How to Get from Resistance to Acceptance

Paradox: Only action taken from a place of acceptance is effective

Photo by Karine Avetisyan on Unsplash

Resistance, the opposite of acceptance, is a blockage of energy. Think about how we experience tension, anger and worry on a physical level: the stomach feels like it’s in knots; our throats clench; there’s a heaviness in the chest. All of those are blocked energy.

Often, we don’t even realize we’re resisting. Our mind believes that whatever negativity we’re feeling will make a difference, the same way we think that pressing an elevator button numerous times will make it come faster.

It won’t.

Resistance doesn’t work

Resistance only ever accomplishes two things: 1) It makes us feel bad, and 2) It strengthens our sense of separation (the ego).

It causes suffering, too. One of my favourite Tara Brach quotes is “Pain x (multiplied by) Resistance = Suffering.” In other words, pain is inevitable. But suffering is optional. If we don’t resist the pain, if we let it pass through us, then it can move through energetically. I’ve experienced that with emotions. But if we resist it, we trap that energy in our bodies and minds for an indefinite amount of time. Like, for decades. I speak from experience.

For a long time, I felt guilt about having resistance – I resisted my resistance – until I learned about what Buddhists call the “second arrow.” I’m paraphrasing here, but a Buddhist teacher once told a disciple, “If you shot yourself with an arrow, would you not feel pain?” And the student said, “Yes.” The teacher then said, “Why, then, would you shoot yourself with a second arrow [guilt]?”

Worrying about my bills isn’t going to change whether or not I can pay them today. Panicking that a partner might leave isn’t going to make them stay. Feeling annoyed that a client hasn’t paid doesn’t actually make that client pay. It just makes me feel bad, on top of not having the payment.

Anger, worry, anxiety and resentment (among others) are all the ego’s strategies to pretend it’s being useful.

This is a classic case of the intellect torturing the soul. Not one of these strategies actually accomplishes anything except to make us feel bad. Really bad. Constricted throat or chest, raised blood pressure, agitation throughout the body, surges of adrenalin. Those just don’t feel good.

Yet jumping straight to, “Oh, I’m just fine!” (announced through gritted teeth) or detachment/denial of the unpleasant emotion is spiritual bypassing. It’s taking a detour around the pain without actually accepting it. This doesn’t work either.

The Mid-step: Accepting the Resistance

When I can’t accept a situation, I try to accept that I’m feeling whatever I’m feeling. That lessens the resistance a little bit. I remind myself that I don’t have to drop whatever I’m feeling (anxiety, irritation, etc.); I just have to allow peace to flow through me. For some reason, that often does the trick. At least for a single moment. Then I have to repeat it in the next moment. And the next.

To use yet another Tolle example, he talks about putting space around a feeling – not minding resistance. If you don’t mind that you feel angry, and just allow the anger to be… it’s amazing how quickly it dissipates. He talks, too, about how the pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness, and every single time I remember to notice my attachment to the pain I’m feeling – the way in which it bolsters my identity as deprived or abandoned or whatever – it disappears.

It’s not always easy. In 2014, I experienced an emotional earthquake that made me realize I’d been suppressing a lot of anger and pain. For the better part of three weeks, rage coursed through me, and it felt awful. Intellectually, I knew it didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t logical, it wasn’t going to change anything, yet emotionally, I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t remember to “not mind.” I didn’t remember to “put space around it.” All I could do was witness the torture it inflicted on my mind and body and try, in various moments, to consciously release it (in ways that didn’t harm me or anyone else). Old pain does get trapped in the body, and it needs to come out. Then, one day, I remembered to just feel what I was feeling—to allow the resistance to be there. Within 10 minutes, the anger was gone.

Acceptance and Transformation

It’s yet another paradox: as Tolle says, the ego believes that if we accept this moment, nothing will ever change – when in fact, the opposite is the truth. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s like the finger trap puzzle: The more you pull, the more stuck your fingers become. It’s only by fully relaxing/accepting that you can escape.

Only when we don’t need anything to be different can things actually change. And acceptance can lead to miracles – the word we use for positive events that we can’t rationally understand or explain, or that are statistically “impossible.”

In those rare moments when I have found complete and total acceptance, something in the universe has shifted, and miracle after miracle unfolds. I don’t know why–this is beyond the scope of the human intellect, but acceptance of the facts in each moment has no downside. At the very least, I feel peace. I can take action to change those facts. At the most, the situations I’ve accepted change.

This post originally appeared on Living the Mess on February 8, 2015