Practice 18

Ending Resistance, Reducing Selfishness, Expanding Acceptance

When we turn to thought to know who we are, we become anxious, self-centered, and stuck in our limited self-concept stories. Experiencing the “I am” that you are, beyond thought — where you are not good or bad, right or wrong, not a separate self — is where you will find endless peace. ~Cory Lee Davis

At the core of all suffering lies a simple cause…“resistance to what is.”

Which is, by definition, the opposite of mindfulness: being with what is. We use mindfulness as a tool to penetrate the mind’s incessant clinging to its ideas of the way things should be, which creates resistance to what is happening in the present moment. Resistance to anything in the present moment takes you out of your mindful state of presence and thus this sacred adversary named ‘resistance’ must be mastered in order to have more presence in your life. By simply being with what is (simple but not easy to do), you inherently are not in resistance to what is. You stop participating as an actor in the drama and you transcend the friction simply by being the unconditional observant consciousness that you are (higher self). Suffering ceases when you identify this way but that is not all that is available to you in such a practice. True, unconditional love becomes available to you when resistance is released.

What you resist, persists.

Resistance to ‘what is’ is the same as not accepting ‘what is.’ We can be in active resistance by rejecting or denying something, but we can also be in passive resistance by exiting the present moment through a fantastical desire to have something other than what is. Active resistance creates frictional energy that disrupts peace and love, trading higher energies for lower ones. But have you ever taken the time to question why you think something isn’t acceptable to you? Try it now. Pick something you resist accepting right now and probe deeply within yourself for the answer of why you don’t accept it.

Is it because of your moral code? Or perhaps your judgments of what is right and wrong for you or your family? Is it based on what you view as ugly or beautiful, wholesome or corrupt, appropriate or deviant, or something more slight such as someone talking too much about themselves? Or perhaps something you deem undesirable about yourself? Let’s say for example that you don’t accept (you resist) when someone is mean to you or your child, and it angers you when it happens. Does it anger you into resistance whenever anyone is mean to anyone else, or does it only really apply to when it is towards you or someone you are closely connected to? Right now, many many people are having mean things done to them and yet you are here pursuing your own happiness without much care for all the meanness in the world. Does that mean you’re a bad person? No, it means that your rubric of resistance—of deeming what is acceptable and not acceptable—is based on your selfishness. On your desire to bring benefit to your concept of the smaller, separate self known as your ego.

When you are in presence, you are simply witnessing all things unfolding dispassionately, and acting from a place of love rather than fear. In presence, one is accepting of all that is, realizing that all beings are working through their wounding, issues, and ignorance in their own way, just as we have throughout our lifetime past and present. If we see meanness or other things we deem as out of alignment with love, we can act nobly from our own love to make corrections without having to resist something as unacceptable. We can learn to embrace what we think is ugly in the world by making the big leap of letting go of the self-preserving and self-biased tendency of the small ego self.

When you aren’t in presence, you are identified as the separate self that mounts a defensive or offensive strategy against the unacceptable as a means to cut it out of your life. You want it to stop and the only way this level of consciousness can reason to do so is to take negative actions to make it stop. We see this in the prevalent cancel culture movement where someone has committed a vile act and, instead of attempting to prospect what a path of healing might look like for that individual, we dismiss them completely. The problem with treating others this way is that by cutting off love from this individual, you cut off their path of redemption—placing them in exile as wholly unredeemable. No matter how despicable we might believe a behavior to be, and rightfully punishable as such, nothing should be beyond the reach of redemption as no being is completely unredeemable. We can set up healthy boundaries that honor ourselves and others in safety without shutting down love completely. The higher reasoning of love would have it this way; it is up to you to decide if you can embrace a love as big as that.

The separate, vulnerable ego-self is biasing the world though its own survival instinct. This is what we mean when we speak of selfishness. The ego seeks things that add to its self, resists things that seem to threaten to take something away, and it doesn’t care that much about others while making these negotiations. By its doing so, it formats the world into categories of acceptable and unacceptable. It wants to cling to the acceptable and reject the unacceptable, and thus takes over control of your love. It says, “this is acceptable and worthy of love (I love this) but that is unacceptable and gets rejected from love (I don’t love that).” Using love in this way—as a tool to manipulate the world into a shape that is more acceptable to it—your ego corrupts the most precious gift you have been granted.

The ego cannot experience true, unconditional love. It can only reduce love into a tool for its most primitive instincts of self-interest, corrupting love into a means to its ends.

In presence, we still can have preferences through honoring the existence of our desires. Desire is divine and fundamental drive that moves life, not to be repressed or denied its existence. Desire creates preferences for this or that experience over another, and by honoring desire we set preferences that guide our actions. This is not to say that desire must be satisfied, but rather that honoring preference is a distinction in practice and different than being attached to outcome or expectations that the desire is met, which creates suffering. We can prefer not to have someone be mean to us or our child without clinging to the expectation that the universe will deliver our preferences perfectly, according to our plans. This is altogether different from selfishness in that selfishness has one fearing the undesired expectation, and acting from a fearful state which shuts down love energy. When we resist instead of accept, selfish fear shuts down love energy—which is the fuel used in sustaining presence. The more love and acceptance we can bring to the Self (all that exists), including the neurotic ego, the more we can sustain presence.

Going beyond this limited self-identification means expanding what is acceptable to you. Challenging yourself to let go and move beyond limiting concepts of acceptability by learning to embrace the great process of human learning on Earth will disempower the ego’s limiting grip on your perspective. The more you expand what you consider acceptable, the more love will come into your life. Love cannot go where acceptance is not already. We have to start with accepting what is before we can love what is, and loving what is means living in peaceful equanimous harmony with life. An acceptance that expands to embrace all horizons must first start with yourself.

Until you can accept what is, you cannot move into what might be.

Joyful acceptance of what is, as it is, is a form of love. Expanding acceptance into joy brings more love into your life, which benefits you and everyone you come in contact with. It is the bigger life that we are all somewhat afraid of living, but it is the life you’ll be most satisfied with. Prioritizing love and acceptance means letting go of ways that no longer serve us no matter how normal or comfortable they have become. When something in you—perhaps a thought, an unwitnessed emotion, a belief, a habit energy—resists accepting something present in the moment you are in, you suffer the consequences of the simple fact of life that all things on Earth are impermanent and thus are constantly changing, including you. When we cling to the past—to moments that are no longer—or to what no longer serves us, we contract ourselves to the point where we are unable to be nourished and invigorated by the present moment. We lose joyful acceptance. We can choose instead to accept that what is past has truly passed in order to open up to what the present moment offers us. In this opening we become nourished, refreshed and revitalized.

By expanding acceptance, you reduce selfishness and you become more self-less (ego-less). You become motivated by the truth of the interconnected nature of all things, rather than the motives of obtaining sex, money, power, safety, material pleasures or comfort with little regard for the experience of other living beings. You expand care beyond just your own child toward all children of the planet. You reduce the separate-self perspective that has you suffering on the insatiable hedonic treadmill, and the whole planet benefits from your expanded world-view.

We end resistance to what is by surrendering into acceptance of what is, which includes our true reaction to a given situation. It does not include our capitulating to what we know doesn’t serve the highest good; as acceptance is not the same as agreeing or condoning. We also don’t go into resistance to our resistance, as that only digs us into deeper negative energy. We build a new habit by pausing to accept ourselves as we are and we move to accepting others as they are. By not needing to change anything, we instead find the compassionate narrative that our higher consciousness offers in presence. We invite love’s compassionate understanding to break us free of what our small-self believes must change about the world before we can find peace and love.

This is how love wins.