To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.
Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away. Cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone, there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
Eckhart Tolle
Stress happens when your mind resists what is…The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.
Dan Millman
At fifteen, life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honourable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou
My home is situated within five minutes’ walk from the majestic river, the great artery that drains a vast area of northwest Europe into the North Sea, several hundred miles downstream. Ours is an intimate relationship, one of daily connection and re-connection.
We are both changed with each new day, with each moment that passes. `You never step into the same river twice´ goes the old Zen proverb. This is true of all of Creation, only it is easier to see its manifestation in some circumstances than in others.
When relations or friends visit a young family, they will often comment on how the children have grown and changed since their last visit. Alas, such observations about the adults are rarely made. We seem to become oblivious to the ongoing unfolding and flow of life as we get older.
Some of us even try to hold on to a certain static state, presumably out of fear of the unknown. This is akin to going down to the Rhein and ordering her to stop flowing. Imagine the amount of effort that would require!
The superlative stance of resistance would be to attempt to get the river to reverse direction, to flow upstream to some given moment in the past. This would require even more effort. All crazy, you muse?
Well, this is how many of us live our lives at certain times, quietly attempting to dictate the terms of the unfolding of the universe. I lived like this for many years and changed my stance only when I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, at which point I had become burned out.
Recovery, in this context is about shifting from trying to live life on my terms to learning to accept life on life’s terms, adapting my thinking, feeling, and actions accordingly. This shift requires courage, surrender, practice, and human support.
Pain is an integral part of the human experience. People die, lovers come and go, health may deteriorate, accidents happen, things do not go to plan or as desired. These conditions apply to us all, though we each tend to react or respond in our own unique way.
Some have mastered living in the moment. Others take up a stance of resistance to the pain, thereby creating suffering. Yet others adopt a covert approach to this denial by blotting out reality, seemingly capable of living in a parallel universe of their own making.
What these parallel universes all have in common is a foundation of fear. Fear of pain, dread of leaving our comfort zones, loss of the illusion of control, terror of our mortality. Built on such an unsteady foundation, they never hold for long. Life has a way of bursting even the most alluring of bubbles.
The only antidote to fear is love. Place a candle in a dark room and the darkness loses its hold, revealing itself as the mere absence of light.
Love is, per se, unconditional. We practice this by loving life as the mixed bag that it is. This requires trust, the trust that we are shepherded and protected by the life force itself, a tall order for anyone whose trust had been abused and damaged during the most vulnerable period of life, namely childhood. We are far more numerous than society would have us believe.
The recovery of the True Self requires us to revisit those earlier experiences with hearts and mind open, open with compassion and the willingness to experience, once again, some of the original pain, as necessary. It is the spectre of re-encountering that pain which often holds us back from this essential step.
Hindered in this manner, we spend our days sitting on our perch in the birdcage, door wide open, choosing to remain incarcerated, the fear of the unknown trumping the promise of freedom.
This sorry state is beautifully described by Charles Bukowski in his 1992 poem, `Bluebird´:
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
This is where encouragement and support are so essential, especially the support of those who once found themselves in similar circumstances and somehow found a way to overcome their resistance, to fly through that open door into a dimension hitherto unknown and unimagined.
I have found the necessary support in the community of people who are consciously engaged in recovery, whereby here `recovery´ is used in its most general meaning in terms of Emotional Sobriety; the recovery of the True Self from the rubble of all the false selves we had developed in our attempts to cut the cloth of our being to suit the presumed preferences and prejudices of those caregivers whose approval and affection we, as vulnerable children, so desperately needed and sought.
A more specific application of the term recovery is that of the process of recovering from the malady of addiction, whether substance or process related. The fabric of our culture is shot through with addiction: The opioid crisis, its tentacles spreading out from western countries, the ubiquitous prevalence of alcoholism throughout the world, workaholism, consumerism, food addiction, porn, and the emerging bane of screen addiction. The list could be extended, ad infinitum.
On the other hand, we have never had, in the history of humankind, the abundance of resources we have today, to help us recover from our self-alienation, our denial, and delusion. Depth psychology, just out of its teething phase, at only 150 years old, is relatively new. The widespread adoption and application of Twelve Step recovery from alcoholism and, later, other addictive afflictions, began with the publication of the AA Big Book in 1939.
Great advances in neuroscientific research, imaging technology, and body-based therapies now successfully applied to address trauma, combined with the re-discovery and proliferation of ancient Eastern practices such as yoga and Chi Gong, all amount to a richness of modalities which demonstrates that we live in a `Golden Age´ of recovery, in the individual, familial, community, societal, and ecological domains.
This stream of innovative resources continues to bring forth new and very effective modalities. EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Neurofeedback, for example, – all developed within our lifetime,- are making great inroads in the treatment of trauma, especially so-called Developmental Trauma, or Complex PTSD.
Trauma is now widely recognised as one of the root causes of the current dysfunction of our species as we continue to wage wars, perpetrate widespread social injustice, and wander aimlessly through the anaesthesia of our consumer society, tottering on the brink of environmental destruction.
The Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality, in which I have completed my training as a Transformation Coach, is yet another valuable contribution to this powerful toolset of recovery.
By simply training three mental muscles (Saboteur Interceptor, Sage Enhancer, and Mind Command Muscles) in our daily practice we can consciously become aware of, cultivate, and widen the gap between impulse and reaction, such that we get to shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions in a more mindful manner, choosing the path of love over the old, ingrained patterns of fear.
PQ brings about the mental clarity that helps us re-discover our True Selves and to consciously align our way of living with our deeply held values. We choose to deploy the powers of Empathy, Exploration, Innovation, Navigation, and Activation, rather than following the impulses of the fear-fuelled Saboteurs: Judge, Hyper-Rational, Controller, Pleaser, Hyper-Achiever, Victim, etc. Over time, with consistent practice, our mind becomes our best friend in the service of our life purpose, rather than our worst enemy, draining us of our vitality.
Today’s `PQ Focus of the Day´ (Make Friends with Life), formulated by PQ founder Shirzad Chamine, perfectly frames my recent reflections on dropping my resistance to what is. It runs as follows:
When you think about it, you are constantly fighting with life. What do I mean by that? You have your plans and your wishes and very often things don’t go according to your plans and wishes. You get unlucky, you fail, others don’t come through as you would hope, the opportunity window closes, and so on. Now let’s be honest, how do you respond when that happens? You probably get upset at these things outside your control that life imposes on you. In other words, you fight life a lot. You’re not good friends with life…
Picture life as a friend who is constantly throwing you boxes of gifts. Knowing that it’s a friend throwing you gifts, you focus on catching the gift boxes, opening the boxes, and discovering the gifts with delight and gratitude.
But if you assume life as hostile, you’ll always feel exhausted, trying to dodge all these boxes thrown at you, some of them even hitting you and hurting you. No gifts, just dodging or fighting the many problems caused by life’s unexpected or unwanted turns and events.
So today, consciously make better friends with life. When things don’t go your way, don’t get upset! Catch the gift box, open it. Find the gift. Thank life as your good and constant friend. The better you treat this friend, the better it will treat you…
