Resistance 02
This is a follow up to Resistance.
This first part of the quote I'd shared was from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. He is a spiritual teacher.
The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of resistance to what is. One the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgement. On the emotional level, it is some sort of negativity.
The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly, you are identified with your mind.
The second is a lightly edited version of what Sam Harris said in an interview with Andrew Huberman. He is a neuroscientist.
If you just are willing to pay attention to it, a couple things happen, one is your resistance to feeling it goes away by definition because now your goal is to just pay attention to it. And you recognize that so much of the suffering associated with the pain was born of the resistance to feeling it. You're kind of bracing against it and all of your thinking about it.
***
And so much of our suffering in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it, worrying about it, everything we're doing with our minds but just feeling it. So when you just feel it, again, it breaks apart into this ever shifting collection of different sensations and it's not one thing and it never stays the same and so two things happen there. One is there can be a tremendous amount of relief that happens there where you can achieve a level of equanimity even in the presence of really unpleasant physical sensation. And this is true of mental sensations as well as true of emotions, the classically negative emotions like anger or depression or fear. The moment you become willing to just feel them in all of their punctate and changeable qualities, they cease to be what they were a moment ago.
***
It ceases to be a problem in that moment because it no more maps onto the kind of person you are than a feeling of indigestion or a pain in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are. It's just sensation.
I came across Eckhart's words last year when I was reading his book. He has several interesting ideas. This was one that seemed important and actionable enough that I noted it down. I heard Sam Harris speak a few weeks ago. The idea that he spoke about seemed strikingly similar in the moment. I made a mental note to track down the transcript and compare them to Eckhart's quote.
How was your experience reading them sequentially? Was there any discontinuity or did it feel like the thoughts of one person? Does finding out that it's two different people, with very different lived experiences, and philosophies - at least on the surface - change how you feel about what they're expressing? For me, knowing that these two people have different journeys before they got to the point where they said the same thing has made it easier to trust the idea, and practice it.
I have one example of when this worked for me. One evening, I was sitting on my computer and watching a video online - can't remember exactly what it was - when I sensed some anxiety rising in my body. My initial reaction was to ignore it and continue watching the video. That didn't work. I tried to understand what was making me anxious and I couldn't identify the reason.
I then remembered the Eckhart-Sam approach and decided to give it a chance. I closed my eyes, focused on the anxious feeling, not resisting or thinking about it, not judging myself for feeling it. I worried that doing this could lead the anxiety to overwhelm me but I experienced the opposite. The anxiety faded away in a few seconds and I was able to get back to what I was doing.
But there have been dozens of times where I've not been able to find the focus to practice this. If you give this approach a chance, I'd recommend trying this when you're not with other people. When you have the option to stop whatever you're doing and close your eyes for a few seconds.