Meet Jess Bashara

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jess Bashara a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jess, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

What does resilience mean to me?

It speaks to how a person is able to recover from challenges and re-enter the world after hardship or tragedy hits, with a renewed sense of self and mission. It also has to do with a person’s ability to not internalize a negative narrative about themselves, when bad things happen.

As I write this, I’m realizing that my definition of this word has evolved over time. I’m not sure when it was that I learned that to withstand something actually meant that you resist it. I’d now take it a step further, saying it means to disallow something to weaken your self-worth. When I was younger, I thought to resist meant to suffer alone in silence, and that in doing so, I was being “strong” or “good”. I believe what I was actually doing was shielding my adults from the truth of my experience, in part, because I didn’t trust that they would be able to help me.

Luckily, somewhere along my journey I stopped giving myself extra credit for self-sacrifice and I began to love myself and my life. Another thing that happened was that people with more relational skills than me began walking into my life, offering me immense support, such as giving me the gift of trusting trustworthy people. This allowed me to be witnessed and accepted for who I was in my fullness, not just when I was easy to be around.

Where do I get my resilience from?

When I was growing up, I saw various forms of strength in different family members who each taught me important lessons on this subject, but none of which impacted me as profoundly as my mom.

My mom’s deep appreciation for nature and her unwavering love for my brother’s and I shone brighter than the difficult life situations she faced, at least in my eyes and that was because she was/is an intentional person. And she went through a lot.

One challenge I witnessed her navigate was walking away from an abusive relationship. She could have listened to the ill advice of people who wanted her to stay “for the sake of the children”, but she was brave and she was my role model. Unbeknownst to her or to me at the time, her decision to walk away from that relationship would later grant me the permission I very much needed to make a similar choice in my own life, when I found myself in a position to choose the well-being of my kids and I or stay in relationship with a man and father who only knew how to betray and avoid accountability.

Probably my favorite aspect of resilience is the way people re-invent themselves in the wake of adversity. I watched my mom take herself out of equations that weren’t in her highest and best and walk into spaces with people who valued her and where she was in alignment with her own personal values. Examples of this are when she joined and organized professional groups that united people to give and receive support or when she joined athletic meet-ups with other women, or when she opened her own business. She could have believed the lies her ex told her about her worth and intelligence and stayed in that environment that made her feel small, but she decided to shine brightly instead.

Her life only got better when she got up again after a horrible relationship. She found love with someone who she could belly laugh with and that man too is part of her resilience story & I love him dearly for being there for her and us as kids.

In my own story, I recreated myself after realizing that my father wouldn’t be able to parent me in the specific ways I needed. It took me many years, but I forgave him for the abuse and his shortcomings and I re-entered my own life with a newfound sense of peace and responsibility to myself to re-father myself and find mental health helpers who could fill in some relational gaps for me as well. I also decided that it wasn’t in my best interest to remain in relationship with certain people from my family of origin.

As a woman and mom who went through spousal betrayal in the forms of infidelity, financial abuse among other issues, I allowed myself to be held by my angel of a therapist at the time, my support groups, friends and of course my incredible mother, who loved me through the whole-heart shattering process of loss and transformation into a single parent of my then toddler & newborn kids.

Motherhood challenges me on a regular basis to be resilient. Sometimes I get knocked down and sometimes I’m stuck in negative behavior patterns and I end up kicking my own ass. I’m still learning new ways to stop doing that!

Lastly, I believe one thing resilient people have in common is that they are deeply connected to their mission here on Earth. They know they have meaningful contributions to make on problems other beings can benefit from, so they change, they morph into who they are supposed to be, to complete that mission.

I’m here to heal myself, to heal with others and to create nurturing spaces where others feel safe enough to come heal themselves with me. I’m so grateful.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

#1 Quality: Hopeful

It has served me well in my life to maintain a general hopeful attitude. While there have been periods of time where I used this natural tendency for positivity to bypass difficult feelings, and while I don’t believe avoiding hard things is the best long-term approach for authentic living, I’m thankful to the parts of me that keep me in a forward motion, because there’s healing there too. I believe hopefulness is a fine tool for feeling strong in my body.

Being in my body is very important to me after having lived through experiences that caused me to escape into my head, for “safety”. That perceived safety was actually my way of figuring out how to not feel the pain, shame, loneliness within. So, I will say that learning how to be with those feelings in a safe way is an important part of my path! My sense of hope helps me build confidence in myself because after each wobble or fall, I hear, “you will get up after this & you will be ok”, and so far, that’s been true. Because of this, I have a self-concept that feels confident and strong. It’s from that place that I’m able to help others build trust within themselves. I’d encourage the reader to engage in practices with individuals who lead you back to yourself, back home.

#2 Skill: Organization

I’m someone who is able to visually order the flow of events in a day or a week. I’m good at anticipating needs, which makes for a great planner. Organizational skills have served me well in many chapters of life, including my time as a student, teacher, program director, reiki practitioner and definitely as a mother.

I’d gently nudge anyone who feels a little lost in this area to learn along side people who have skills you want to acquire, ask how they got there and if they have advice for you. I also believe in outsourcing! I don’t think we need to do it all. So that you can do the things that light you up and get you excited, sometimes that means you’ll need to collaborate with someone who is passionate about the thing you’re just not good at or don’t like. I think that’s efficient management and nothing to be ashamed of!

#3 Area of Knowledge: Boundaries

I started to consciously learn about boundaries when my then therapist told me about the book Co-Dependent No More by Melodie Beattie. During our work together & after digesting the book, I learned that boundaries help me to take care of myself in relationship to other people. Boundaries describe my comfort levels on the type of company I keep, as well as what I will or won’t do in any given situation. Being clear on my boundaries has helped me to see toxic relationships for what they are and have helped me to get myself to a better place, with people who I truly align with, time and time again.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I have HUGE visions around my healing work. I want to work with people who experience these divisive times we are living in and feel inspired to take peaceful action, by bringing people together in ways where we can highlight how our commonalities outweigh our differences.

I envision future collaborations to include other Reiki practitioners in Massachusetts, with level II or higher, individuals who own large gathering spaces, community leaders such as elected officials and community program directors. These aligned individuals will come together to hold a vision of peace and unity and organize spaces for community healings, for the greater good.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jessbashara.com
• Instagram: @reikiwithjessbashara
• Facebook: Jess Bashara
• Other: bashara.jess@gmail.com

Image Credits

Jamie R. Doyle Photography