Is Resistance the root of Suffering?
One of the overarching goals that most people have in life is happiness, joy and a sense of peace and this can come in many forms. For some it is the realization of a dream, an aspiration, a desire to achieve. For others, it is found in relationships, building a family and forming a secure home. We all strive to live with abundance, even if this is not material.
We can experience joy in many forms, we don’t have to be rich, living in a castle, driving a Range Rover, or wearing a Rolex watch. These things can bring joy and there is nothing wrong with this. However, there is a theory that when we base our experience of joy and happiness on external sources, we abandon the power we have to reach a state of inner peace.
Buddhism talks of detachment, the ability to let go of the tendency to seek love, joy, peace in an external object, or being. This doesn’t mean that there is a coldness or an absence of emotion, rather an acceptance that the source of all love comes from within. As Whitney Houston said in her song “the greatest love of all” is the love she had for herself!
The idea that if we accept the self, and create inner peace, we attract the same. There is a theory that we are all vibrations. Our thoughts, physical bodies and emotions emit a frequency and that this is matched by external energy. We are attracted to what we are, which is central to the idea of manifestation.
From this idea we can explore the idea of resistance. In a world where we are taught from a young age that success, happiness, wealth, abundance are all abstract concepts we spend our lives reaching for, what happens when the world doesn’t give us that? Are we failing? Has fate dealt us a poor hand? Or are we fundamentally flawed and this is our karma?
Life is hard, the human condition equates to suffering. Our ego is programmed to keep us in a constant state of fear, to protect us, so that we are cautious, on guard for dangers. So, we learn to worry from a young age. We replay mistakes from a past that no longer is, in preparation for a future that doesn’t exist. This keeps us in a constant state of fear which feeds into our suffering.
What if we changed our perception of the meaning of life? What if we stop resisting failure, tragedy and loss? Seems impossible right? But without experiencing darkness, how can we show how powerful our light is? What if the experience of pain, loss, bereavement, sadness, is the journey to healing and strength? Gold is made from exposure to fire, diamonds are subjected to intense heat and pressure before their beauty is ever witnessed.
Do we not have the same potential? That our beauty lives within us all, and that it is the battles we survive and the wounds we heal from that slowly lead to the creation of love, peace, and inner calm. When we stop resisting the failures, the times when we experience loss, and accept them as part of being, we exist in a state of peace, which is not situation dependent. Life passes through us, and we remain constant. We accept the things we cannot change; we allow time to flow through us, not to control us. After all, isn’t time an illusion?
Take for example, a time in your life when you lost a relationship. You experience the pain and bereavement, and the fear that the loss is going to jeopardize your future. Often this is because you have built an idea of what your future is going to look like with this person. Suddenly, a future your ego thought was a certainty, is abandoned in place of uncertainty. You are resisting the inevitability of a change. This generates fear and suffering.
Remember that the future doesn’t exist. Your ego has provided you with a forecast to create a sense of safety and predictability. When this doesn’t go to plan, we can often resist what is lost. This doesn’t fit with what we thought our purpose was.
This resistance adds to the pain. Of course, it is natural to grieve relationships, either from a breakdown, or separation, or a bereavement. This is a human response to loss and can take time. But what we often don’t consider is that our body and mind are also grieving a future that was never promised, but that we mapped out. We are grieving more than just the person. We are resisting a future without them.
What if we relinquished the resistance and focused on the healing. What if we accepted without judgement and processed the now. It’s hard isn’t it. There are so many life experiences that force us to experience pain, whether physical or emotional, and we lose sight of our faith. We often become overwhelmed with the sense of loss, and because we are intrinsically bound to the idea that our purpose is defined by a specified future, one which we have likely planned out our whole lives, we fall into a state of confusion.
The idea of living now, being present, has been the subject of many of my blogs and I have shared reviews on authors who have also written about the power of now. Living in the present moment can reduce so much of the suffering we experience. I’m not saying we shouldn’t plan for our future; we have mortgages to pay, we have holidays to plan, and we have responsibilities which often have deadlines. But living in the present can still be achieved while ensuring practical matters are accounted for.
Experiencing now is about accepting all that is right now. It is about finding joy and happiness in what we have now. It is about letting go of resistance to events that contradict what we thought was “meant to be” or to plans we thought were set in stone. Letting go of the expectations that feed into our dreams and allowing us to focus on being the best person we can be and making the most of the present moment in which we exist.
We can aspire to create all our dreams and goals by directing our energy into gratitude for the here and now. Gratitude that we can create our own reality, that we are here right now. By experiencing the emotion of fulfilment, we attract it. By existing in a state of wanting, we attract more of the same. By resisting what is right now, worrying that we won’t achieve, find love, build security, find peace, we create a change in our vibrational state. This then affects everything that we attract in.
Sounds mind blowing doesn’t it! Remember my other blog on consciousness where I talk about everything being broken down into atoms, and energy. That is what we are. Our thoughts are energy, our words are too. We get back what we give out. The law of the karmic cycle. When we start to let go of fear, we take back the control we have given away to a future that doesn’t exist. We begin to experience the stillness of now.
In the now we are most powerful and abundant. Because we simply are. There is no “then” or “later”. We are no longer bound by regrets or mistakes because they are past versions of ourselves. We are not bound by what might be, because we have taken back the power from a future that doesn’t exist. We accept everything is meant to be right now.
It’s not easy to grasp this mindset, sometimes it can be a fleeting moment of clarity before we default back to the ruminations, using memories to forecast what will happen, creating problems based on schema built into our neurochemistry whereby the brain attempts to solve problems based on past events. This drags us back to a state of fear. The brain is wired for survival, so we are biologically programmed to experience fear. But science has also shown that the neurons in the brain that lead to thought, and behaviour, can change. We can evolve past entrenched thought patterns, and this is the start of enlightenment or awakening.
When you reach a point in life, where you start asking the bigger questions about existence, and the meaning of life, it is often the result of an existential crisis. The night is darkest before dawn and sometimes it takes an horrific life event for us to see beyond our fear, to finally let go of the resistance we have for experiencing right now. We are forced to experience pain and chaos, and in doing so, we are forced to face our shadows, the parts of us we have denied.
This is the shape of healing. Of self-acceptance. There is a saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Never has a saying been truer. For anyone reading this far, I hope that you have reached the other side of pain, that you have alchemized the trauma you have lived through. If you are in the middle of a crisis, I hope that these words have resonated and validated your pain. I always like to safety net all my readers when I talk about more powerful issues and this blog is no different. If you are experiencing a crisis that you feel overwhelmed by, please talk to those around you, your family, or friends and ring your NHS GP to seek additional support. You can always ring the 111 service to access your local crisis team if you need more immediate support.
