Resistance to Resistance

Yesterday, in order to honor a stated personal goal of self-care, I took the day off. I watched a show, went for a walk, and not much else. Although this was necessary, I felt some resistance. Not only around the idea of taking a break, but toward work itself, as though I needed to resent it in order to relax.

I’ve likely been experiencing the effects of this dynamic for much of my life without actually recognizing it.

In my encounters with individuals and groups, I frequently observe various forms of resistance. Not necessarily to the relationship or the process, but in people’s actual lives. A lot of folks suffer from their own strong aversions, whether to getting things done or to aspects of their inner experience. At some point, we can become tired and frustrated not only with the things we’re resisting, but with resistance itself.

And that’s always a good place to press pause.

For me, taking a break seemed to require ginning up resistance to work. Apparently, I needed to invoke antipathy toward productivity to justify resting. This wasn’t conscious. It was happening automatically. My inner contrarian often plays a protective role by generating sufficient aversion to make something as basic as taking a break feel permissible.

But all that really does is create a point of tension and yet another binary. Because the truism is, um, true: whether we do something or don’t, time still passes.

Without getting too woo about it, the natural capacity to leave these polarities right where they are, neither denying nor indulging them, is a practice unto itself. We might then reencounter a space of evenness amid all that comes and goes.

This kind of recognition seems more available when we’re grounded in the body. This lets us gently open up to and accommodate the mental dichotomies and “inner” energies (aka emotions) arising from our personal patterning.

There are other approaches to desire and aversion. For example, some contemplative methods deliberately invoke strong revulsion toward the object of fixation. One way young Buddhist monks have traditionally been taught to work with sexual attraction is to contemplate the reality of the body’s eventual decay. This may be more natural in cultures where death is less hidden from everyday life. But a medical mindset can serve the same purpose. My crush has guts! In Sanskrit, the practice is called aśubha bhāvanā, or “contemplation of the unattractive,” with variations appearing across Buddhist schools and lineages.

But I’m talking about something different: how we can abide with the endlessly varied, yet stubbornly familiar ways that duality presents itself. Oftentimes it’s as simple as something we want or something we don’t want. The lived experience of this isn’t intellectual. It’s felt. And so feelings are a good place to start. Because, as I am learning, talking about “nonduality” often obscures its naked immediacy in the here and now.

Where presence is nonexclusive, relaxed, and welcoming, even the gnarliest dichotomies can be “seen” in their plainness as they arise and dissipate. As conditioned phenomena, they have every right to be there. But they aren’t objectively or permanently established, even as they are felt.

With practice, we can leave them be in a way that’s neither defensive nor definitive, recognizing vulnerability and groundedness within the same field of awareness. This is not always comfortable. But as long as we’re embodied beings with feelings, thoughts, and sensations, it’s possible to practice along these lines. And where aversion to practice itself arises, that too can be an opportunity to feel and tend to the emotions beneath the mind’s habitual labeling and judging.

It’s not so much about everything making sense, but having the sense to be open and uncontrived. No need to chase after what happens next, whether having a rest or takin’ care of business, in the King’s parlance. The future arrives all on its own, at which point it won’t be the future at all. We may never transcend our to-do list, but we might stop mistaking it for ourselves.