storm
- Taste — sweetness still on the tongue, the taste of being exactly where you belonged
- Sound — overlapping voices, music, water, whose laughter
- Touch/interoception — warmth, looseness in the limbs, where joy lived in the body — chest, throat, the back of the eyes
It closes by naming what's actually happening: somatic resourcing — not nostalgia, but the nervous system returning to a state it already knows, so it recognizes the territory of aliveness. The final line lands it: "The body remembers what sustained it. Let it."
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The NSIF Dose Cultivating Resilience
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