Over spring break, I had the privilege of teaching a lesson on building resilience to students at York College. Many thanks to Dianne Creagh (Director of FYS at YCP) and Greg Stoutenburg (Instructor of Philosophy at YCP) for the invite and opportunity. Coincidentally, I was reading the book Buddha’s Brain (Richard Mendius and Rick Hanson) and really loved the metaphor they use about building a raft to represent internal strength and growth. This idea fits in really nicely with the way I have approached resilience-building – namely as an active process in which students have a lot of agency to make choices for their own lives.

It was great to meet the students of YCP, and I hope they found the session useful and practical. They each wrote themselves encouraging notes at the end of the session which I’ll mail in a few weeks to remind them of some of the key ideas of the session.