What is resistance?

A while back I talked about the inner resistance. How we tense up inside and try to block whatever is going on in the present moment. This is part of a bigger pattern of living in a state of resistance towards what is. 

Let me give you an example from just this morning. I wanted to get up one hour earlier than my wife. But I didn’t want to disturb her sleep more than necessary. We have a very small bedroom with no given place to put our clothes. And in the darkness I couldn’t find the clothes. I knew that the more time I spent looking for my clothes, the more I would disturb her sleep. So I quickly started to feel stressed. And with the stress, frustration started building. 

I of course found my clothes, after having made sure that there was no way my wife would be able to go back to sleep. And I got dressed with negative emotions lingering in my body.

The point is that that my irritation and frustration over something very trivial did nothing to help the situation. On the contrary, it made me stop thinking about what I was doing, which most certainly prolonged the situation. 

And yet, we have trained ourselves to respond to situations that we perceive as negative in this way. This is resistance. According to Eckhart Tolle, behind all of this is the ego’s unconscious and erroneous belief that we can change our circumstances by making them “wrong”.

We cannot help that we have negative emotions. But we can help how we respond to them. Every time that we get frustrated, blame, criticize etcetera, we are resisting. These are a few examples to help explaining what this is about. But really, every time we make a situation “wrong” in our thoughts and attitudes towards it, we are resisting. And the paradoxical is that there is no point resisting the resistance. As with so many things, the only thing we can do about it is bringing awareness to it, while reminding ourselves that the resistance does nothing to help the situation.

We sometimes think that resistance is valid. The thought may be something like this: I want this, so I’m going to make someone or something bend to my will. But how often has this led to the desired result? On the other hand, when we stay calm and instead put focus on what we can do, while not expecting anything in particular from the world, we start taking our power back.