Acceptance & Resistance

If you find yourself in a situation that you would really rather not be in, it’s easy to fall into the trap of being desperate to get out of it.

If we have a desperation to get out of where we are, it’s the desperation that’s going to keep us where we are.

It’s the cruel irony of the situation.

In order for the door to open to another set of possibilities, we actually have to accept where we are right now. For as long as we’re forcing doors open, they’re going to stay closed because it’s the actual forcing that produces the resistance.

So the first thing that we have to do is if we’re in a situation where we’re trying to escape ourselves, we have to say to ourselves, ‘You know what? This is really hard right now, and I am just going to accept that in this moment, this is my reality. This is how I’m experiencing the world right now.’

We remind ourselves of this based on the understanding that how it is we are experiencing the world will be different in five minutes. Our situation then may have completely changed. It’s true for now, but it may not be true in five hours, in five days, or five weeks. We don’t know.

But for this moment it’s true.

And so I’m going to keep coming back to observing the structure of my body, a hallmark of the practices I teach because my structure is not subjective. But through the course of my life, I have created a number of subjective meanings around my experience right now, which is prolonging and exacerbating my suffering.

So if I am in this place and I’m trying desperately to escape that place, what is happening is I’m trying to escape that place by thinking my way out of it. And through the desperation to escape, I’m actually activating more of my survival nervous system.

Instead, we have to say ‘Here I am. Here I am. It might be really hard. It might not be where I want to be, but for this moment, this is where I am and I’m going to keep coming back to something real, something that I know is not part of my own subjective analysis in order to support my unconscious brain and allow it to make more adaptive decisions.

The more I am able to observe what is, the more parasympathetic (the more open, the more observant, the more fluid) I become.

I allow more sensory information in, and my brain has more information to work with. My field of possibility becomes wider.’

What we have to remember is that the range of possibilities that I live in happens unconsciously, not consciously. And the trust comes from allowing ourselves to say, here I am, and I understand this situation to be temporary. The suffering comes through attaching a meaning that takes us somewhere other than the reality of right now.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

Taken from a transcript of our Live Q&A discussion in my membership group JoyRide. Click here if you are keen to join us or check it out!