Melt the Resistance

Where there is resistance, there is the invitation to go deeper.

Maybe you’re on your morning walk and you hit a wall inside. ?Or perhaps you are eating a bowl of cereal and by the first bite, there it is.

Sometimes you haven’t even gotten out of bed yet before it strikes you.

Resistance. A brick wall to the heart. ?Pema Chodron uses the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Shenpa to describe it–that place in us where we get stuck, where we turn opaque, triggered and stubborn. ?That human tendency inside us to say “no” to reality; to say “no” to what is.

Many great teachers have said it is not our pain or sorrow that brings suffering, but our resistance–that added layer of aversion to our experience of the moment. ?Without resistance, pain would be uncomfortable but not unbearable. ?Without resistance, our emotions and psyche would have the space to shift and change naturally.

Someone once asked Gandhi how he could stand spending day after day in his prison cell (expand). ?”Easy,” he replied, “I simply did not wish I was anywhere else.” ?Gandhi practiced non-resistance, self-ahimsa.

Feel into your heart. ?Find that place that burns with hurt–the fire of anger, the sinking of disappointment, the emptiness of yearning.

Lean into the heat. ?Taste it fully. ?Melt the resistance.

It may not go away. ?It may not ever go away.

But it will pass. ?

For what you resist persists; and what you greet melts at your feet.