The Effortless Acceptance Beneath Resistance
La aceptación sin esfuerzo bajo la resistencia
A student describes noticing a deeper layer of acceptance behind their resistance to pain, and the teacher explores how resistance itself is effortlessly appearing and already fully accepted at the deepest level.
The Effortless Acceptance Beneath Resistance
A student describes noticing a deeper layer of acceptance behind their resistance to pain, and the teacher explores how resistance itself is effortlessly appearing and already fully accepted at the deepest level.
A while ago, after getting back home, I noticed something relax. It was as if I suddenly noticed the resistance to my resistance. It was more like realizing that there was something already accepting the resistance. I think I was okay with feeling pain, but not okay with the part that resisted and didn't want to feel pain. And then it became clear: it's fine to not want to feel pain and to resist it. I actually have no control over the resistance. It's not like I can stop resisting. If it goes away, it goes away by itself. When that realization landed, something relaxed.
I also appreciated how you guided the meditation. When you said something about not resolving the internal conflict, that did something. I notice how I'm constantly lost right now in what direction to take, what activities to pursue, a lot of uncertainty. There's an internal pressure that says I have to find what I want, I have to find the direction. What you said relaxed that. Instead of needing to resolve it, I could let this internal struggle just be and let it resolve by itself. I suppose this is just a sharing. I don't know if there's a question, but if you want to say something, that's fine.
I can say something small. A way to look at this is to see that what can shift is what you're focusing on. You could be focusing at one level, for example the resistance you're describing, and then trying to not resist. That's going to keep you stuck at that energetic level.
The deeper level where resistance isn't
It's not so much about saying, "I can't do anything about it; maybe at some point it goes away." The reality is that there is a level, right now, where that resistance isn't there. What can shift is not that the resistance goes away, but that your reality, the heart of your experience, shifts to a deeper place where there is no resistance.
The same happens with preferences. Naturally, nobody wants pain. Nobody prefers pain unless there is some very unusual distortion. So yes, naturally you don't want pain. But let me offer a thought experiment for pointing to a deeper place. If you had a child or a lifelong partner, and after thirty or forty years this person dies, would you want to not feel pain? Would you prefer to not feel pain?
Well, no.
So that's a kind of hypothetical pointing to a deeper place. Not wanting pain and wanting pain coexist. The same is true of resistance. We experience resistance, and we also experience the absence of resistance. But what happens is the reality where there is an absence of resistance is overlooked, even though it's always here. Right now, there is a deeper place where nobody is resisting.
Yes. I think what I was trying to communicate in the first part, about something relaxing, was exactly that. I was noticing the part that wasn't resisting, even to my resistance, to my bodily reactions and rejection of what I was feeling.
Yes. And so let that become a deeper truth, a deeper part of your reality, because it is. What I mean is: let your glimpse, your depolarization and shift, be your deeper truth and deeper reality, instead of considering it as a shift that comes and goes, something at the same level as the resistance coming and going. Look at it more as a shift into a deeper reality.
We can forget that and go back to the more superficial reality, and then we think the two are comparable, as though we're at the same level of resisting and not resisting. But actually there's a shifting to something deeper that's more true, more real, more of a ground. Instead of trying to go back and forth between resisting and not resisting, realize there is a deeper truth, a deeper reality where the non-resisting is always present.
So when you experience resistance, instead of trying to create a shift for the resistance to release or to work with it, see if you can find the non-resistance that is already there, as you once glimpsed it.
The imagined entity and the narrative
It was also comical in a sense, because I was also noticing that what I usually do is this: an imagined entity reacting to resistance. It's all made up.
It's all a narrative. And then you believe you're the character in the narrative, and then everything happening to that character you imagine is very real and difficult. But there are only thoughts, sensations, sounds, which are appearing without any resistance. To whom? That's the question.
Don't answer that. Leave it unanswered. Because if you try to answer it, you're going to go into thought to try to figure it out.
Effortless seeing
Right now you're looking at a computer screen or some device, right?
Yes.
The exact experience of the screen you're looking at: can you not see it?
No.
If you try really hard, would you be able to not see it while you're looking at it with your eyes open?
I don't think so. Unless I blur my vision.
You can blur your vision. You can get really distracted with thoughts, so distracted you don't see what's right in front of you. But if your eyes are open, you might see a blurry image of the computer that's right in front of you. Now, turn that around. Does it take effort to see?
No.
So that's what we're doing all the time with experience. There's something you don't like, you don't want, you decide it shouldn't be there. And there's a lot of effort in either distracting or blurring or changing that which is appearing. No matter what it is, it's appearing effortlessly, and no effort needs to be made in order to fully accept it.
I could ask it differently. Do you need to make an effort to accept the appearance of the screen?
Right.
You would have to make an effort to change the thinking pattern that says it shouldn't be there, if you were convinced it shouldn't be there. But the appearance of it: you cannot not accept it fully. It's impossible. At the same time, the thinking pattern that it shouldn't be there is also appearing effortlessly. What we call resistance is also appearing effortlessly, and it's effortlessly accepted without any resistance. It's already the case.
This is the kind of thing you can deny, debate, or rationalize, but it's an absolute truth. If you stick with it, you will see it for yourself: at the deepest level, there can be no resistance. There is no resistance, and everything is effortlessly accepted all the time.
Resistance as symptom
When I say "at the deepest level," I don't mean a level that is not here, one you need to shift to. I mean the deepest reality now. Even if at the mental and bodily level there are signs of resistance, symptoms of resistance, those symptoms are accepted fully. They are appearing like the screen, effortlessly, and they are absorbed by experience, by mystery. "Absorbed" is just a poetic way to say they are appearing and known fully without any resistance.
At that level, all resistance is just a narrative. It's like clenching into a fist and saying, "Yes, I'm resisting. I don't want this moment to be as it is. I'm trying to accept it, but I'm resisting. I'm trying to accept it, but I'm trying." Meanwhile, the experience of the fist is appearing effortlessly. The tension of resistance is appearing effortlessly. It's effortlessly accepted, fully. The experience of wanting to undo the fist is appearing effortlessly, known effortlessly, accepted fully without any effort.
Seeing the pointlessness of the struggle
The more you see that this is absolutely real, the more you start to wonder: what's the point of the whole struggle? Then the struggle can fall away because you see its pointlessness. You can also see how it was helping you cope in the past, but it's pointless. When I say pointless, I mean specifically that the narrative which says "there's value here, there's a good strategy for better living" is a bad one. The narrative is not useful, it's not practical, and the strategy doesn't work. It's like trying to hold water by squeezing it.
Co-creation instead of resistance
The narrative that there's another, better way of living would be the resistance: the narrative that resisting what is, is useful and practical and will get you to a better present moment. A much better narrative is accepting what is and then creating a better present, or moving with it, co-creating, dancing.
That's why I use words like co-creation, dancing, movement. You live from seeing the fullness of what is, from the knowing of the complete acceptance of what is. From there, you dance, you co-create, you move, you explore. That is the mystery of this incarnation, this perspective.
The more you do that, the more you see that the whole strategy of resisting what is, is futile. It's like trying to ride a bicycle while sticking a rod in the wheel. You're struggling, saying, "It's so hard to ride this bicycle," while you're jamming a stick into the spokes at the same time.
To be clear: the stick in the wheel is "what is happening shouldn't be happening." What is appearing should not be appearing, and I can do something about it. I can make what is appearing not appear by trying really hard to not see what is right in front of me, to not sense what I'm sensing, to not taste what I'm tasting.
Yeah. But it seems like a way out of that, if resistance or those ideas are happening, is realizing what you said before: that there is already acceptance of that.
Yes, there are many ways out. That's one of them. Another is seeing that you hold a belief about a way of living that is a false one, one that doesn't accurately represent reality.
The cookie dough of what is
The resistance comes from a belief that what is happening shouldn't be happening. "I know it shouldn't be happening because I know what should be happening, and what should and should not be happening is X, Y, Z." Compare that with: "I prefer something else. Let's see if we can make that happen, because I'm listening to a deep desire to manifest something more beautiful and loving than what is currently happening."
There you use the substance of what is, like cookie dough, to make something with it. The alternative is always trying to throw away the cookie dough, which is the substance of reality, what is currently happening, which actually is divine, is divinity.
In the other position, "I know what is happening, what shouldn't be happening, what should happen," you are now separate from the creation, and you know better.
It might sound far out, but what I'm saying is, to me, very simple and fundamental.
I like it. I think I get it.