What is the Fallacy of Resistance?
Resistance: What We Resist Persists
Most of the nagging issues in our lives stem from our inbuilt resistance to certain people or circumstances. There is a simple dictum that the universe follows, “whatever we resist, persists.” It is like there is a conspiracy going on! Whatever we wish to avoid seems to bump into us again and again. As such it is not a conspiracy, but the simple consequence of a universal law in operation, the law of resistance.
We all live within the boundaries of our mind, like a spider within its self-created web. However, if we impartially examine our mind we find that most unhappiness and displeasure is due to unconscious resistance to anything that contradicts our mind’s conditions of likes and dislikes. Love turns into hate in a moment, and happiness into misery. Lift the veil of conditions and ease and beauty starts to flow. It could be our boss in the workplace or our spouse at home; stress is born out of resistance to “what is.” When we don’t “like” certain traits in a person, we resist and friction is created. If we withdraw the resistance, understanding happens, and love blossoms.
Mindfulness Rewires Our Brain
All resistance to life situations is our subconscious programming in automatic operation. Till the unconscious patterns are changed, not much changes. Mindfulness in our daily life changes our inner patterns and builds spiritual immunity to combat all upheavals and challenges of life.
Mindfulness rewires our brain to move from a conditioned life to a life of freedom. It transforms a life of conditioned habits and compulsions to a life of balance and beauty. We need to first practice being aware of physical sensations, thoughts and emotions that pass through our mind. As we observe our mind without judgment we see that conditions of mind such as compulsive thoughts, agitations, and anger will all surface.
Don’t be judgmental, that is creating resistance, fighting with nature. Instead withdraw like the clouds in the sky; watch the thoughts as they have come only to pass. If we resist, criticize, or feel guilt, they keep persisting. Mindfulness is being non-interfering, and seeing things as they are, not how we conditionally wish them to be.
First Accept, Then Find Solutions
The simple way out of this repetitive cycling is to reprogram the mind in the art of acceptance first, and then find solutions that can work. The best option is to stop resisting and practice patience, forgiveness, compassion and surrender to the higher will to transform our road blocks into an easy-flowing life.
Let us say we find someone who is hostile to us and despite all our resistance, insistence, and attempts to understand, nothing is working. Then what do we do, keep fighting? Here is the clue: just start thinking that the other is nothing but a soul in a lower frequency, so we use our soul power of positive thoughts and light to think and fill the other person with more positive power so that he/she can see the light and rise.
Calmness, patience, harmony, tolerance, non-reactivity, non-resistance, and responsiveness are higher qualities, not lower. They don’t come to people who rush, rush, rush all the time. They are qualities of a mindful person who is patient, organized, and very good at time management, handling one thing at a time. We can learn much from their calm approach to life.
Cultivating A Calm, Responsive, Spiritual Mind
Imagine a situation where the external conditions don’t change, but our internal environment is gradually changed into a higher dimension of stability and calm. As such, true-life experiences are all to teach us to learn certain basic universal norms of life. They have less to do with our religious beliefs and more to do with our lifestyle or our conditional living modes.
After all, whatever we do, we do it only to be happy, peaceful and healthy in life. If our life story is contradictory to this foundational desire of one and all, then something needs change. That which needs change are the glasses with which we are seeing this world.
As we consciously put our efforts toward an inner change of attitude, and do so with love for our own self and love for others, knowing that love alone has the magic keys to open the floodgates of true joy in life, we are close to a state of mind which will usher in all the beauty and glory of the Divine Light.
Let us make small printouts of the law, “Whatever You Resist Persists” and place them around for a while till the law sinks into our consciousness and we no longer resist but win the situation through our acceptance first and then reaching out to a God-given solution and flow with life.
The less we resist the more we flow, the more we flow, the more we become like water. Water makes its way through every obstacle on the way, not fighting but flowing…. Flow with life, and allow the life to be a flow.
