Make Friends with Resistance

I’ve learned to make friends with my feelings of unhappiness and resistance because they reveal where I’m fighting Life.

Let’s be honest. we all fight life. It’s what humans do. More specifically, it’s what the mind does. It seeks pleasure and tries to avoid pain, which are the same thing. But, there’s no such thing as a frictionless life.

We wouldn’t want a frictionless life even if we could have it. Why? Forward motion requires friction, and friction depends on Resistance. This is a law of physics and metaphysics.

I know Resistance well. I feel it when I’m sidelined by sickness. Or when a conversation goes sideways with my wife. Or when I get cutoff by a tourist who doesn’t know how to navigate the roundabouts in town—seriously, for the love all that is good, please just watch a Youtube video.

Other times, I’ll simply roll out of bed in a crunchy mood that stalls in my nervous system for a few days with no clear explanation beyond the felt-sense that “life isn’t working”.

I’ve named this crunchiness Carl, because I imagine my mental self like the character from Pixar’s movie, Up.

In the past, my default strategy for dealing with Carl was avoidance or judgment. I would beat myself up for not being evolved enough, or I would try to change my feelings.

For a long time I didn’t realize that, just as physical pain draws attention to imbalances and misalignment in the body, so psychological suffering reveals my misalignment with Reality.

Resistance and feelings of unhappiness aren’t to be avoided or fixed. They are the way to freedom, but only if we’re honest with ourselves.

The Cause of All Unhappiness

What’s really at the center of unhappiness?

Judging by the headlines, you might think life itself is to blame. Or maybe the politicians are. Or climate change. Or social media. Or the daily revelations about the corruption rotting our institutions from within, not to mention the senseless wars laying waste to innocent lives everywhere.

There is too much pain for the mind to hold.

However, while these things contribute to a profound sense of heaviness when I think about them, their existence is not the root cause of my unhappiness. It is not the cause of yours or anyone else’s, either.

The world “out there” is not to blame. It never was. In fact, there is nothing wrong with Reality. Life is the way it is. This is perhaps the simplest and most frustrating fact of life.

When I am able to see my self clearly, only one cause for all my unhappiness emerges, and that is my thoughts about reality.

More precisely, it’s the belief that the world should be different than it is. My perceived difference between the Way Things Are and the Way Things Should Be is at the center of all my suffering. You might even say it is the definition of suffering.

The Two Aspects of Life

In life, there is only (1) What Happens and (2) The Stories revealed in us by What Happens, which are little more than mental/emotional habits we learned early in life.

If What Happens agrees with the way we think it should’ve happened then we are happy.

• Our political party of choice rises to power. Happy.

• A co-worker compliments us on a job well done. Happy.

• The tourist figures out the roundabout (finally!). Happy.

• The person we want wants us back. Happy.

But when things don’t go the way we think they should, What Happens becomes a problem.

• That other political party rises to power. Problem.

• No one notices my gifts and talents, no matter how hard I work. Problem (with a side dish of resentment).

• I get to the checkout and discover my package of organic chicken breasts is $48.25. Problem.

• A social media post triggers feelings of not being enough. Problem.

At the center of every Problem is the ego’s demand that “life should not be this way.” The only way to become happy, as far as the mind is concerned, is to control reality and shift blame to the world.

Reality is stripped of stories, however.

Would wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes be “natural disasters” if we weren’t around to be impacted by them or would they just be events or things happening? If a tree falls in the woods and doesn’t hit a house, is it a problem?

These things are only problems when they disrupt “my” world, “my” life, and “my” expectations. Everything we encounter that triggers a defensive response is simply revealing a story we have within us about ourselves, others, life, and how we’re at odds with them all.

The one who doesn’t love us the way we want and leaves isn’t rejecting us. What happened is that they left. If anything, they only rejected the idea they have of us.

In a similar way, our response to what happened is revealing a story of rejection that was already in us. Both are unexamined stories.

The same goes for social media, which might be the biggest mirror ever invented. Social media, ultimately, isn’t the problem. The stories they reveal in us, which we believe about ourselves, are.

I’m not saying these experiences aren’t painful. They are. I’ve known deep betrayal and joy in my life. No matter what has happened, though, I was only seeing the story I wrapped around What Happened.

Lean Close

If you’re reading this, I can safely assume at least a couple things about you. You are committed to your own inner freedom. I’m confident, too, that you’re already aware of every word I’ve written so far. None of this is new.

It’s a simple truth: we see the world not as it is, but as we are. You’ve undoubtedly come across this truth in your own adventures and explorations into awareness, mindfulness, and spirituality.

Still, we all have a kind of recurring amnesia around it. Our reactions to life are embodied habits that we’ve developed over decades.

Most of the time, we know not what we do, which is why “doing the Work” is essentially making the unconscious stories (and lies) we tell ourselves conscious.

I could give you a list of ideas and practices to help you “do the Work”, but honestly you don’t need them. You don’t need more information. Neither do I.

We’ve forgotten more books, podcasts, and articles (just like this one) than we will ever remember, and they all point to the same simple truth: life is a pristine mirror. What good does it do to be angry at the mirror? It is only reflecting what you see.

That is the invitation and the challenge: to truly look and see. Every person, situation, and challenge in your life is a mirror.

Drawing on the mirror, breaking it, or covering it up do nothing. You have to look even you don’t like what you see. Especially then. Lean close. Look deeply (and with compassion) at yourself. Become curious about what you think is true. Trace those beliefs to the stories being revealed in yourself.

Ask questions like “Is this true? What would life be like if I no longer believed this? How can I shift this story?”

All of this matters not simply so you can enjoy your own life, though that is important. This isn’t just about you because the stories we tell ourselves shape the world “out there”.

As the ancient Hermetic truth goes, as within so without. The world is the out-picturing of my stories, yours, and everyone else’s.

We are not only freeing ourselves for our own sake. That is far too small of an endeavor. We’re ending the wars within ourselves so we can end the wars with each other. And Resistance is there to show us where we’re hung up.

The world will not change through new laws, technology, or systems. The world will evolve as we and our stories do. As we free ourselves from the limiting patterns and stories that close us off from ourselves and each other, the natural result is peace within and love without.