Oops, you’ve turned into a bowling ball

Okay, so we might have a wee little problem. The thing is you’ve been turned into a bowling ball… we’re not really sure how this happened… we’re guessing it might have something to do with all the people telling you to “harden up”. It looks like you really took that advice on.

Turning into a bowling ball is an alarmingly common condition. Most people believe that the harder they become, the more protected they will be. It seems to make sense. When you are a bowling ball, you don’t let problems get in your way, you just knock them over and keep on going.

The thing is, life is not like a bowling alley. There are no highly polished lanes you can smoothly glide along. The obstacles in your way can not always be easily skittled. And you don’t get magically returned to a place of rest the moment you’re done knocking over those obstacles.

At times you will collide with problems you simply can’t knock down. These problems are like solid immovable walls and when you are a bowling ball, the impact can be rather jarring. Being hard really doesn’t help at all. Every big collision just places more stress on you and over time that stress can really take its toll.

So, let’s imagine for a moment that instead of being a bowling ball that you were a squash ball. Suddenly colliding with a solid wall wouldn’t be such a problem. You could absorb the impact and bounce back. You could handle the hardest blows, get whacked all over the place and still end up in fine shape. That sounds far better, right?

The big question is, how can you go from being a bowling ball to being a squash ball? Thankfully it’s something we’ve been studying for a long, long time.

One of the most powerful things we’ve discovered is that you no one has a fixed amount of resilience. The ability to bounce back is something that can be learnt and developed over time. The more you learn and develop your skills, the bouncier you will become. You really can go from being a bowling ball to being a squash ball.

Throughout Mindarma you will learn a range of skills and strategies that will aid in this transformation. As well as learning all about mindfulness, you will discover what to do when faced with difficult thoughts, uncomfortable emotions and times of high stress (we don’t recommend trying to smash them like a bowling ball). You will also find out why it’s important to follow your values, take care of yourself and reach out for support when the going gets tough.

Already, Mindarma has helped transform numerous lives. Trials of the program show significant improvements on a resilience scale, which measures the ability of users to bounce back from difficult life events. People just like you are getting ‘bouncier’ and for research nerds like us, that’s very exciting!

Our favourite way of celebrating is to watch this incredibly beautiful video clip, which shows thousands of bright, bouncy balls making their way down a street of San Francisco. It’s an ad for a Sony TV, but when their tagline pops up we like to imagine it being replaced by the words: Mindarma – Making people bouncier.