What makes a person strong? Is it enough to have physical power and big muscles to call yourself strong? Or are we talking about intellectual or financial power? And, what about inner strength, the kind of strength that you cannot see but that allows us to gracefully face challenges; the strength that accompanies us through the darkest and most difficult times. I believe this is the strength that we neglect to develop as we spend hours at the gym, or at work trying to feel stronger. It is this inner muscle the one that helps us when we feel defeated, the one that gives us that extra push to try again and to not spiral down into defeat, sadness and sometimes an episode of depression and, or anxiety.

We hear about concepts like resilience, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and having purpose these are inner resources that compose our inner strength. Inner strength is described as being able to stand grounded on your own, while at the same time being connected to your environment and having a desire to transcend. Flexibility and creativity also play a role as they amplify our possibilities and choices. Inner strength is what makes the downward spiral stop and what shifts our challenges into opportunities and allows us to become more than what we were before; to shift the challenge around and grow from it.

Inner strength is invisible, graceful and subtle. Contrary to what we may think strength is not aggression at all, actually we usually become aggressive because we don’t feel strong enough to resolve a situation. Aggression hides our weakness. Inner strength gives us power to not act aggressively but with certainty. Ultimately, being responsible for our emotions and our actions is what shows our strength.

Some cultures consider emotional and/or mental health crisis as an invitation to change and growth. A time to look at your life, revise it and really see what needs to change in order to achieve the happiness and growth we all hunger for. Crises are moments to practice and build our emotional strength, because as with physical strength we need to build up our emotional muscles. But the problem I have observed is that emotional crisis can be perceived as weaknesses and people prefer to hide their struggle. This misconstruction of strength actually is making people weaker and when they reach us, they are unnecessarily depleted and often even experience physical symptoms. We have observed joint pain, back pain, gastrointestinal issues and sleep disturbances as a response to un-processed emotional stress.

But, the mind and body connection goes both ways; studies show that increasing our physical strength might also increase our inner strength. The impact of exercise on depression is well documented, and you can even notice how your mood and tolerance can be affected by lack of sleep or feeling sick. Building physical strength for you might mean to start walking, or maybe challenging yourself in a physical level; but is it not about the product or the achievement but about the invitation towards growth and towards strength. It is about understanding that feeling grounded and like you can carry your own weight will translate in both the physical and psychological.

Maybe the question is not about strength in general, but about YOUR strength. Have you ever wondered what makes YOU strong? Knowing your own natural strength might be the key to start to enhance your particular strength, and then every other type of strength can grow out of this. And this is, in my personal view, one of the purposes of therapy, to help people identify and connect with their own particular type of strength and to use it not only to resolve what brought them to therapy but to develop tools to better face the challenges of life.

Life will test our strength constantly. I always believed I was not strong, as I identified it as dependent on physical characteristics, but now I know that my unique strength comes from my creativity, my passion to help others and my commitment to making the world a little better every day. And, of course my yoga practice helps me translate between my mind and body.

What makes you strong? We would love to hear about you at ATIC