Resisting What Is

Struggle is part of being human. Say it isn't so. We struggle with physical pain. We struggle in relationships. We struggle with who and where we are in life. Most of us, I imagine, struggle with the struggle, with wanting our life to be something it's not and dissatisfaction with the present moment. I've spent a great chunk of my life that way. One of the reasons I wrote my book is to explore that, put it out in front of me, and share and explore that common human struggle with others.

When I think about struggle and pain, I come back to a phrase I heard in Disciple I class at church several years ago, The Human Condition. As humans we are anxious and tied up in our current status and culture. Its part of being human. We can't outrun it.

So why do we resist it?

I suppose everyone wants that perfect life. We all want to feel happiness, experience success, love. When we don't we feel something is wrong with us or that we must run the other way, ignore, reject or fight our pain and suffering, like it's something attacking or chasing us. But when we do this, we resist being human, we resist life itself.  Can we flip this instead to think: What is the current moment trying to tell me, teach me? How can I accept this part of life and experience the full range of human emotion from excruciating physical and mental pain and suffering to complete, ecstatic joy and bliss? Were we not created with all these emotions, feelings and capability to experience them? So why do we resist feeling ALL these things? What is the meaning and purpose in pain?

We become afraid of pain, both psychological and physical. On one level it makes sense and I think some of us make our life's mission to NOT experience pain and suffering, to work hard to feel happy all the time. No one wants to suffer, but if we were given the capacity to feel pain, what does it mean to resist it at all costs?

I resist life every day. For so long that is all I did and I was completely miserable and depressed, struggling every day to find the joy, find the reason for living a day that I didn't want, didn't plan for and wanted to run away from. But I realized that in the resistance was my pain, my suffering. When the struggle with dealing with my mother came to a head that day in 2012, the struggle was palpable to me, like a multi-layered brick wall I kept beating on with stupid, blind intent. I was trying to move the wall of the reality in front of me and it was completely futile. Reality was going nowhere.

"The internal voice in my head was silenced a bit that day in my car after visiting my mother. I finally acknowledged what I was resisting was me. Not able to change my external world, all I had was me. I could control me. So, I began listening to myself and what I could actually control and change. I began a lone journey to find myself again—I had run away from myself and longed to come back."

Eckhart Tolle says in A New Earth, "All life-forms need obstacles and challenges in order to evolve." Also, "Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." And, "The ego says, 'I shouldn't have to suffer,' and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it." If this is true, shouldn't we embrace--at least on some level--the pain, the difficult things, the struggle?

What are you resisting right now?