Working with Resistance
By Tergar Meditation Community • 3 min read
It happens to the best of us. You don’t intend to sweat the small stuff, yet you wake up in a grumpy mood, or a plan you were looking forward to gets canceled, and you’re abruptly flooded with disappointment. Is there a way to work with these resistant feelings as they arise, without waiting for that time you have set aside specifically for meditation?
Most meditation traditions, and also most Buddhist teachings, address these very questions: how do we work with life? How do we work with our resistance and turn it into openness? The reason we struggle so much in general is, in large part, because it’s so difficult for us to be mentally flexible with whatever comes at us, especially if it doesn’t feel great. We dig in and recoil, with a feeling of, “Oh no!” Resistance is the basis for a lot of the issues that we have, when we’re basically not willing to let ourselves be open to a given situation. You could even say that resistance is what causes us to be anxious, or to be frustrated, disenchanted, or whatever it might be.
The main point to remember is that a fundamental quality of awareness is spaciousness. You can imagine it as literal space, outer space, with all the events, thoughts, feelings, and circumstances of your life arising and dissolving in that space like stars, planets, and galaxies. The nature of space is that it’s able to accommodate everything that arises within it. No matter how many blazing supernovas, colliding asteroids, or suns burning out it might contain, space itself is never harmed. Likewise, resistance is one of the things that arises within awareness, but awareness is the bigger picture. So it only follows that to the degree that you identify with the various changing, moment-to-moment ups and downs of your life, you’ll feel that resistance. And to the degree that you can touch into the quality of spacious, accepting awareness, resistance is naturally dissolved. Whatever comes at you will be workable and flexible and, most importantly, you’ll see the situation in its proper perspective.
When you recall this spacious quality of awareness, if you’re a little bit frustrated or grumpy one day, then it’s fine. It’s just what’s happening . . . the mood that monkey mind woke up with that day. The way to work with these blips of resistance is to remind yourself again and again, in and out of meditation, that awareness is spacious enough to accommodate both a grumpy monkey and a happy monkey.
“Resistance to change puts us at odds with reality, and this creates never-ceasing dissatisfaction.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
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“To cope with destructive thoughts, we need to understand that what is really happening is a failure to recognize our mind’s true nature. We get muddled when we confuse our conceptual mind — the way we perceive external objects, the way we feel and think — for reality. And, in doing so, we end up exaggerating our problems.”
Once I was giving a teaching on love. The theme of the talk was that everyone has love within them. No matter what the circumstance, who you are, or where you are in the world, you have love 24 hours a day — even when you are feeling anger or hatred. During this talk, it looked to me like all the students were very happy. I was, too.
Throughout our time together, we slowly learned we were not responsible for each other’s happiness. True happiness can only be found within ourselves.
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