Sherold: Welcome, everybody. My name is Sherold Barr. I’m a master coach and writer. I’m thrilled to have a guest who has spent her career studying how people survive the worst thing — what makes some people not just recover but grow, and what science and spirituality together tell us about the resilience that lives inside all of us.
This is particularly meaningful to me because this is how I have grown through trauma. There are things I want you to know about resilience from Lydia.
Dr. Lydia Manning is a gerontologist, researcher, end-of-life doula, and CEO of Circle Life Consulting. Her research focuses on resilience, spirituality, and what it means to age and live on purpose. She is a certified Sage-ing Leader, end-of-life doula, and co-founder of Wally’s Hearth, a social model hospice home. She serves clients as an individual trustee and trusted advisor for older adults and their families.
I’m so happy to have you, Lydia, because we need people like you to talk to us about how to do life — especially as we’re aging — in the way that we want to. Welcome.
Lydia: Thank you, Sherold. It’s a delight to be here. Anytime I get to talk about aging, life course transitions, and resilience, it feels like a gift and a blessing. Thank you for inviting me.
Sherold: Thank you. I know my listeners and readers will appreciate it as well. I’ve included your research in several blogs recently, and it’s really hit home with people.
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(8:37)
What is actually happening in the nervous system and psyche of someone who has survived catastrophic medical trauma?
Sherold: Your research describes resilience in later life as something that can be studied and understood. When you look at someone who has survived catastrophic medical crises — multiple surgeries, weeks in the ICU, a body pushed to its absolute limit — what does your research tell you is actually happening in that person’s nervous system and psyche?
Lydia: I want to offer a disclaimer — I’m a gerontologist, not a neurologist or medical doctor. My expertise is in understanding, from lived experience, what resilience is and what it looks like to navigate adversity.
Aging is one of the longest and most natural experiments we have in human resilience. When you make it to later life — to 85 or 90 years old — you have to have evidence of not only physiological resilience, but social and psychological resilience as well.
When it comes to extreme physical trauma, I think instantly not only about the body itself, but about navigating today’s healthcare system — which can be traumatic in and of itself. Physiologically and psychologically, our bodies are trying to integrate what has happened. Our nervous system is trying to make sense of it. Does it fight? Does it flight? Does it fawn? There’s a natural process of integration, an attempt to maintain homeostasis and adapt.
Not everybody adapts to trauma in the same way. When you’re thinking about intense medical trauma, it’s almost like a layered resilient response — physiological, psychological, spiritual, social, and emotional. And it’s also about asking: not only what has happened to me, but who am I now that this event has happened? How do I integrate it, make sense of it, and potentially grow from it — using it as a point of departure for who I might become?
Sherold: My internist gave me the wisest advice when I came back from my accident. It’s coming up on ten years — a car wreck in Mexico, six abdominal surgeries, evacuated out, six weeks in the hospital. She said: don’t think about who you were. The minute that accident happened, that’s your starting point. Don’t compare yourself to who you were before.
I thought that was brilliant. It took a lot of pressure off me. Recovery became about micro-amounts of improvement. I couldn’t walk, actually — that was one of the most difficult things — but eventually I did.
The spiritual component was what really brought it all home for me in a way I hadn’t expected. Which leads me to your next area of research.
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(8:42)
How do you define spiritual resilience — and how is it different from just getting through it?
Sherold: You’ve written about spiritual resilience as a model for understanding adversity, and you’ve been clear that spirituality is a resource, not a prescription. How do you define spiritual resilience? And for someone without a traditional religious framework — which is a lot of people today — what does it look like?
Lydia: I spent many years understanding the religious and spiritual experiences of the oldest old — people 85 and over — and really digging into the spiritual lives of women. That work led me to appreciate how people use their spirituality to navigate adversity.
I define spiritual resilience as the capacity to draw on meaning, connection, transcendence, and deeply held values during times of adversity. I don’t think religiosity and spirituality are the same. For the spiritual resilience piece, it’s the idea that there is a greater cosmic good — something beyond ourselves that people can tap into during times of adversity. I see it as a divine support system.
We talk a lot about social support in the world of aging. We don’t talk nearly enough about our spiritual supports — not necessarily a spiritual community of practice, but a larger connection to something beyond our individual sense of knowing.
Having that framework gives people the capacity to ask: how do I make meaning of my adversity? How do I integrate this into who I am and who I am becoming?
I also want to note — and I think Brené Brown says it beautifully — that vulnerability is the birthplace of resilience. Sometimes we really have to allow ourselves to be in the depth of that, and trust that something is going to emerge. Reframing from problem to possibility. Our spiritual frameworks help us do that.
Sherold: Each time something would happen, I would look to my higher power and ask: am I supposed to learn more compassion? Because it did help increase my compassion. And the spiritual nature of resilience gave me something to believe in, something to become devoted to.
I had never experienced grace before this event. I can’t even explain what it was like — but it lifted me up. And I think that’s exactly why that component is showing up as a key part of resilience.
Lydia: Brené does beautiful work — she has a real ability to help translate research into practice, which is a skill some researchers do well and some could do better.
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(8:48)
What surprised you most about the resilience narratives you collected?
Sherold: You’ve done research with people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, and you found resilience narratives were more common than you expected. What surprised you most? And why do you think resilience shows up more in this older age group?
Lydia: It’s been a decade since I collected those narratives, but I think they still ring true.
The most surprising findings were about ordinary acts of resilience — micro-moments. Not heroic resilience, though there were one or two examples of that. It was much more about process — what happened in the ordinary, everyday moments of being able to move through. How people navigated in the everyday is what I found inspiring, comforting, and surprising.
I think about someone I interviewed who had wrongfully served 25 years in prison for a murder they did not commit — eventually they were able to revisit the legal case and were released. That’s a different magnitude than someone who lost belongings in a fire. But people still experience trauma in similar ways. It’s all relative.
What struck me was this resilient thinking — the ability to frame from problem to possibility. I think of Mary Oliver’s quote: it took me years to realize that the box of sorrow someone gave me was actually a gift. The ability to look at whatever happened and see it as an invitation to get curious about how to move not only on, but forward, and to grow.
Sherold: In my belief, these are lessons for me to learn. I look at them that way now. I know immediately about meaning and purpose. And I’m very careful not to let an event define me as a victim.
During one of my surgeries I had a near-death experience. A voice in the void asked me a question: you get to choose how you go through this experience — what will you choose? And I answered telepathically: I don’t want to be a victim. I’ll take the high road. I’ll use love and gratitude to heal.
That experience — one of the most difficult I’ve been through — I wouldn’t trade for anything. It put me on a path of much deeper spirituality. Learning that we have an inner life. That when everything outer fails, we have that.
Lydia: And that’s part of cumulative resilience. I think about the relationships we have with our past, current, and future selves. Something very prominent in the narratives I collected was this idea: based on your past self, you could trust your present self to get your future self where it needed to be.
You navigate enough, and life throws enough at you, and you start to figure out — yeah, I can trust myself. It might not always be pretty. There might be fits and starts. But in the end, I am going to be okay. Even if that vision of okay doesn’t look how I imagined it.
And resilience is not only an internal tool — it’s relational. We build it with people, for ourselves and with ourselves, but also in relation with others.
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(8:57)
How does mindset shape our biological experience of aging — and does the same principle apply to major health events?
Sherold: We’ve touched on mindset. How does the way we think about growing older shape our biological experience of it? And does the same principle apply to a major health event — does the story we tell ourselves literally change what happens in the body?
Lydia: I’m not a medical doctor or bench scientist, but I am a believer, based on my own research and evidence, that language matters. The story we choose to tell ourselves — our internal dialogue and our external dialogue — matters.
I’m a big reader of Louise Hay. And I always reference the research of Becca Levy at Yale and Tracy Gendron — women who have been researching ageism and how we think about ourselves as we grow older.
We know this is a public health issue: if we can change the way we think about our own aging as late as age 50, we stand to add five to seven healthy additional years to our life course. That’s powerful. It’s a shift from I don’t have to age to I get to age. Aging isn’t doom and gloom — it’s a process, a paradox. Will there be hard things? Absolutely. But there will be beautiful things.
Similarly, the story and the narrative we have about how we navigate adversity matters. Your example about choosing not to be a victim — we have agency in how we identify in these spaces. And that is a beacon of hope.
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(9:02)
Tell us about being an end-of-life doula and the co-founder of Wally’s Hearth.
Sherold: Tell us about being an end-of-life doula and the co-founder of this hospice home. To sit with people as they die — that sounds so noble.
Lydia: It is a gift to journey with people. As we like to say at Wally’s Hearth — no one needs to walk the last mile alone.
I’ve been teaching dying and death for almost 20 years in an academic setting. In 2018 I got certified as an end-of-life doula, and right when COVID was happening, it really changed our conversations around end of life.
Doulas are non-medical supports who help people transition — in preparation for death, during the transition itself, and post-mortem in bereavement support for family members.
In 2019, a close family friend was dying of brain cancer. I went looking for a doula to gift to their family. I found Tiffany Johnson, who became my co-founder. She supported our friend through that process, and about 18 months ago we decided to start our own social model hospice home in the Chicagoland area.
Tiffany’s father was named Wallace. My good friend was named Walter. Both brought us to this work. Hence the name — Wally’s Hearth.
We’re part of the Omega Home Network — omegahomenetwork.org. Our guests come in the last 30 days of life to receive non-medical, around-the-clock care and support at no cost to the guest or the family. We rely on community donations. It’s the idea that people sometimes want a non-institutional space to transition — and sometimes their own home isn’t the best place. We become a surrogate space, a surrogate family, where people can come to die in a safe and supported way.
Sherold: I’ll put a link to the Omega Home Network in the show notes. This is a movement, isn’t it?
Lydia: It really is. Just as we’ve reimagined aging, we’re reimagining death. People are deciding their end-of-life experiences can look many different ways. We’re seeing green burial, water cremation, home funerals. People are starting to reclaim a sense of community, ritual, and ownership — in how we care for each other as we age, and as we die. Just like we don’t have to age a certain way, we don’t have to die a certain way.
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(9:09)
What does your research say most clearly about what a woman in the middle of a hard thing right now most needs?
Sherold: Last question. For a woman in her 60s or 70s who is in the middle of a tough thing right now — a diagnosis, a marriage ending, a loss — what does your research say most clearly about what she needs? And what do most people get wrong about resilience?
Lydia: Resilience is not always equated to strength. I think women need permission — to be who they are and where they are in the moment. Sometimes that means falling apart. We land on our feet time and time again — but sometimes we don’t have to stick the landing. Permission to not perform resilience.
Know that you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be able to make sense of it. You’re going to develop and grow from it. But it’s a process. Some days will look better than others.
Make sure you have connection — people who can sit with you and witness. Who don’t necessarily need to fix, but who can say: I see you. I love you. I’m here.
Agency — making choices in the everyday around what I call ordinary magic or ordinary resilience.
Ask for help. Articulate exactly what you need. I know it’s not always easy. I work with a client who navigated the loss of his partner to dementia, and then to death. He got so good at it that he would literally keep a list in his pocket. When someone said can I help you, he would pull out the paper and say: actually, I could use a meal on Wednesday at 5 PM. And I don’t like artichokes, so if you could drop something off without artichokes, that would be great.
People need meaning. They need to make meaning of their trauma. And people need time — if you’re going through something really hard, give yourself time and grace. You can’t know in the moment what this is going to mean to you. It will unfold.
Sherold: It will. This has been such a rich conversation. I have to say — my mother is going to be 99 on Halloween, and her mother lived to 101 and a quarter, so I apparently have a long road ahead.
Lydia: Get ready, Sherold. You have longevity.
Sherold: I know. I’ve got to be resilient enough to handle it. One last thing I’d add — look for role models. Find people who are doing it the way you want to do it. There’s no prescription. It’s really about what fits your life and what you want.
Thank you so much, Lydia. I’ll put links to your website and the Omega Home Network in the show notes.
Lydia: Thank you again for the invitation. My website is LydiaManning.com — there’s a contact form there if anyone has questions or wants to continue the conversation. And if anyone is interested in hosting a wisdom circle series with their own group, I’d love to explore that.
Sherold: Can people hire you virtually?
Lydia: Yes. I’m a researcher and academic, but I’ve also been in the consulting space for 25 years. I speak, I write, and through my Sage-ing work I hold wisdom circles — series around forgiveness, mortality, life review, the gifts of aging and elderhood. It’s a facilitated space where people can unlock and harvest their experiences around aging, find new meaning and purpose, and step into elderhood. I’ve also held retreats — mainly with women — where we come together for three or four days for this intense and beautiful work.
Women are hungry for gathering around the fire. We’ve known how to do that since the beginning of time. And people are looking for these meaning-making spaces.
I fundamentally believe: if I can understand resilience, study it, identify it, and define it — then I can teach it. And if we can teach it, we can learn it.
Sherold: I love that. Thank you so much, Lydia. Blessings to you.
Lydia: Blessings to you too, Sherold. Thank you for being a model of resilience and helping people tap into their repertoire of tools for the journey.
